On Saturday, March 28th, we (Clay - KF8UI, Dale - KC8ZXF and Adam - W8DEV) continued working on the new .26 repeater.
If you haven't heard, a Motorola MSR2000 was donated to MSCG a few years ago and we're looking to convert it to replace our current .26 repeater. Right now we have a pair of Syntor Xs running and hopefully we'll be able to get the MSR2000 running to bring us closer to current century technology (The MSR2000 is still old, but it's newer than our current setup). The MSR2000 is rated for a 100% duty cycle at 100 Watts.
We've already had the crystals tuned to the proper frequencies and we recently purchased a PL board that would allow us to set the repeater to the proper 100Hz tone. The current PL is based off a reed which is fixed to 146.2 hz. This new PL board will allow us to designate the tone as we see fit. We're hoping we can just solder the new card to the existing PL card where the reed was located. That's still to be determined.
We started going through a conversion document to setup the MSR2000 to work as a repeater and when we got to the end of the mod (which includes adding certain jumpers to the backplane as well as removing others) we found out that the mod assumed we had certain cards which we don't. So we ended up finding another mod that would give us a lot more information and actually explained the reasoning behind the changes that were made. As we progressed through the modifications, we ended up wiring up the TX/RX connectors for the antennas, the DB9 connection for interface to the controller, and we successfully were able to receive a signal. We had issues transmitting ( I won't bore you with the details) but we ended up finding out that we needed some specific Motorola tester/tuner to be able to calibrate the exciter to the correct frequency. This tester/tuner was supposed to be included in the unit but it, as well as the microphone were missing so we were unable to tune things properly. We could see on an HT that when we tried to transmit that a signal was being sent, but it wasn't even powerful enough to register on a power meter. After doing some digging, we found the necessary tester/tuner on eBay and it should hopefully show up by the end of the week.
All in all, it was a pretty productive day in that we got a lot of work done in preparation for upgrading the repeater.
I'm no electronics/radio expert, I'm just going based off my limited understanding. If my information is wrong, I'll do my best to get it corrected.
73s
Adam
W8DEV
If you haven't heard, a Motorola MSR2000 was donated to MSCG a few years ago and we're looking to convert it to replace our current .26 repeater. Right now we have a pair of Syntor Xs running and hopefully we'll be able to get the MSR2000 running to bring us closer to current century technology (The MSR2000 is still old, but it's newer than our current setup). The MSR2000 is rated for a 100% duty cycle at 100 Watts.
We've already had the crystals tuned to the proper frequencies and we recently purchased a PL board that would allow us to set the repeater to the proper 100Hz tone. The current PL is based off a reed which is fixed to 146.2 hz. This new PL board will allow us to designate the tone as we see fit. We're hoping we can just solder the new card to the existing PL card where the reed was located. That's still to be determined.
We started going through a conversion document to setup the MSR2000 to work as a repeater and when we got to the end of the mod (which includes adding certain jumpers to the backplane as well as removing others) we found out that the mod assumed we had certain cards which we don't. So we ended up finding another mod that would give us a lot more information and actually explained the reasoning behind the changes that were made. As we progressed through the modifications, we ended up wiring up the TX/RX connectors for the antennas, the DB9 connection for interface to the controller, and we successfully were able to receive a signal. We had issues transmitting ( I won't bore you with the details) but we ended up finding out that we needed some specific Motorola tester/tuner to be able to calibrate the exciter to the correct frequency. This tester/tuner was supposed to be included in the unit but it, as well as the microphone were missing so we were unable to tune things properly. We could see on an HT that when we tried to transmit that a signal was being sent, but it wasn't even powerful enough to register on a power meter. After doing some digging, we found the necessary tester/tuner on eBay and it should hopefully show up by the end of the week.
All in all, it was a pretty productive day in that we got a lot of work done in preparation for upgrading the repeater.
I'm no electronics/radio expert, I'm just going based off my limited understanding. If my information is wrong, I'll do my best to get it corrected.
73s
Adam
W8DEV