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Author Topic: Early days of repeater use  (Read 30941 times)

K3XR

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #30 on: December 02, 2021, 12:39:30 PM »

I recall the early days of repeaters in the late 60's early 70's.  I lived in the Philly area at the time and most of the simplex activity was 146.940 which also happened to be a repeater pair 34/94.  Some of the other pairs I recall were 146.  16/76 22/82 28/88.  Few if any had any tone requirements at that time as not that many were on the air.  As best I can recall just about all repeaters were converted commercial units as was much of the individual equipment in use.
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KE7XL

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #31 on: December 02, 2021, 01:22:56 PM »

In my area, New York State's Hudson Valley 1966.....very few repeaters. 2 between Albany and NYC at a distance of 140 miles.... almost no commercial gear for FM....almost all the gear was converted land mobile....for example a Motorola Dispatcher Phone, 6 volts, crystal controlled and made for a motorcycle....very few operators....almost all of us were on 2M AM with Heathkit Lunch Boxes...I was on with an Aerotron 500.
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KC6RWI

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #32 on: December 02, 2021, 03:10:41 PM »

WHo is buying all the hand held baofengs?  So many ht's being sold and I see little use for them, except they do have a nice flashlight and can receive in
a number of places, also fm broadcast.
I see cb antennas on the big rigs and I am yet to hear one, although I haven't tried very hard, I guess they must use them once in awhile?
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WA6BJH

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #33 on: December 02, 2021, 03:39:30 PM »

I helped put on the first repeater in Eastern North Carolina, 16/76, on the WITN television tower in Grifton.  Fortunately, the tower had an elevator because we were up and down it quite frequently keeping the repeater on the air.  At the time, the only other nearby repeaters were in Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, both on 34/94.

Prose Walker was a nice guy.  I worked him on 30 meters after he retired and was living in Florida.  I was living in Springfield, Virginia, at the time and we talked about commuting and the traffic in the D.C. area.

The man who did most to help develop repeaters was, in fact, Wayne Green, W2NSD/1, SK. He and a bunch of “repeater men” went down to D.C. to talk with the Commission about why repeaters were important and shouldn’t be heavily regulated.
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WA6BJH

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #34 on: December 02, 2021, 03:41:02 PM »

Oh, and some of the early repeaters in the Los Angeles area were FM in and AM out.
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W1BR

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #35 on: December 02, 2021, 03:48:11 PM »

repeaters were well established in New England long before Wayne Green and his clown show.  He attempted usurp established 34/94 repeaters with a renegade repeater that destroyed coverage between established W1ALE, K1ZJH and other systems.
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K6YE

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #36 on: December 02, 2021, 10:34:47 PM »

I remember getting on the oldest repeaters, W6MEP 147.240 (Art Gentry, SK) and Catalina repeater 147.090. I, along with many other young hams, used the old Benton Harbor Lunchboxes (AKA Heathkit Twoer) to access. Since the repeaters were FM, we added a Varactor to the AM transmitter's modulator/oscillator, producing a crude FM. In addition, we used slope detection to receive FM on the AM receiver. Still it was a lot of fun.

Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end........

Semper Fi,

Tommy - K6YE
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KD6VXI

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #37 on: December 03, 2021, 07:39:28 AM »

WHo is buying all the hand held baofengs?  So many ht's being sold and I see little use for them, except they do have a nice flashlight and can receive in
a number of places, also fm broadcast.
I see cb antennas on the big rigs and I am yet to hear one, although I haven't tried very hard, I guess they must use them once in awhile?

Everyone has a baofeng because they are cheap.  They get put in the glove box, the go box, a tool box, etc. because they are cheap.

Everyone having one doesn't equate to them using one.

Not to mention the preppers all feel they are necessary for whatever they believe is going to happen that will knock out all communications.

Rugged Radios buys them by the hundreds, puts a new sticker on them and sells them for a 1000 pct markup.  Seriously.  And now the government is finally cracking down on them.

The CB radio issue with truckers is this.  You have the Punjabi ND Sikh drivers.  They have their own channel they use.  You have the Hispanic drivers.  Again, they have their own channels.  You have the red blooded American drivers.  They are being programmed by right wing media outlets.

That's what I found driving truck for nearly a decade and living in a 7k foot mountain peak where I had receive capabilities that extended to tens of thousands of square miles in Central California.  Truck drivers are still using cb.  Just not channel 19 or 17.....  And not speaking English for the most part.

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI
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W9AC

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #38 on: December 03, 2021, 07:46:35 AM »

It was an amazing time.  In the 1970s, the rich guys brought their Motorola HT-220s to the monthly club meetings. The HT-220 was THE handheld of the repeater era.   

