This past week, I heard about a new UHF repeater going on-air in the NW suburbs. That's great, because there aren't many UHF repeaters out this way in Plymouth. Mostly I'm using those in Minneapolis and working the edges of their coverage. There's the TCFMC's 444.100, the 444.375 in Plymouth, and the relatively new 444.725 hybrid In Osseo. That's it.
You may think that's a lot, but the .375 is (as N0FWG put it) "under-utilised". I'm somewhat less than welcome on the "dot one" due to unflattering (but true) posts on the TCFMC, and it's fair to say that I'm not missing out on much there anyway beyond the morning roundtable. I'm still experimenting with various indoor antenna solutions that will let me reach the .725 from my study, but I can reach it quite well with an exterior antenna. Still, it's a new repeater that doesn't have community built up around it yet.
And so I was excited about the MGRC's venture into UHF. In past conversations with President WD9IGX (Tim), I had noted a complete disinterest in UHF as far as the Club went. I don't think that Tim even owns a UHF-capable rig. Nothing wrong with that, of course. And a few of the prominent Club members actually operate UHF repeaters: N0FWG (Jerry) runs the Plymouth 444.375, N0ZRD (Gordy) runs the Robbinsdale 444.775, and KA0KMJ (John) has three machines on the air (443.000, 444.425, and 444.725). Conversations with these three, however, also left me with the distinct impression that the MGRC had priorities other than a UHF repeater for the area, and that "cross-band" was a dirty word in that crowd.
Learning that the new repeater was operated out of a Maple Grove hospital on 443.700+ (186.2 PL), I programmed it in to my FT-897D for a test that I believed would involve an awesome UHF machine put up by experts on the band.
Imagine, then, my disbelief when this new repeater came back with a (noisy) S3 signal when I threw out my sign. The thing is seven miles from me, and it sounds like a "hobby" repeater in Wisconsin! An HT connected to an antenna on your roof could do as well working simplex. No one was on it, so I couldn't get a signal report. Yeah, it was disappointing.
Then this morning, thinking that I had maybe judged it harshly when it was so new, I threw out my sign on the frequency again using a three-element Yagi aimed to the north-west with ten watts. It didn't come back at all. It was already "off-air".
As K0LAV (Paul) informed me, 443.700+ is one of the SNP pairs on the UHF band. It's much easier to get permission to operate a repeater on an SNP pair, but you don't get exclusive use of the frequency. Generally, SNP pairs are used to test repeaters before they move on to a fully-co-ordinated pair. Maybe this is as good as we can expect, though. Sure, it could cover a stretch of I-94 from 169 up to (maybe) Rogers, and it could cover Elm Creek Park. If it were linked to the .375, I could maybe see some kind of practical use for such a low-coverage machine. But, as we all know, linking is "cheating" in some incomprehensible way.
I could see a more compelling case for a GMRS repeater that would try to cover some of the nearby parks, than I could imagine a rationale for a 70cm repeater that struggles to reach Plymouth.
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