There's been a repeater operating on 147.030+ (PL 114.8) for about three months, and I didn't notice.
Listed as being in Minneapolis, I get full scale on the signal meter with a simple 1/4-wave ground-plane at 5W. Really, I can hit it and get a full-quieting squelch tail on my BaoFeng HT, with the rubber duck, inside of my condo. It's that good.
Since I'm a bit out of the loop here, I obviously have no idea how high the antenna is or how powerful the machine is.
As I've said before, I have no idea why anybody thinks that we need another standalone VHF machine in town. Since it's inside Minneapolis proper, it has access to fibre for an internet link. There should be an EchoLink conference server, or at least IRLP access, so that links could be set up easily to other machines or other bands -- even temporarily. Somebody's spending money on rent and maintenance to keep an excellent machine running that nobody uses -- because we already have a lot of excellent machines on VHF.
People say that we need redundancy because machines break down, or can be damaged in storms. Isn't that what the County repeaters are for? There's the .700 in Plymouth, the .820 in Golden Valley, and the .430 in Edina...and that's just on VHF. These aren't hobby repeaters with an antenna on somebody's roof. They're powerful, high-quality machines with emergency power and security on great sites.
Even with that aside, just off the top of my head I can come up with the .760, .370, .850, .450, .670, .210 and .170 machines. These aren't rinky-dink repeaters, and there's even more than that (.290, .270, .120, etc) if you stop and think about it.
Out of all of those that I listed, only two are anything other than a standalone VHF repeater: the .450 (HandiHam linked network with EchoLink) and the .290 (EchoLink). You can say that the .850's remote receive sites set it apart, but that's just about coverage. The .370 and the .760 claim to have EchoLink, but it's disconnected far more than it's working.
I'm not complaining that we have a new and excellent repeater. I'm just wondering why someone thought that we needed another powerhouse two-metre machine. Unless we get a whole lot more hams in the near future, those machines are going to continue to chase after the same number of people. And the split won't be favourable to anyone.
In the meantime, I look forward to finding out just how far this new repeater reaches.
UPDATE: N0YNT (Matt) has informed me that the receiver on this new repeater is not very good. He terms it "deaf", in fact. I admit that my only data point at this time consists of a "ker-chunk", which proves nothing. Also, it seems that the purpose for putting this repeater up was to prevent losing the frequency pair. The slot has been empty for at least a couple of years, and there are no empty slots left in town.
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