Last night I spent a couple of hours on the Arden Hills .940 repeater. Usually it's a bit boring, but you do come across the scattered individual looking for a signal report with their new (or recently dusted-off) radio for the band. There's been several of these that I've come across over the past month or so, and I don't even mention it any more because it's so common.
Last night, I heard KD0UDM (Neal) throw out his sign on the 223.940- (100.0 PL) repeater in Arden Hills. He was trying out his Alinco DR-235T-III with an indoor 5/8-wave antenna from his apartment near Loring Park. The .940 was his first stop, and he did fairly well with five watts into the machine; not full-quieting, but quite readable.
We discussed the band, and radios, and the development of the 1.25M band. Neal has plans to put up a low-powered, experimental repeater for propagation purposes on the 222 MHz band using two mobiles and indoor antennae -- much as he has done in the past on two metres and UHF. He noted that it's much easier to get a co-ordinated frequency pair on 1.25M compared to two metres or 70 cm. This seems to be something that others howling for co-ordination on VHF are unaware of.
At one point, I was comparing the three currently-available repeaters: Arden Hills 223.940, Maplewood 224.880, and the Burnsville 224.540. The .940 has the best audio, the .880 has weak coverage, and the .540 has the best receiver. We decided to move down to the .540 so that Neal could hear the difference.
KD0UDM's signal was dramatically different on the 224.540 machine. It's as if we had switched to narrow-band in terms of audio quality. However, Neal was now coming in with full-quieting, as opposed to his noisy-but-readable signal on the 223.940 repeater. The .940 is the most popular local 1.25M repeater (which is not a great distinction), but the TCRC's 224.540 has a lot going for it.
Next, we decided to try FM simplex. Now, I was running 10W into a three-element Yagi pointed Neal's direction, and we were only eight miles distant from each other, but I wasn't very hopeful of strong success.
Hey, I was wrong. Simplex worked better than either repeater. It makes me want to experiment with simplex a bit more -- maybe with an omni-directional vertical. Neal and I had a substantial QSO on the national calling frequency (223.500), and it worked quite well. The only potential issue is that nobody is hanging out on 223.500, so I'd have to establish contact on a repeater and move (QSY) to the simplex frequency.
While KD0UDM and I were on the .940, KA0KMJ (John) came in. He had just got a dual-band BaoFeng HT that covered 222 MHz, and he was hitting the repeater with the "stock duck" from indoors in Osseo. His signal was noisier than Neal's, but it was readable. This seems to be a common theme. HTs with stock ducks can reach the repeaters, but using a simple 1/4-wave ground-plane with that HT -- even indoors -- generally results in a full-quieting signal within the metro. The 2M/1.25M BaoFeng, combined with a $30 1/4-wave ground-plane, is a pretty reasonable way to get on the band without spending a lot of money. And you probably already have the BaoFeng accessories that you would need.
So that's two more well-known and highly-experienced hams in town that are now on the 1.25M band. Unlike the VHF and UHF bands, there aren't several repeaters to spread the numbers too thin. While more people are getting gear for 222 MHz locally, it'll take three or four people to hang out on relatively consistent basis before people see the band as a viable option.
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