Physical Radio Systems of the WVRA
last update 04/27/2008
147.135/146.865 repeater system - satellite receivers/multicast transmitters
PL 114.8 (2A)
147.135 System Goes Voting Receive and Multicast Transmit
On January 20th, a voter was added to the 147.135 system. Currently we are voting receivers at the Fox 55 tower in Hewitt and a receiver on Mosinee Hill. The voter will decide which signal has better quality and put that signal out over the 147.135 transmitter at the Fox 55 tower and also a transmitter on 146.865 (PL 114.8) on Mosinee Hill. The additional transmitter and satellite receiver at Mosinee Hill will greatly help the coverage in the Wausau area. In the near future, we will also be adding satellite receivers for the voting system in the towns of Bevent, Dancy, and Brokaw. We will also be adding a receiver at the Wausau Hospital location when we change to the new 6M radios on the 6M repeater. With the new voter there will be some time needed to work through a couple of little problems. Please be patient while we work through these. You will also notice a small difference in audio quality between the 147.135 and 146.865 transmitters. This is due to different audio routing paths to the different transmitters. With the new system, there are a couple of things that will work different. We will no longer have the link between the 147.135 and 224.640 repeater systems. Also, if you use auto patch, you need to always listen to the 147.135 transmitter. The phone line audio is not played back to the 146.865 transmitter at Mosinee Hill.
In the event that you were to transmit on 146.265 (146.865 -600khz), we have placed a receiver for that frequency out at the Fox 55 tower and have that tied into the rest of the 147.135/ 146.865 system. The antenna for this receiver is lower on the tower, so the range will be less than the 147.735 receiver. The PL for this is also 114.8.
If you have any questions about this, please contact either Mark, N9MEA or Matt, N9NMH. For more information on voting systems, check out our voting comparators page.
1/24/07 - Added satellite receiver and link transmitter at Brokaw. Currently we are voting Brokaw, Mosinee Hill, and Hewitt (Fox 55 tower). The equipment at Dancy should be on the air by the weekend.
1/27/06 - Added satellite receiver and link transmitter at Dancy. This brings us up to 4 receiver sites. The receiver at Bevent should be going up in the next week or two. There is also a hum on the Brokaw site that I should be taking a look at 1/27 or 28. A lot of the hum is filtered out by the link receiver and the voter, but if you listen close, you can hear when someone votes Brokaw. I will also be looking at the voter issue that is causing the beeping while we talk on the system.
1/29/07 - Repaired hum on Brokaw this weekend but didn't have time to go to FOX 55 tower to look into the voter problem. I hope to look at that before the end of the week. Hopefully, Bevent should be on the air before the weekend.
1/31/07 - Went to the Hewitt (Fox55) tower to try to get rid of the beeping coming from the voter. I changed a couple of things to see how they work. Also noticed hum coming from the Dancy site. No hum from the Brokaw site, though. Doesn't look like Bevent will get on this week, maybe next week. If you know of anyone that has a 19" rack shelf that they would like to donate to the club, have them contact Mark, N9MEA.
2/3/07 - Remounted the radios at Dancy to repair the hum on the 2M receiver at that site.
2/10/07 - Installed the satellite receiver and link transmitter at the Bevent site. This site is on the air. There is some decense from another transmitter in the building. Need to add a pass/reject cavity in the receive line to try to rectify the problem. This brings us up to 5 receive sites, Hewitt, Mosinee Hill, Brokaw, Dancy and now Bevent.
2/13/07 - Installed bandpass/bandreject cavity on satellite receiver to get rid of decense from the other transmitter. There is still about 3db of decense. Mobiles from Wausau can hit this receiver.
3/9/07 - Added battery backup power to the Dancy receiver and link radio. We now have backup power at Dancy, Bevent, and Mosinee Hill. We hope to be adding it soon to the Hewitt (Fox55) site.
6/2/07 - Heard the 146.865 and 147.135 transmitters cutting out. Problem is in the voter and turned up after adjustments were made to the voter last weekend.
6/23/07 - Got out to the Fox 55 tower and repaired the problem of the transmitters cutting out. The problem was in the voter.
