To ham or not to ham, that is the question....

[Uncle Ben]

Ya I have talked with a Dan and a Doug from Baily 0n .145 . Dan is on quite a bit in fact. Seem like nice enough fellows but I would rather be chatting with one of you guys! Has any one messed with the DCS encoding yet? Our own repeater would be cool but a little more geeky than I want to get into right now. Michelle might have something to say about the new metal "tree" that popped up in the back yard too!
BTW....I scored a Yaesu VX-7r with extra battery at the pawn shop a little over a week ago! Haven't played with it much but it's pretty cool! I couldn't pass it up for only $150! Guy at the PS said he had it for a while and no one knew what it was! He Googled it and found out it was an HT but thats all he knew! It seems to be in great shape and it does work....in fact I was listening to you guys rag chew last monday while cleaning the garage! I tried to beep in but no one heard me or you ignored me! I might have not had the tone set correctly either. I ordered a manual and downloaded a PDF manual so I can figure it out. I'll try it if I can tomorrow night at the rag chew.....

I hear you Kev, it would be sweet if our little community had its own repeater that worked across the front range, where we could all hang by default and be a little less apprehensive about speaking up. In fact keep your eyes open, if someone were to stumble across the equipment necessary to build our own setup, I'd gladly donate the hillside & power to keep it running. Heck maybe the club will decide to buy all this stuff some day.. still kicking myself that we didn't grab that 40' tower than was available a while back, but alas I didn't own any land then.

But I am like you, I typically monitor 145.145 on one, and 145.310 on the other, though lately I've been listening to 146.805 instead of .310 because that's one of the repeaters that lets people monkey around with the IRLP stuff... like when we do the Expeditions Portal stuff that's the channel you go on, then Ricardo or Blake will push the magic buttons and we're on the Western Reflector. But point being, it's a little more interesting over on 146.805 than .145 or .310.

However, just about every time I start talking with someone on .145 the guy on the other end has been super cool, and half the time they live in Bailey and we'll often discover we know the same people. In fact a couple of them are threatening to drop in on our meeting next month

 

[nakman]

I don't think know them.. ham guys I know in Bailey are Dennis and LJ..


but yeah we'd have to be stealth about it, and put it back in the woods a bit. And hope the kid's hair doesn't stand on end while he's out on the swing set.

 

[Uncle Ben]

Ya I have talked with a Dan and a Doug from Baily 0n .145 . Dan is on quite a bit in fact. Seem like nice enough fellows but I would rather be chatting with one of you guys! Has any one messed with the DCS encoding yet? Our own repeater would be cool but a little more geeky than I want to get into right now. Michelle might have something to say about the new metal "tree" that popped up in the back yard too!
BTW....I scored a Yaesu VX-7r with extra battery at the pawn shop a little over a week ago! Haven't played with it much but it's pretty cool! I couldn't pass it up for only $150! Guy at the PS said he had it for a while and no one knew what it was! He Googled it and found out it was an HT but thats all he knew! It seems to be in great shape and it does work....in fact I was listening to you guys rag chew last monday while cleaning the garage! I tried to beep in but no one heard me or you ignored me! I might have not had the tone set correctly either. I ordered a manual and downloaded a PDF manual so I can figure it out. I'll try it if I can tomorrow night at the rag chew.....

I also want to play with the cross band repeat feature just for fun to see how far this little HT can yak with the Cruiser backing it up! Anybody have a clue how to do that yet?

 

[DaveInDenver]

With more people getting into ham, we should have a common repeater and I think the Rising Sun Ham Club is just the huckleberries to do it. We could charge a small fee to other clubs to use it. With Tim's free rent it wouldn't be expensive, although renting space on Lookout or Squaw would provide a ton more coverage.

BTW, that VX-7R was a steal, they are usually about $350.

146.805 is interesting during commutes. I'll get on once in a while when I'm driving at a decent time. Most of the drive-time people are radio and TV broadcast engineers, so that's interesting. They really don't talk about ham, but what broadcast towers they are working on, what stations, etc. They also talk about other stuff, hiking, skiing and just general B.S. It's pretty interest and not really a tighty-whitey crowd. I'd guess most of them are in their 30s and 40s, just working stiffs chatting on the way to work.

FWIW, I think we should designate a simplex channel to call home and then have a repeater progression. It's best to stay off 145.310 for local stuff since it does tie up the linked repeaters with chit-chat relevant only to Denver.

 

[Groucho]

Repeaters and simplex...

We have sort-of "adopted" the 146.460 MhZ freq for trail runs. That came from the NorCal Guys using that freq.

Nakman and I chatted with another HAM on the way home from CM2007 on 146.520 about setting up our own repeater that could be raised and lowered on a trailer for Cruise Moab. That way, we would have a temporary repeater that we would have to coordinate with the local guys on freq and such, put it up on Poison Spider Mesa and viola! Our own CM repeater!

Dave, have you had any experience with those things(repeaters)? I know most guys get second(or third or fourth) hand stuff to start out with to make it less costly. Here is one I found on ebay. VHF Repeater

I would like to do this, but I'd be worried about all of the permission and stuff we'd have to go through to make it all possible.

Anybody's thoughts?

 

[DaveInDenver]

Dave, have you had any experience with those things(repeaters)? I know most guys get second(or third or fourth) hand stuff to start out with to make it less costly. Here is one I found on ebay. VHF Repeater

I would like to do this, but I'd be worried about all of the permission and stuff we'd have to go through to make it all possible.

Anybody's thoughts?

Never set up a repeater. I think the biggest issue is getting an open frequency pair, the rest we could figure out. What would be cool is if we could convince Tim to give us Internet access and make the Rising Sun repeater an IRLP node. I think setting one up at one of our mountain member's homes makes sense. Once it's dialed in, moving it to a commercial tower is relatively easier. Don't want to be shaking out a repeater and causing all kinds of interference with Fox31, you know.

I was thinking it probably wouldn't be too tough to find a GE Mastr repeater, that's a pretty standard part. There's probably lots of other controllers, Motorola for sure. Not to mention the Tait you linked to, probably ICOM, Kenwood, Vertex also make repeater parts.

http://www.repeater-builder.com/rbtip/

 

[Crawler#976]

If you guy's can pull off a portable club repeater or a dedicated club repeater that would be sweet!

K0FXF is available...

K0RS K0RSC aren't