Just this morning I spoke on the radio with N0FWG (Jerry), who is the trustee for the 444.375 repeater that I mentioned in yesterday's post. It turns out that this repeater is not run by the County, but Jerry also thinks that the 444.500 is. He went on to say that the site is about 100 feet up which, when combined with Plymouth's altitude, should make for good range on UHF. I wasn't able to hit it from Blaine this weekend, but maybe that's just a bad spot. I'll be interested in checking the range over the next few weeks.
Mostly I was stunned to hear someone come back when I threw out my callsign. I've never heard anyone on the .375 before. When I first got my licence, I would leave the radio on the frequency for several hours without hearing anything but the ID. I would always try it in the evening, but I guess that it's pretty much Jerry's repeater and he's on it during morning drive time. As I said before, activity attracts activity, though. Immediately after I closed with him, someone else picked up. I would have hung around, but I had literally just got out of bed when I threw out my callsign and I needed some coffee. He did say that the repeater was "under-utilised". I'll have to remember to ask him how much power it puts out.
The only other thing worthy of note in the exchange was that Jerry is the Frequency Co-ordinator for the Minnesota Repeater Council, and he confirmed that there are no empty VHF frequency slots left in the Twin Cities metro. While some of those slots are occupied by dead machines and defunct clubs, there are a lot of repeaters in town. There are still some openings for UHF, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment