Loose Notes 8/16/15

  I had a great day on the air yesterday (8/15). Getting up early to take advantage of the tropo ducting, I spent an hour on two-metre SSB and CW with my tape-measure Yagi set up horizontally. Then I switched over to a vertical whip and tried the same thing, with the idea that I might not have been pointed in the best direction. Topping it off with some UHF SSB and CW, I called it quits after two hours as the propagation began to fade. No contacts were made, but I had a few near-misses. 

  Putting the Yagi in the vertical position, I moved over to FM. Even though the peak ducting was past, I reached a VHF repeater in Owatonna for a short contact with K0AJB (Kevin). Then I took advantage of the beam to work some local repeaters that are harder to reach from Plymouth -- such as the St. Paul VHF .120 -- where I ran into KC0FMI (Bob) and WW8A (Wayne). FM simplex was apparently dead at that point, but I did run into WE0K (Phil) in Columbia Heights later on the 146.52 calling frequency. I even put my six-element UHF Yagi up and managed to reach the Hugo .050 repeater and chat with N0SBU (George) himself. 

  Later in the evening, I ran into K0LAV (Paul) on the UHF .800 repeater. During the course of our conversation, the repeater just plain quit for several minutes. And, in another conversation with N0BID, it did the same thing. The 444.800+ hasn't been its old reliable self over the past year. 

  With all of that out of the way, let's look at some of the recent developments: 

• The Richfield 444.475+ (118.8 PL) repeater is back on the air, incarnated as a System Fusion machine. Though it putatively is linked full-time cross-band with the Richfield 145.390- repeater, I was only able to get traffic from the UHF side to repeat on the VHF side. As far as I could tell, nothing on the VHF machine gets re-transmitted to the UHF side.  

• N0BVE (Don) has resurrected a previously-mentioned project on his SNP 145.230- (114.8 PL) machine in Chaska. Formerly on 442.925+, the VHF .230 now hosts a WIRES-X link to a hub in Beaumont, TX. This hub, in turn, connects with dozens of other repeaters in the U.S. and even England. To me, it seems like the closest analogue equivalent to DMR. The Chaska repeater can be hard to reach -- it's only S7 here in Plymouth -- but it's an interesting experiment that I hope will stick around.  

• The latest rumours are that N0AGI (Nagi) is exploring the possibility of linking his 442.175+ (100.0 PL) System Fusion repeater in Prior Lake with the Minneapolis 444.425+ (114.8 PL) power-house machine.  While Nagi's UHF repeater has excellent coverage to the south and south-west (nearly to Mankato), topography has conspired against him to prevent any significant coverage to the north. If this works out, the coverage of both repeaters will greatly expand and the metro will see more continuous UHF coverage. 

• The 442.600+ repeater in Maplewood has been down for several weeks now, and the Dayton 444.450+ (114.8 PL) has, at least temporarily, joined the list of absent UHF machines in the metro. The UHF .450 is the only System Fusion repeater in the north-west metro.  EDIT: I've confirmed that the 444.450 is back on the air now.

• Looking at APRS, it seems as if KC0LDH has pulled the plug on his Becker I-Gate. Meanwhile, AE0EE-5 has appeared on a part-time basis in the Uptown area as an RPi gateway. N0HOY-10 has the icon for the digipeater in the proper place (rather than in Wisconsin) now. KD0RVY-1 is (hopefully) sticking around now as a much-needed I-Gate in the northern exurbs. Also, W0AZR-1 has recently popped up as a digipeater near Austin, MN. It's doing a great job covering I-90, working as a team with the gateway in Glenville. And K8IRC also just appeared as a gateway in northern MN between Coleraine and Hibbing. There are a lot of digipeaters up that way, but gateways are scarce, so it's always nice to see hams stepping up to the plate and filling the gap. 

• What else? The power-house 147.225+ (no PL) repeater near Brainerd has switched over to System Fusion. It's now the most northerly SF repeater in MN, and boasts a 50+ mile coverage radius. The 145.130- (no PL) is another SF machine just slightly further south, but is no slouch in coverage, either -- and it has an EchoLink node (233515). 

• We're less than two weeks away from the launch of the Fox-1A FM satellite (435.180 up, 145.980 down). Next year should see four more FM satellites launched, including three Chinese "birds". The number and quality of satellite passes should be amazing this time next year. As always, the time of local passes can be found here, so practice up on the SO-50 and be ready for the new opportunities.