eHam
eHam Forums => Repeaters => Topic started by: NO2A on March 10, 2012, 11:54:52 AM
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I know for most of us repeater use came to be in the 70`s. That`s when it really was popular. Recently I read that Steve,WB2WIK had a repeater set up in 1966. For anyone that operated back then what was it like? How many machines/people were on then? Was it just 2m? Thanks,Mike.
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If you can find a copy of it (now out of print), The Practical Handbook of Amateur Radio FM & Repeaters, by Bill Pasternak, WA6ITF and Mike Morris, WA6ILQ is a great way to see how it all started.
Stephen
N5VTU
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I think the 1970's were the real "heyday" of ham repeaters. There seemed to be about 100 active users for every repeater, All having a great time, Including fooling with autopatch, Allowing telephone calls from your mobil! LONG before the days of cellphones!
Nowadays it seems there are about 100 repeaters for every user, And no one has fun anymore.
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FM caught on a bit quicker on the west coast then up here in New England. We had a few machines,
but the mode really blossomed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a lot more fun when hams
were using converted AM rigs or modifying cast off commercial two-way stuff. Since the late '80s
activity has been falling into a death spiral in this area.
Pete
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I visited California in 1960 and remember hearing repeaters running AM (in lieu of FM).
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I visited California in 1960 and remember hearing repeaters running AM (in lieu of FM).
That there were. One of the first repeaters ever operated by a ham was W6MEP's machine (Art's SK now) and it was AM.
I liked the "early days" of FM repeater operation, it was a real tinkerer's dream. Lots of homebrewing and lots of experimentation. When small crystal controlled rigs that were small and light enough to be mounted under dashboards came to market -- finally! -- it took off like a rocket and became enormously popular. Even then, lots of experimenting: People building frequency synthesizers to replace the crystals and all sorts of cool stuff.
I think it all crashed and burned in the late 1980s or so when it all became too easy and just wasn't interesting anymore. Of course, cell phones became popular then, too, so there was no need for autopatches anymore. Without technical stuff to talk about ("hey, I just hooked up a touch tone pad to my rig and am adjusting its output level...can someone tell me if the tones all sound about the right deviation?") we literally ran out of anything interesting to talk about and I kind of abandoned it, as did many.
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2 HR2B Regency radios located in an old refrigerator... now that is an early repeater!
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Thanks for the info!
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"Without technical stuff to talk about ("hey, I just hooked up a touch tone pad to my rig and am adjusting its output level...can someone tell me if the tones all sound about the right deviation?") we literally ran out of anything interesting to talk about and I kind of abandoned it, as did many."
I think you hit the nail on the head there. At least that is exactly my experience.
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It was kind of crazy in the beginning. Lots of people using a relatively small number of repeaters. People with Yagis trying to hit repeaters long distances away. Many conversations happening day and night, and almost always people on the air to chat with! Where did all those operators go? Those certainly were the days.
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I remember when the MTARA repeaters, especially the one on Mt. Tom, in Holyoke MA, were active 24 hours a day. There was always someone on the machine. Today, you'd be lucky to find activity during the commuting hours. Where the activity went is a mystery. Many of the most active users retired, moved away, or passed away. Repeaters don't have the draw they did back in the 70s. For one thing, modern technology, such as cell phones has made many aspects of FM repeaters obsolete. How many machines still bother offering autopatches?
Pete
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I remember when the MTARA repeaters, especially the one on Mt. Tom, in Holyoke MA, were active 24 hours a day. There was always someone on the machine. Today, you'd be lucky to find activity during the commuting hours. Where the activity went is a mystery. Many of the most active users retired, moved away, or passed away. Repeaters don't have the draw they did back in the 70s. For one thing, modern technology, such as cell phones has made many aspects of FM repeaters obsolete. How many machines still bother offering autopatches?
