We had some initial success!
I went back to Bennett Butte yesterday with my FT-897 and a dipole of unknown pedigree, along with the X-50a antenna from Armando Martinez KJ7NUZ.
The bit of tower Work too replace the VHF/UHF antenna and the HF pole went rather quickly although I did have a bit of a fuss getting the new dipole unfolded on site. With the VHF/UHF duplexer I had I was able to get the GMRS repeater back online and do a bit of testing although I didn’t have anybody to talk to you. SWR seemed good so I moved onto the inside work. As it turns out the di-pole I had was a halfwave 80 m so the only band we could tune into was 80 m. This isn’t a huge issue, but in the future, we will be looking at an off-center fed dipole to get more bands usage a the site. The good news is that the noise floor on 80 m up there midday is about S3. 80M ground wave during the day should cover most of Coos, Curry, and parts of Douglas counties.
I did the initial set up for VARA FM and Vara HF to get them up and running and did some tests and sent some data and both sides worked very well! I was very easily able to connect to KK7APK–10 and move data at 8505BPS!
We should be able to do better when we can run VARA FM WIDE but currently we are stuck with narrow as we are using an older Signa-link sound card interface.
Once that was sorted I got on the Phone with Tom KF7RSF who was able to log in from home and help me get the SYSOP software up and running!
With the SYSOP software up and running Tom was able to connect on both 2M and 80M but did have a but of issue as his directional antenna was pointed in the wrong direction on 2M.
We setup the auto startup and with everything up and running and dark fast approching I packed up and headed down the mountain.
Sadly our triumph was short lived. Apparently at some point the Signal-link cable can out of the Signa-link and both the HF and VHF Vara instances where listening to the HF radio.
By the time I made it back to the office in Coquille it was no longer taking connections on either port. 🙁
Tom was able to log in and get the HF side back up and running but some time in the night the computer got sleepy and is not totally off line.
I suspect this is due to a power setting telling the machine to sleep after so many hours. I will try and get back to the sight this weekend but most likely will not get back to the project until sometime next week. 🙁
The frustrating thing about working on remote & restricted access sites is amount of effort it takes just to make the trip. But that is the price we pay for mile high real-estate…
Until next time,
Chip
KE7ADD
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