Hello.
Still working on my local repeater project. I manged to pick up the last radio I was going to need for it, so I'm pretty well set. There was one minor setback. The local club I belong to (CVARC) published a repeater usage guideline. One of the items in there specifically says no cross-band repeating. Which is of course exactly what I'm planning on doing. So I took some time at the last club meeting to talk to the repeater trustee, explain my situation, and ask for a variance. He was quite understanding and after going over what I had in mind he gave it his blessing. So the project is still on but again holding for more parts. The deep-cycle battery and a repeater controller. I either have to buy or build one of those. I certainly have enough "stuff" to be able to build a very robust controller. I'd like to be able to combine my repeater controller with my radios in such a way that I can do channel direction. The radios have pins on the back that allow me to apply a simple binary code to switch to any of the 16 channels programmed into the radio. This would allow me to use more than one repeater. It would also allow me to put in an out-of-band control system to turn things on and off, make setting changes, and of course change channels. I can do it, but time is an issue. So I may end up buying first and building later.
On an unrelated note, I took a 2500 mile round trip to North Carolina and back this past week. I went out to pick up my son and his family and bring them back to Iowa to live. I put my CB (yes I still have one) and my Alinco DR-635T together in a stack and took them on the trip. I also used APRS to allow my family to track my progress both ways and to look for other hams in the area to talk to. Early Thursday moring, I supposedly drove within 6km of someone else on 520 somewhere on the east side of Knoxville, but they didn't respond to my call. I managed to have one nice QSO early Saturday morning as I was going around the South end of Cincinnati. Talked simplex on 146.520 to a great operator. I was so fried at the time from lack of sleep that I can't accurately remember his call sign. I think it was KD8ECG. Just looked him up on QRZ, and that's correct. After listening to the CB off and on during the trip, my passengers found the ham QSO quite refreshing. Clear, clean, and no bad language. That impressed them the most. My son is now asking about becoming a ham. Told him I'd help. We'll see.
Enough for today.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