7/3/07 - Interesting problem today, both the 147.135 and 146.865 transmitters were off the air. I noticed the problem shortly before 5pm. I went out to the Hewitt tower and found both the Astron SL11 power supplies that power the link receivers were only putting out about 4 volts. I turned off one radio attached to each supply and the voltage came up to 13 volts. I turned the radios back on and the voltage stayed at 13. After some further trouble shooting, I found out that we had a short power outage at the site and when the power came back on, the power supplies go into shut down. This only happens when the AC power is lost or the power is turned off and then returned while all the link receive radios are powered up. In this state, this also caused the voter interface to not work. I powered down all unnecessary radios and will bring out a different power supply to power all the link receivers. Thanks to everyone that called to inform me of the problem.
7/7/07 - Installed a replacement power supply for the link receive radios. Wired the voter interface to a separate Astron SL11 power supply.
7/19/07 - Removed the Dancy satellite receiver for a preventative maintenance check. Hope to get it back up on Monday 7/23/07.
7/23/07 - Reinstalled Dancy satellite receiver.
8/21/07 - Got the Abbotsford satellite receive site up and running. There are still a couple of problems at the site. It appears that the duplexer on the tower is bad. Len N9QIP will replace that at a later date. There is also a problem with the battery backup power supply. That should hopefully be fixed in the next couple of weeks.
8/29/07 - Installed bandpass cavity and preamp on satellite receiver at Dancy. This was done to get rid of decense caused by a data system at the same site.
9/1/07 - Repaired the battery backup power supply at Abbotsford. This site now has backup power. All the sites except for Brokaw and Hewitt (Fox55) have some form of backup power whether it be generator or battery backup.
9/5/07 - Removed the link transmitter from Bevent to modify it.
9/6/07 - Reinstalled the link transmitter at Bevent. Also removed and then reinstalled the link transmitter at Mosinee Hill. With these done, this leaves Brokaw as the only transmitter that needs to be modified. I went to Brokaw to pick up the link radio, but there was a LARGE wasp nest hanging from the ceiling just inside the door. I decided to wait to do this one until after it gets cold outside.
10/12/07 - Today we did tower work at the Hatley site and installed the RF equipment. However, we don't yet have a link frequency coordinated for this site so it is not yet on the air. We also got some antenna work done out at the Fox55 tower. We installed a UHF corner reflector for the link to Mosinee Hill to free up the Diamond dual band antenna which is going to be used for the new UHF repeater on 444.425.
10/15/07 - Lots of stuff going on today. First, we got the Wausau Hospital satellite receive site up and running. Had a complaint that the 147.135 and 146.865 transmitters were kerchunking since sometime Sunday. It was acting up during my drive out to the Fox55 tower, but it cleared up just as I was pulling into the parking lot. I watched things for a couple of hours while other work was being done and it never acted up again. Also checked the power out of the system just to make sure something didn't get cooked while it was transmitting and everything looks good. About 78watts out to the hardline.
10/31/07 - The 147.135 along with the 444.100 went dead during the Halloween Watch. Went to the site at 11pm and found the UPS was in alarm due to over current. Moved the power supply for the 444.100 power amp to a non-backed up outlet for now until we can get another UPS.
11/13/07 - The transmitters on 146.865 and 147.135 were kerchunking again. It was still acting up when I got out to the Fox55 tower and found that the status tone detector on the Signal Quality Module (SQM) for Bevent was out of tune. I retuned the detector circuit and all is working fine now.
11/15/07 - The wasps were finally gone from inside the building at Brokaw, so I removed the link transmitter so that it could have the transmit modification done.
11/16/07 - Reinstalled the link transmitter at Brokaw.
12/7/07 - Got the Hatley satellite receive site up and running with the voter. This site is now operational. This brings us up to a total of 8 receive sites - Hewitt, Hatley, Bevent, Dancy, Abbotsford, Brokaw, Wausau Hospital, and Mosinee Hill. Also got all equipment at the Hewitt site on UPS power now. Thanks to Mike KB9DED, Matt N9NMH, Mark N9MEA, and Len N9QIP for locating and donating the UPSs and all the necessary equipment to get everything working on the UPSs.
