Howdy everyone.
Well I have some great news! We finished working on the MSR 2000 yesterday. Dale (KC8ZXF), Clay (KF8UI) and myself started around 1300 or so looking at wiring up the PL board. We were initially focusing on getting the PL to decode and we couldn't get it to work. We followed the instructions (or so we thought) and had everything wired up as it should be. We saw the LED light up on the PL board, assuming it meant we had power.
We spent a few hours trying to figure out why the decode wasn't working properly. We were all getting really frustrated, getting near to the point that we were going to call it quits and assume we couldn't do it. I kept looking over the schematic and install guide for the PL board and I found out two important things that changed everything. First thing was that the LED (by factory default) turns on either when the board is decoding or when the signal is "off hook". Secondly, there was a note on the schematic that in order to decode, we had to ground a specific wire.
So...we realized that the whole time we thought the LED was a power indicator, it was telling us that we were "off hook" and the board can't decode when that happens. So we grounded out the extra wire and then the moment of truth...will it work? We plugged in the MSR2000 and noticed that the LED on the PL board wasn't lit...good sign. Dale was getting ready to key up his HT while Clay and I were holding the multimeter connections to check voltage. Dale keyed up and we saw the LED light up when he keyed up. He tested several times to make sure. You would have thought we just won the lottery. We were all jumping up and down hooting and hollering! We were so ecstatic that it was working! Like kids in a candy store! It was awesome!
We spent a little more time getting the encoding working, tuning the PL, and also hooking up Clay's secondary controller. Everything was working great. Audio was perfect. All that was left was to wire up a potentiometer for the internal speaker and then build the wiring harness to the voter and controller.
Around 1900, I had to leave to go get my son and Dale and Clay left to go to the Saturday Night Coffee Break at the Palace.
After the Coffee Break, Clay, Dale, and Tony (W8CCT) went back to Dale's garage to see if they could finish everything up. They must have stayed past 0000 but they got everything completed. They had to run up to the repeater site at one point to check the cabling, and it's a good thing they did because they found they needed some additional jumpers.
So, as of early this morning, the project is all set for installation which is slotted for around 1500 today. Once the new repeater is in place, the only thing left to do on this project is to tune the cans to the new system.
Special thanks to the following people:
All in all, this is going to be a great repeater for us! Thank you to everyone who helped out! I'll probably put another post up after the repeater is put in place.
73s
Adam
W8DEV
Well I have some great news! We finished working on the MSR 2000 yesterday. Dale (KC8ZXF), Clay (KF8UI) and myself started around 1300 or so looking at wiring up the PL board. We were initially focusing on getting the PL to decode and we couldn't get it to work. We followed the instructions (or so we thought) and had everything wired up as it should be. We saw the LED light up on the PL board, assuming it meant we had power.
We spent a few hours trying to figure out why the decode wasn't working properly. We were all getting really frustrated, getting near to the point that we were going to call it quits and assume we couldn't do it. I kept looking over the schematic and install guide for the PL board and I found out two important things that changed everything. First thing was that the LED (by factory default) turns on either when the board is decoding or when the signal is "off hook". Secondly, there was a note on the schematic that in order to decode, we had to ground a specific wire.
So...we realized that the whole time we thought the LED was a power indicator, it was telling us that we were "off hook" and the board can't decode when that happens. So we grounded out the extra wire and then the moment of truth...will it work? We plugged in the MSR2000 and noticed that the LED on the PL board wasn't lit...good sign. Dale was getting ready to key up his HT while Clay and I were holding the multimeter connections to check voltage. Dale keyed up and we saw the LED light up when he keyed up. He tested several times to make sure. You would have thought we just won the lottery. We were all jumping up and down hooting and hollering! We were so ecstatic that it was working! Like kids in a candy store! It was awesome!
We spent a little more time getting the encoding working, tuning the PL, and also hooking up Clay's secondary controller. Everything was working great. Audio was perfect. All that was left was to wire up a potentiometer for the internal speaker and then build the wiring harness to the voter and controller.
Around 1900, I had to leave to go get my son and Dale and Clay left to go to the Saturday Night Coffee Break at the Palace.
After the Coffee Break, Clay, Dale, and Tony (W8CCT) went back to Dale's garage to see if they could finish everything up. They must have stayed past 0000 but they got everything completed. They had to run up to the repeater site at one point to check the cabling, and it's a good thing they did because they found they needed some additional jumpers.
So, as of early this morning, the project is all set for installation which is slotted for around 1500 today. Once the new repeater is in place, the only thing left to do on this project is to tune the cans to the new system.
Special thanks to the following people:
- Dale (KC8ZXF) for allowing us to use his garage for the work
- Clay (KF8UI) for supplying cables and connectors
- Al (WB8YOB) for supplying cables and connectors
- Rob (KD8KUB) for supplying the technical manuals for the MSR2000
All in all, this is going to be a great repeater for us! Thank you to everyone who helped out! I'll probably put another post up after the repeater is put in place.
73s
Adam
W8DEV