I purchased a used Mocom 30 from my high school teacher, whose brother worked for Motorola in Schaumberg, IL. The Mocom 30 was installed under the dash of a '73 Chevy Monte Carlo.  I think it was my junior year in high school that I made an autopatch encoder from a gutted Western Electric Princess telephone with lighted touch-tone keypad. 

The pad was installed in a Bud cabinet and powered from the Mocom.  Just two panel switches: Power On/Off and keypad light On/Off.  The mic plugged into the encoder box and the output of the box plugged into the radio.  Touch tone level was set with a pot at the mic's tube preamp stage.  Guys with deviation meters on their Clegg radios were always being bothered from guys like me to set transmit frequency and adjust transmit audio for the right amount of FM deviation.

No matter how "geeky" my friends and I were in high school, nobody thought I was a geek when other students would gather around and watch me make phone calls from my car in the high school parking lot.  For a short time, I was as cool as the high school quarterback. 

Paul, W9AC

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KC6RWI

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #39 on: December 03, 2021, 09:37:22 AM »

Very interesting, Shane, I am going to check out rugged radios for a laugh, funny, the report on the truckers, and sadly its probably true;
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KD2E

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #40 on: December 08, 2022, 07:54:46 PM »

Also fun in the '70s was driving up mountaintops on foggy nights, and hunting for 2M enhanced band conditions. Those distant repeaters fading in and out...and the ops were more than excited to comply with a quick chat to confirm.  Pretty cool snagging a repeater in NC from a hilltop overlooking the Hudson river in NY!!! 
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W0RW

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #41 on: December 09, 2022, 04:51:04 AM »

See  “W6AQY, Early VHF FM Mountain Top Repeater in Southern Calif”, https://www.eham.net/article/47343

Paul  w0rw
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SWMAN

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #42 on: December 09, 2022, 05:03:47 AM »

 I can remember around 1970 when I was a teen, an older man in my town took me to the Rochester NY ham feast. I saw a couple of guys using handheld talkies. One of them showed me how it operates and explained that he was using a thing called a repeater and told me how it worked. I was totally amazed by what he was telling me. I never got to use a handheld until many many years later.
 Good memories of my first repeater experience.

73, Jim W5JJG
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W0RW

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #43 on: December 09, 2022, 05:57:00 AM »

K6MYK Repeater information.
 Repeater operations by Burt, K6OQK.

The original repeater had rack panels that were all different colors with extra
holes from whatever they were before becoming a part of the repeater.
When the repeater was going to be brought to the San Fernando Valley
Radio Club's picnic, Art, Bill and I brought the repeater back to
Northridge to give it an overnight face lift. All of the equipment
was removed from the rack and all of the panels were removed. They
were painted the same color and all of the holes were filled With
screws or cover plates. We were up all night laughing, giggling and
probably cursing.

The telephone dial on the front was the local control of a stepper
relay used to access various functions of the repeater and was
probably a modification that happened in about 1968. The original
control system only had four basic functions using four supersonic
tones in the region of 15 to 20 kHz. The original functions as I
recall were:

1 Transmitter on
2 Transmitter off
3 Audio transfer
4 Squelch adjustment up and down

The 420 control receiver was a very modified ASB-7 receiver. It was
a wideband FM system, probably in the vicinity of 100 kHz deviation.
The 420 path from Northridge was not very good as it had to shoot
through Cahuenga pass, the higher peak just west of Mt. Lee. Later
Art added one or two pre-amplifier stages to the original ASB-7. The
pre-amp/s were built in to cavities from another piece of Military
Surplus equipment that originally used light house tubes. Instead,
Art used Nuvistors that had grid caps and plugged into the lines
inside the cavities.

In my memory the repeater was about the only thing that ran in that
part of the Mt. Lee building. It was located in a room within a room
about, maybe 8' by 8' that had a glass window looking into the outer
area room. When you walked into the repeater's room there was only
the sound of a few fans whirring. the receiver speaker was usually
left turned down. If the repeater was in use, and it usually was,
you could hear relays clicking from inside of it. When the ID would
start you would hear the 35mm mag-strip film pick up speed and move.
You could hear the film riding on the silver shoe and then the
contacts falling into the various holes that were punched in the
film for the MCW ID. There were three sets of parallel holes. One
was the K6MYK ID, another the K6ROC ID and the third was a single
hole to tell the loop to stop. There was a switch for switching
between the K6MYK ID and the K6ROC ID. The 35mm mag-stripe was about
a five foot loop. The Code consisted of holes punched using a
standard hand held paper punch. A dit was one hole, a dash was three
holes and a space between a dit and dah was three spaces. The space
between the DE and K6MYK was six spaces. Good phrasing actually.

