Justin, G8YTZ is delighted to announce that the from 14:50 on 6th October 2019 the GB3JV Amateur TV repeater is now on the air in beacon mode. The new repeater is located in Petts Wood, Kent, and transmits on 3404MHz.

The Tx antenna is a slotted waveguide design and gives the station and ERP of 150 Watts. Receiver Inputs are available on 1249MHz and the repeater output will shortly be streamed on the BATC Web Site.

To receive the repeater all that’s required is a tuneable DVB-S2 Satellite Receiver, or a BATC Minitiouner, a small dish and a C-Band LNB. Coverage predictions show reception possibilities across the heavily populated area of South-East & East London as well as parts of Essex.

The South Hampshire Repeater Group has recently established an on-demand link between the Fusion 70cm repeater GB7MT (Southampton) and the Fusion 70cm repeater GB7PO (Portsmouth) relying solely on RF. Whilst it is often common practice to use the Internet to link repeaters, the keepers of GB7MT and GB7PO decided to adopt an ‘RF only’ policy to linking their repeaters using off-the-peg (well, almost) Ubiquiti 5Ghz equipment.

The 13-mile hop between sites is achieving bandwidth in excess 100Mbps of which the repeaters use approx. 0.05Mbps! The idea was initially inspired by the Local Emergency Planning Officer Tim Pettis 2E0CXQ who, for resilience purposes was keen to establish a communications path between the two cities in the very unlikely event of an existing civil communications infrastructure outage.

The Galway Digital Radio Network have received confirmation of the Licenses EJ7IBD for the Inishbofin Island DMR Repeater and EI7LRD for the Loughrea DMR Repeater. The two repeaters are on the bench in preparation for the airwaves.

The Inishbofin Island Repeater, EJ7IBD, will be set up with a 4 stack vertical system beaming East towards the mainland. This Repeater will prove excellent DMR coverage of the western Side of Connemara and up as far as Achill Island. This is the first repeater to be established on an Island and issued with an EJ prefix.

The Loughrea DMR Repeater will be established to the South East of Loughrea and will provide a huge coverage to the East and South East running 40 Watts into an Omni-Directional 4-Stack Vertical Array. The footprint of this repeater will probably overlap the coverage of the Mount Leinster Digital Repeater.