Summer's almost over

Greetings all,

Well, my son, the one I picked up from North Carolina in my last post, actually followed through on his desire to become a licensed ham operator.  Took and passed his test the first part of August.  Took his test on a Sunday, and his call sign was in the FCC database by Thursday morning.  Very fast.  His call sign is KEØBLE.  He's been having fun since then.

I managed to do some bartering with a "local" business radio repair company and picked up a Motorola R.I.C.K.  Supposedly it came out of a local fire truck that used it as a cross-band repeater.  It's not exactly what I was looking for, but after having a long look at the manual, I think I can get it to do what I want.  Which is to receive using one UHF radio and key the VHF radio.  Then to receive from the VHF radio and transmit on a different frequency using a second UHF radio. 

Originally I was going to go for a local repeater with a link to the VHF site.  There was only a marginal reason to have a full repeater.  The goal with this congolmeration is that I can still key the VHF radio if it's receiving.  Why would I do that?  Since it's primary use will be to link with a VHF repeater, there's a certain period of time after a transmission ends where the repeater's transmitter is active but there's no actual conversation taking place.  It's permissible to key up and continue the conversation at that time.  I'd like to be able to do that.

One of the things that concerns me with this setup is that I don't have any sort of duplexer assembly that one normally uses with a repeater.  I never intended to have the radios share antennas.  But the close proximity of the transmitter and receiver could still cause problems.  I think I can get away with some sort of bandpass/bandreject filtering on the receiver.  To that end, I found a set of instructions for making a diy UHF duplexer out of 3 LB coffee cans.  After doing a lot of research on the internet, I'm going to try using gallon paint cans instead.  I picked up the connectors I'm going to need at the local electronics parts store.  I'll pick up the empty paint cans and the other pieces and parts I'm going to need at either a local home improvement store or a local hardware store.  Then I'll try my hand at building some notch filters.

I'm going to document this entire build process with pictures, so hopefully I'll have something to post soon.

Until then ...

73
Steve
KDØWSW