The possibilities are endless

Having had limited success with my antenna building and trying to get a better signal in from the club repeater, I wondered several times today if it was feasable to assemble a low power cross-band repeater and put it in a location that I can reach on low power from my apartment, and from that same location also key and receive good signal from the repeater.

The aparment complex just put garage door openers in our garages, which meant they had to run power to all of them.  Of course they only put in one outlet right where the opener is, but I think I can work around that.

So today I positioned my wife in front of my ICOM and told her what I was looking for, and then went out to the garage to do a test on 70 cm.  With 3 watts to the back side of my 2 meter yagi-uda, full signal with full quieting.  I ran a similar test from there to the club repeater with 5 watts on 2 meters.  Also full quieting on receive.

So since this dovetails nicely with my desire to build a special events repeater, I think I'm going to order in a couple of the Baofeng UV-5R's ($30 each on Amazon) and use them as a base for the repeater.  I have lots of features I want to include.  Temperature sensing and fans to vent the housing to keep the radios at a suitable temperature.  It should have the ability to turn the repeater function on and off remotely.  The ability to play pre-recorded messages.  The ability to identify itself either with CW or a different message.  Extended battery life with low battery warning.  The ability to program via computer, or in the absence of a computer to be set to some sort of default so it can be programmed remotely via DTMF.  Some sort of  solar battery charging system.  It won't ever completely charge the battery, but it will help extend the battery life.  The unit needs to be housed in some sort of weather resistant environment while still allowing for ventilation.

Step one will be to make the simple cross-band version.  Once it's proven, I can go from there.

Enough musings for tonight.  I'm net control for the new ham net, so I better be getting ready.  It starts in 30 minutes!

73
Steve
KDØWSW