HandiHam repeater update

 I had a chat with KG0BP (Chris) this morning on the HandiHam .450, as a follow-up to a 'conversation' last night on the Arden Hills 220 MHz repeater. Chris runs the link to the 223.940 HandiHam repeater, as well as running the 444.850 HandiHam repeater. I got the inside scoop as to what is going on with both of these.

I've had a lot of trouble reaching the .850 no matter what I've tried. Edina isn't that far from Plymouth, especially considering that I can reach the Bloomington .325 UHF HandiHam machine decently. But Chris doesn't have a tower - just a ground plane on the roof of his house - and the antenna isn't above the trees. "Green leaf attenuation" isn't an issue with VHF, but it will kill you on UHF. The .850 doesn't get further north than St. Louis Park, according to Chris, but does well to the south and east. Still, the south and east are pretty well covered by the HandiHam network already. The Bloomington repeater covers the south-east pretty well, the Chaska repeater covers the south-west, and the .650 is closer to St. Paul (while still in Minneapolis proper). Chris says that the .850 reaches into downtown Minneapolis, too. For something that's on the level of a "hobby" repeater, that's not bad.

Right now, Chris is in the middle of moving house, so the 220 MHz link and the .850 are both down. He's considering some different options when he sets these two back up. The first is a beam to the 223.940, which makes a lot of sense to me. There's not a lot of point to having an omnidirectional link, and he's been doing that mostly because it was easier. I told him about the 3 element Yagi that I just got for 220 MHz, and he might get that. It's small and light enough for a rooftop situation, and it would be the way to go if you just want to hit the one repeater and feed it into the EchoLink system. The second thing that he's considering is using a beam for the .850 pointing north. Again, that sounds like a really good idea to me, since the other directions are largely redundant and a UHF beam is pretty small. He could get rid of two ground planes and replace them with two small beams, while still having a ground plane on the same mast.

While the move has placed antennae lower on the list of priorities for Chris, and the weather is moving toward winter now, it's not unrealistic that both of these links could be up in a few months. Even though my personal interests are strongly in favour of the restoration of the 220 MHz cross-band functions, I would rather see this done right than done quickly. And any kind of improvement to the cross-band UHF coverage in the metro could encourage UHF use, too.