About a month ago, I checked out a Minnesota repeater that was mentioned on the RepeaterBook Twitter feed. It was the Bayport 443.375+ (167.9 PL), which the MRC listings showed as in Minneapolis with a 179.9 tone. One of the advantages of RepeaterBook is that it can be kept more up-to-date than the quarterly MRC repeater listings, which often lists repeaters that have been down for over six months. For example, the MRC lists the 224.660- repeater in Columbia Heights that has been off the air since January 2014, and virtually non-functional for a month prior to that. The disadvantage of RepeaterBook is that it relies on hams to keep it up-to-date, though it's pretty simple to correct or update the information found there.
In the case of the Bayport UHF repeater, I listed it as "off air" in September 2013, after finding that the MRC listing's information would not allow me to access it. Last month, K0LAV (Paul) updated the RepeaterBook listing to show that it had moved to Bayport and was using a different PL tone. The MRC's public repeater list caught none of this.
From K0LAV's information, it seems as if this is a prime UHF repeater. With an an antenna mounted on a smokestack at 600 feet (wow!), it conservatively lists the range as 30 miles. That range provides UHF coverage up to Taylors Falls, and includes Lindstrom and Wyoming -- even out to Coon Rapids. Wisconsin is covered well past Baldwin and as far as Amery. Likewise, it reaches Red Wing, Rosemount, and Edina, while covering both Minneapolis and St. Paul proper.
This is phenomenal UHF coverage...and nobody knows about it.
I'm on the fringe of the Bayport .375's coverage radius here in Plymouth, and I've been a bit disappointed with the receiver performance of the repeater. Even with a three-element Yagi, my 3.5W Chinese HT couldn't "ker-chunk" the machine. Using 10W on my TYT TH-9000 and an indoor 5/8-wave whip, though, got me into the Bayport repeater. Since there's nobody on it yet, I couldn't get a signal report. The repeater itself is S6 here, so this may be a new "alligator" for the metro. I'll test it with my 5W mobile today driving around Plymouth, but I'm sceptical that I'll be able to reach it. Certainly, if someone with a 5W HT in St. Paul, for example, is unable to use this new repeater, then its usefulness is considerably diminished. The MARA 444.800+, the Maplewood 442.600+, the Gopher Radio Club's 444.425+, the Columbia Heights duo on 444.550+ and 444.750+, the Robbinsdale 444.775+, and the assortment of linked HandiHam UHF repeaters are already fine options for low-power metro-area hams on UHF. Also, the Arden Hills 442.075+ has decent "ears", and its links will allow access to the vast majority of Wisconsin.
Still, there are a lot of hams out there with "real" mobile radios that can operate on UHF, or those with UHF base stations, that could find the coverage range of an "alligator" repeater compelling. Two metres seems to be the more usual choice for these operators, however. Until we see propagation reports and have actual QSO's with hams closer to the new machine than I am, dismissing the repeater on the basis of its "ears" could be premature.
One thing that's nice about the Bayport 443.375+ repeater is that it employs tone squelch. This means that nearly all of the nasty "intermod" interference found in urban areas can be eliminated. I've covered this topic before, but suffice to say that you need to set the "decode" CTCSS tone the same as the "encode" tone in order to make use of this gratifying improvement. Pretty much all radios that actually have CTCSS will allow you to do this, from the cheapest BaoFeng to the high-end Japanese transceivers. CHIRP software, for example, has a column labelled "ToneSql". TYT software has a column named "CTCSS/DCS Encode". PuXing programming software calls this feature "Rx Tone". If a repeater employs tone squelch (and not all of them do), simply set this feature to the same tone as the one used to transmit.
Give this new repeater a test. If, as I suspect, this is one of K0LAV's machines, he will be improving it as time goes on -- especially if it starts to see a lot of use. While UHF is widely seen as the "second choice" of many operators, it's the best choice for those in antenna-restricted situations (like me) and also for those that don't like having huge antennae on their vehicle. Unfortunately, there is no EchoLink access for this repeater. Given its wide coverage and deficient "ears", this would seem to be a good addition. Paul has a lot of tricks up his sleeve (though EchoLink isn't usually one of them), and it might be that this machine will be RF-linked to another repeater or employ remote receive sites on the fringes.
EDIT: I wasn't able to reach the 443.375 with my 5W "mobile" in Plymouth, even though I tried from a few very elevated locations. Usually, altitude trumps power on UHF, but this isn't one of those cases.
3 comments:
took 20 watts with my base setup here in Lino. Definitely a bit down on receive sensitivity at this point. Thanks for the heads up on the new machine.
You're considerably closer to the repeater than me. Thanks for the confirmation.
Did you get a good signal out of the machine, once you reached it?
With that kind of antenna height on UHF, it should provide HT coverage in Lino Lakes. It's still new, though.
I never heard of a UHF repeater in Minneapolis on 443.375, so maybe this was a low-power "hobby" repeater that was just moved to a fantastic site. Kind of seems like a waste.
it came back to me full scale S9+. I couldn't kerchunk it at all with my HT's even from outside my house.
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