Well, I was really hoping I would have better news by now unfortunately, only a part of this project has been completed.
Th list so far:
- Starlink at the site (complete)
- 100 amp 12 V power supply with 100 ah+ backup and 19 inch rackmount breaker panel (complete)
- A GMRS repeater (complete)
- VHF Vara FM Winlink Gateway (in process)
- HF VaraWinLink Gateway (in process)
Currently, Starlink is up and running on the site. We do have the hundred amp 12 V power in the rack and operational and we do have the GMRS repeater operating at full capacity!
Unfortunately, the only antenna I had on hand was a 3db UHF antenna so we only only have antenna space for GMRS at this point.
The plan is in the future to replace this with one of the several dual band antennas with a wide enough bandwidth to operate both GMRS and 144.970 MHz for the VARA FM side of the Gateway. I had a set up like this operational at home for quite a while so I know it will work, but we don’t have the funds currently to buy the antenna and the duplexer to make this work.
We’re also short a VHF radio, and a Masters Communications, digital radio adapter.
Unfortunately, we currently have about $4000 wrapped up in this project and so funding has kind of dried up.
On the HF side of the Vara Gateway I did take a dipole up there that I thought had been good unfortunately, when I got it on the tower and ran coax, I found the antenna to be completely DOA.
I do have another at home I will try to get up in the coming weeks and at least get the HF side operational.
Sadly, however, at the same time I found that the computer we have up there will only run Windows 10 and it’s not Windows 11 compatible.
That leaves us further up the creek without a paddle as we no longer have a computer that will operate the WinLink Gateway software.
So we will be dead in the water for a while until we can come up with some funding to pay for summer all of the parts that we need to make the rest of the system operable.
I am starting to wonder if I should give up on the windows based operating system and go ahead and try to run the WinLink software under a Windows emulator on Debian. That would be a fun and interesting project and generally Linux takes less system resources anyways.
I me give us a try at my home over the next few weeks if I don’t come up with a viable solution by then.
For the time being the GMRS repeater is up and running and you can read more on the GMRS page!