Meat Plow wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:48:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:04:11 -0400, Meat Plow
wrote:

Some times the best way to blow off some steam is with words.

Yep. I've learned more about effuent terminology and profanity while
working on the septic system than all the CB lingo in my chequered
past.

Heh...septic systems suck. I've lived in two homes with them in my
youth and 5 kids in the house. #1 back in the mid 60's used to fill up
and leak through the ground. Made the grass around it nice and green
though #2 was in a home newly built for us in 1968. A brick ranch
out in then rural surroundings, no water/sewer. Never had a lick of
problems with that thing. It was a huge tank and cleverly made leech
bed from house block in sand and rock. I guess in that location the
tank could be made from house block and act partly as a leech bed of
its own. 20 years later they ran water and sewer and caved in the tank
and leech bed so I know what it looked like.

I've helped
design one of the best amateur radio repeaters in the Cleveland/Akron
area now being used for the backbone of NOAA - W8CLE and SKYWARN.

Well, working backwards, I either built or helped build:
W6JWS-2m Bonny Doon. (no photos)
K6BJ Santa Cruz. http://www.LearnByDestroying.com/k6bj/
KI6EH Watsonville. (no photos)
A bunch of junk in Smog Angeles I would like to forget.
WB6EEP West L.A.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
and a bunch of commercial stuff.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/index.html
My favorite was a repeater built into a hollowed out 4x4 fence post
and installed in a prominent location. Sorry, but no photos.

The problem with ham repeaters is that they seem to run forever,
usually with zero maintenance. When something finally breaks, I get
to fix it. When someone builds it wrong, I get to fix it. When
something blows, I get to repair it.

Design is usually done on the back of an envelope. Documentation? We
don't do no stinkin documentation:
http://members.cruzio.com/~jeffl/k6bj/K6BJ%20Repeater/slides/Documentation.html

One of the few smart things I've done is to NOT build my own repeater.

Well now adays using a prebuilt from a company like Icom, a cavity
duplexer and adding a Mirage repeater amp and a couple Diamond Super
Stationmasters, some 9913 or hard line is the way to go. Back in the
early 90s it was piece together a controller, mobile or bass rig, an
AT computer to handle the phone patch etc.... I know of one such beast
still in existence that I had a part in its equipping and that I had
modified a couple Motorola 160mhz "Pageboy" pagers for use on the
repeater. It's used every day all day long and part of the SKYWARN 2
meter network. I can hit it with a 5 watt HT 50+ miles away albeit
strategically located.


'90s? you should have tried building one in the late '60s. Motorola
Twin-V transmitter strip, a GE Pre-prog reciever strip, home brew power
supplies, Unijunction transistor timers and a surplus W.E. Touch tone
decoder and a homebrew phone patch. The diplexer was home brew out of
scrap copper pipe. All of this mounted in a surplus 3' shallow relay
rack.

There were no computers. It was on 146.01/146/61 and installed in the
pressbox at Lemon Monroe high School in Monroe Ohio. You could hit it
from the Dayton hamfest with a 1 W handheld.


--
The movie 'Deliverance' isn't a documentary!