The drive for the film loop was an old turntable motor assembly with
the shaft extended through the front panel to carry the 35mm drive
sprocket. There was also a Shure Bros. tape head that rode on one of
the mag-strip tracks that contained Millie's voice ID. When Art had
to make a new ID track he had to take a tape recorder to the repeater
and plug the ID tape head into the recorder in place of the
recorder's normal head. As I recall it was a Bell and Howell tape
machine. It was the same one he later used for the QST bulletins.

There was also one other unique sound that could be hear in the
room. That was the sound of the audio transfer relay when it would
move. It was a Ledex rotary selenoid. Every time it was pulsed it
would rotate a standard rotary switch one position - basically a SPST
as a result of every other contact wired causing control each pulse
to toggle the audio between the two-meter receiver and the 420
control link receiver.

The two-meter receiver (AM) could be switched between the normal input on 145.18 MHz and 145.22 MHz, the K6ROC LACD frequency.

I mention all of this because the memories the pictures brough back
to me. I still have a full set of schematics of the original
repeater and its control system   K6OQK.

From Paul, W0rw:
 i would go up to Mt. Lee (Mt. Hollywood)  every Monday (1960's) to operate K6ROC, It was the second frequency of the K6MYK repeater, K6ROC was the LACD frequency, locally. This was in the 1960's.
Most of the users had Gonset Communicators and the city gave the crystals to the LACD members.
   See the 'K6MYK' repeater article in QST, March 2004...p52, written by Bill Pasternak, WA6ITF.

   The Mt Lee building operator/guard would 'buzz' the entrance gate open after you told him who you were. 
    (This building was the first TV studio/stage for the Don Lee Broadcasting Co.
W6XAD/ W6XAO. TV on 44.5 MHz.  Having the studio up on Mt. Lee eliminated the need for a VHF transmission link down to the city.)
   i am not sure he was an 'Officer' but he handled traffic to outlying PD's around the country.
i think his traffic was mostly stolen car info. He operated on 5140,5185/5195 kHz, CW, i watched him operate.
He was also called the "Link" operator. He also kept the Fire water Storage Facility (Swimming Pool) clean.
   He sat in the same area where all the LAPD Receivers were located, There was a tall rack
of about 19 Motorola Unichannel VHF receivers for the  sector car frequencies.
All those channels were microwaved down  over the "Link" to LAPD HQ.
   The Dispatchers listened to one or 2 of those channels and would all take turns transmitting  over the Elysian Park MF Transmitter on 1730 kHz AM, (KMA367). Their "Transmit"
control took turns, when they pushed their PTT control they had to wait for their red light to come on, when it did they had the "Air".
   Mt Lee also had lots of other transmitters, The LACD had about 10 different GE Base Progress Line Stations, one for Command (47.66) ,  and one for each City Department: Police, Fire, Public Works, Red Cross, DWP, etc, These were all remote controlled from the old lower office section (in cubicles) of the main Mt. Lee building.

They were hardly ever used.
 The same layout of stations was also installed in the big LAPD Command Trailer. That trailer was taken to the Granada Hills HS for the San Fernando Earthquake communications.
   The Valley LAPD station was KMA787 , Transmitting on  2366 kHz and the main VHF receivers for the Valley were up on top of the Van Nuys City hall. We (LACD) had a GE 450 Mhz base station there too.
   The big 'TV Stages' at the rear of the building were empty and only other guy who had an office there was the RADEF Training guy, Skip Trigg.
This building has now been torn down because it really was indefensible in the high fire
risk area. The swimming pool was not enough to protect it. Now there are only communications shelters and the big 150? foot tower remaining.
Paul  w0rw
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K6YE

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Re: Early days of repeater use
« Reply #44 on: December 09, 2022, 08:58:04 AM »

Those days were fun. Being a teenager in the 60s, I could afford the Benton-Harbor lunch box (AKA Heathkit Twoer). Since it was an AM rig, we installed a varacter to produce a crude FM and slope-detected for receive. The most prominent repeaters accessible for me was Art Gentry's (W6MEP) Machine and The Catalina Machine.

My first T-Hunt was with WB6DTT, Rev Ben Crouch Jr, (brother of gospel singer Rev Andre Crouch). We used a Clegg-Zeus 22er, attenuator network, and mounted a small DF Yagi on a broomstick. I remember one chap using a multi-element quad that was shut down by CHP (California Highway Patrol). It was a blast for me. LOL.

"Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end................."

Semper Fi,
Tommy K6YE
DX IS and CW RULES
 
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