The past 30 days were a busy month for the Engineering committee. The team was hard at work meeting and gathering more info around the existing repeater environment to create a master plan for the SLSRC repeaters. This partial plan, submitted to the board on February 19th, called out current issues, concerns and the 2018/2019 goals of the Engineering committee. The committee will start work on the high priority action items and then move into firming up and implementing the short term goals. More details will be shared with the membership regarding the plan during the program at the July general meeting.
Earlier in January, SLSRC gained ownership of a roof antenna mount and penthouse space on the main tower of MoBap Hospital. MoBap sits at the corner of 270 and Hwy 40 and the antenna location is right in the middle of the hospital. It’s blocked by line of sight to both the north and south by taller buildings, but has clear views to the East and West including downtown. This location might not be the best or tallest location, but we’ll take what we can get! Plans are still unknown at this point what the committee will do with the MoBap site, but we are looking at using it as an APRS digipeater/iGate location along with building out our future mesh network. Stay tuned for more developments around this effort.
In February, the Engineering committee accomplished the following tasks:
- Completed a site tour of the 146.940 location. This site is at 200 S Brentwood on top of an apartment complex around 18 stories above Clayton.
- Completed a site tour of the 146.970 location. This site at 665 S Skinker Blvd is on the top of the Dorchster apartment complex 26 stories high. It has clear line of site views for miles in each direction with no obstructions. There is a repeater work day scheduled for March 10th at the .97 site with a laundry list of items to complete. Included in the to-do list is to provide internet access to this site via a 5Ghz point to point dish connection.
- Inventory and asset tagging of all the equipment at the 146.940 site.
- Site tour of the 146.910 location. This is at 12555 Manchester Rd on top of the Edward Jones office building. We are planning a repeater work day in May for the .91 site to replace an antenna and provide internet access to this location.
- Each of the site tours above produced a list of action items to accomplish during an Engineering work day along with preventive maintenance tasks.
- Removal and demo of old Motorola rack equipment and documentation of the newly acquired MoBap site.
- Submitted master repeater plan to the board for discussion.
Below are pictures of the MoBap repeater work day where the team cleaned out the old cabinet and installed a power supply into the new cabinet. We also documented the coax run and created a plan for the next repeater work day there.