On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:09:09 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

'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.

Feh. My first repeater:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
was like that. 6m Pre-Prog receiver near the bottom. Unichannel
receiver hanging in back. Two 80D xmitters, with mobile power
supplied modified for AC operation, near the top. DC wire line remote
in the middle along with home made control and audio panels. Note how
cleverly I put all the heavy stuff on top so that it would topple when
moved. Driving around town with a 2500 and later a Princess (Schmoo)
phone on the floorboards was the ultimate in cool in the late 1960's.

Also, initially no touch tone. It was controlled by a rotary stepper
switch and a single tone decoder. Also, no PL. A later machine used
a Strowger switch when 10 functions were deemed insufficient. However,
it was way too big and and made far too much noise, so a WE 247B
materialized and I switched to Touch Tone. The first PC I used in a
repeater was for IRLP, not the controller. I keep wanting to build
and write code for my own PC based controller, but can't find the
time, excuse, or market to justify the effort.

One of the repeaters I listed (W6JWS-2m) is an Icom RP-1510 commercial
repeater owned by the local ARES group. I inherited the unpaid
lifetime maintenance contract on it when the previous tech died. I
had to remove a tangle of modifications, fix a few things, retune, and
deal with a nasty case of intermod at a new location. The quality of
the radio and controller are marginal, but it will probably remain in
service forever.

How we got from microwave ovens to this will remain a mystery.

Back to shoveling mud and muck. Yech.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558