Our Amateur Radio Repeater, K5EPH, 147.220 + 136.5

Located In Athens, Texas. (EM22ce).

— KV5R is disabled. Please help. —

Our Repeater

See Technical Index for several repeater lists you can print.

Oct. 05: NOTE: Our repeater, K5EPH, now requires CTCSS tone access of 136.5. For those without tone generators in their radios, you may dial 11 to temporarily disable the tone access. This step was taken to reduce interference, NOT to exclude anyone! All licensed hams are welcome.

Also, the repeater transmits 136.5 for tone squelch. If you are getting interference from the pager system, or another repeater, you can enable tone squelch on your radio, if available.

October 2002: PHOTOS

The commercial Decibel Products 264 antenna was raised to the top of the tower (about 80 feet), replacing the temporary Cushcraft ARX-2B. Tower work was performed by James Davidson, N5WYN of CCLARC, with several AARC members as ground-crew. The project took about 3½ hours.

The 264 could not be mounted on the pipe mast because an abnormally long (15-16 feet) ginpole would be required -- so it was mounted as high as possible on one of the tower legs. Several members on-site agreed that an extra 20 feet would not make any noticable difference in performance, but the extension of the heavy 2½-inch mast would add substantial stress to the unguyed tower.

The 264 is a very heavy-duty commercial unit and should survive nearly any weather event. The old commercial police antenna (a DB 224) was removed for refurbishing, and the temporary Cushcraft ARX-2B was returned to its owner, KV5R.

The G.E. Mastr-Exec repeater is installed and operating normally -- despite continuous interference from local pager systems...

The repeater has battery backup emergency power.

--KV5R

May 2003

The controller has been updated with a new program.  There are a couple of new features that will be noticeable.

NET  MODE - The scheduler now puts the repeater in net mode at 8 PM every Monday night, and restores it to normal mode an hour later.  The most noticeable difference is the courtesy tone.

Any time we bring up a net (club or SKYWARN) this mode will be used. Anybody who comes on frequency will immediately know a net is going on.

EMERGENCY  POWER  FEATURE - Hopefully we'll never hear this one.  But if we loose AC power and the battery backup kicks in, the repeater will go to a much shorter squelch tail, and a single quick courtesy beep. This alone will conserve power.  Further it will serve as notice that we should keep our transmissions short.  When power is restored, the repeater will return to normal mode.

AUTO DIALER - Finally, I am working on programming the auto dialer so that those of us who operate locally can have easier access to commonly-called autopatch numbers.  Instead of having to dial all 10 digits, we'll just dial 3 and the controller will spit out the 10 digits it has stored in memory.

We have enough autodial memory slots for each club member to have only one. I am starting to program in home phone numbers as I have them.  Not everybody has a local home phone number. Some are long distance numbers. Only local numbers will be programmed in.

If we have more space left over after this is completed, we might be able to assign two autodial memory slots to each member.  But we'll see how it goes. When this job is completed, I'll get a list of autodial codes to everybody.

Otherwise, the repeater continues to operate normally. 

--James, KF5WT