1/25/08 - Lost power to most of Rib Mountain including the tower on Mosinee Hill that has a satellite receiver located at. The generator ran perfect and we had no loss of service on this 147.735 satellite receiver and link or the 146.865 transmitter.
4/18/08 - Tested back-up power battery at Dancy - tested
good. Still had 12.7 volts after running the receiver/ link transmitter/
and receiver preamp after 45 minutes.
4/26/08 - If you've been listening over the last couple
of days, you would have heard that there were times that the transmit audio was
OK and times when it was very low. I tracked it down to the Abbotsford
site and UHF link receive radio at Hewitt. There were actually 2
problems. The link receiver has low receive audio out to the voter and
the satellite site at the Abbotsford tower has low audio coming to
Hewitt. It is unknown as to whether the problem at Abbotsford is the link
transmitter or the 2M receiver. For now, the Abbotsford site has been
removed from the voter and the link receive radio has been removed for
repair. I hope to get to the Abbotsford tower in the next couple of
weeks.
The WVRA 147.135 repeater is located on the FOX 55 tower located in the town of Hewitt, northeast of Wausau. This site is comprised of 2 Motorola Radius GM300 mobile radios. The receive radio is connected to a TX/RX preamp and then goes to the output of a bandpass cavity. The input of the bandpass cavity is connected to the receive port on the Wacom WP-641 duplexer. The transmit radio has the power turned down to approx 1 watt from the normal level of 25 watts. It then runs through a transmitter 50 ohm attenuator network. This network drops the power down to approx 250 milliwatts. The output of the network feeds the input of a GE Mastr II 100 watt continuous duty PA. The output of the PA is run through a TX/RX isolator/ circulator and a 2nd harmonic filter. The output of the isolator is fed to the transmitter input of the Wacom WP-641 duplexer. The antenna port of the duplexer then goes to the 2M side of a Telewave 2M/ 70cm Telewave cross band coupler. The 70cm side of the coupler is connected to the 444.100 repeater. The coupler connects both repeaters to the same 1 1/4" hardline that runs up the tower to a height of approx 780 feet. The feedline then connects to another Telewave cross band coupler to separate the signals so that they can go to their respective antennas. The 2M output of the cross band coupler is connected to a 1/2" hardline jumper and then is run to a Telewave antenna. This antenna is mounted on the antenna mount standing up from the mount. The 70cm antenna is mounted on the same mount but is hanging down. This repeater is controlled by a SCOM 7K repeater controller and Motorola Spectra-TAC voter. This controller is also shared with the 224.640 repeater. There is also auto patch on this repeater. During the hang time of the repeater, the PL tone is stripped off. This means that if you have receive PL enabled on your radio, you will not hear the courtesy tone or any of the controller generated announcements.
This repeater is a voted system. We currently have satellite receive sites at Mosinee Hill, Bevent, Brokaw, Dancy, Wausau and the local receiver at the FOX 55 tower. The satellite receivers are linked back to the main site at FOX 55 using Motorola Maxtrac 100 transmit radios that have GE MDX radios connected to them receiving on 147.735. The link receivers at the FOX 55 site are Motorola Radius M120 radios. The audio output of these radios are fed through an interface which switches the audio input of the Motorola Spectra-TAC voter from the receiver audio or a 2175 Hz tone. The 2175 Hz tone is used to squelch the signal quality cards (receiver input cards) on the voter.
In the near future we plan on adding satellite receive sites at Poniatowski and Abbotsford. We are also looking at expanding the satellite site to Lincoln, Langlade, and Waupaca counties.
The output of the voter is sent to a S-Com 7K controller and then to the Motorola GM300 transmit radio on 147.135. The output of the voter also goes to a UHF Motorola Maxtrac 100 transmitter which transmits the signal to Mosinee Hill to be rebroadcast on the 146.865 transmitter.
The best way to use the system is to always transmit on 147.735 (PL 114.8) and then listen to either 147.135 (PL 114.8) or 146.865 (PL 114.8), which ever works best for you depending on your location.
The WVRA sponsors a formal swap net on this repeater system on Wednesday evenings at 9pm. Please check out the net info page for more information on this net.
Pictures of satellite receiver sites