December 2018 – Engineering Update & December Work Day

by Kyle Krieg, AAØZ

In December the Engineering Committee worked on the 9666 Olive site which houses our 146.850, 443.075 and 224.520 repeaters.  The committee purchased a new Ubiquity 16 port switch, which grew out of our 8 port switch installed last year. The 8 port will be re-purposed at the 146.940 site to help bring that site up to speed with the rest of the repeater cabinets and will round out our Ubiquity infrastructure.  We also installed our new server which will help us monitor the network and wireless point to points to each site. We are running Ubiquity’s UNMS server on Linux on a donated PC the club obtained years ago. We will also migrate our Unifi server to this platform later this year. The team checked out all the weatherproofing and connections to ensure they are surviving the winter.  Everything looked great!

The team also installed the WØSRC Allstar hub node at the repeater site.  Think of this hub node as a “room” in WiresX or a “talkgroup” in DMR world.  It can also be compared to a “conference server” in the Echolink environment.  Anyone with an Allstar node can connect to this hub, as they will be heard by any others connected.  The WØSRC hub node is at #49485 and more info can be found on our Repeaters and Nets homepage.  Later in 2019, the committee will place nodes on other WØSRC repeaters to tie into this hub to link repeaters together on an as-needed basis.

Late in the month, we worked on the APRS digipeater located at the MoBAP Hospital.  There is a pager antenna system located 15 feet from our antenna pushing out 180+ watts, which was making our digipeater a little deaf.  STL ARES was gracious to loan us a 150 – 152 Mhz filter, which we installed and also did some cabinet clean up.

In January the committee has the following items to complete at the 146.940 and 442.100 site during the workday:

  1. Currently, there is a large cabinet in which our equipment is racked, however it does not have any security.  The club owns a smaller lockable cabinet that we will move equipment into.
  2. Install the 8 port Ubiquity switch from the 146.850 site and re-program.
  3. Replace all the coax cables in the system on the output of the duplexers as the current coax cables are very lossy.
  4. Check all weatherproofing on the antenna systems.