Pete
It could have a lot to do with the rise in cell phone use. What happened to 2 meters is similar to what happened on the 11 meter band. When I was a kid, the CB band in my area was just jammed with locals. I could talk day and night to different people, most of whom were within only a few miles of me! There was so much activity, the FCC actually had to expand the band from 23 to 40 channels. Today, the activity level on both bands has significantly diminished.
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I remember when the MTARA repeaters, especially the one on Mt. Tom, in Holyoke MA, were active 24 hours a day. There was always someone on the machine. Today, you'd be lucky to find activity during the commuting hours. Where the activity went is a mystery. Many of the most active users retired, moved away, or passed away. Repeaters don't have the draw they did back in the 70s. For one thing, modern technology, such as cell phones has made many aspects of FM repeaters obsolete. How many machines still bother offering autopatches?
Pete
I used the Mt. Tom machine hundreds of times during my commutes from NNJ to Boston. Lots of nice people.
Re autopatches, "probably not many." No need, with cell phones. Here in CA most of our repeaters are at commercial sites on mountaintops where a land line is commercial rate, so you can pay $90 a month if absolutely nobody ever uses it. Not worth it.
Residential rates are much cheaper, but "home" repeaters don't do well -- they're not on nearly inaccessible mountaintops. ;)
I think the early days were great because of all the experimenting going on. My first several 2m FM rigs were trunk mount "taxicab" radios with huge cables going to the battery up front and to the control head under the dash, and they took some serious effort to install, tune up, and get working. When it finally all worked it was an accomplishment and half the conversations were comparing notes about what the other guy did.
That's all gone and not coming back.
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Couldn't you make the same case for HF, though? You can get on 20 meters completely "off-the-shelf", too, and have little to talk about from a technical standpoint. Doesn't stop people there :)
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With HF you have the ability to talk to a wide range of people located all over the world. In addition, working DX and contests successfuly takes some degree of skill. HF can offer the challenge that is missing in 2M repeaters. IMHO it's not much of a challenge to press the PTT button and say "AA4PB listening". In the early days when you had to cobble togther your own equipment for 2M it offered a technical challenge that kept things interesting.
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Hey there, just was reading this, and i can kinda recall hearing some of those old repeaters, used to hear a schoolmate from my hoghschool club (from the Wisconsin School For the Visually Handicapped in Janesville, WI, i was too young to join and it died before i was old enough unfortunately) talking on one that was up in the Janesville area. Question for ya, anyone here happen to recall if they had PL access back then, or did they use "whistle-up" access? I can recall reading an article about it in an old issue of QST that i have here in my shack, it mentiones something about needing a "whistle" tone of a certain frequency to open the machine up. Thoughts? 73. N9NRA
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You can't "whistle up" a CTCSS ("PL") activated system, at all.
That works only for "tone burst" activated systems, which are popular in Europe but not in the U.S. The tone burst opens the system with a single burst of a high frequency tone (like 1750 Hz), so a "whistle" can often make that work.
Our systems here are almost entirely CTCSS at much lower frequencies and the tone is required continuously.
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I realize the post is about repeaters, but after reading these comments, I re-call the old days of "running a phone patch" on HF. Sort-a miss that too.
Bob
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My first exposure to repeaters was when Tom Fischel, KØPJG stopped to show me his VW beetle with a GE Progline (I think) commercial FM low-band transceiver installed in it. He had modified it for 6 Meters and he and some friends had a 6 Meter repeater operating here in the St. Louis area. The 6M FM rig's control head was mounted on the dashboard of Tom's beetle and above it, in a Bud box, was a DTMF pad Tom built for repeater autopatch. I believe the early repeaters in our area were all carrier squelch (open).
I recall thinking how silly Tom's beetle looked with the 6M whip with ball and spring mount on the back bumper. Of course, it wasn't so silly anymore after I built up an old commercial rig for 6M of my own and installed a 6M halo on the back bumper of my '57 Chevy.
"Hello Mom? Guess where I'm talking to you from.....";o)
Funny how your view point changes when you are viewing something at a much "closer" distance.
Terry, WØFM
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2 meter phone patch was a huge draw for me in the mid 70's. That is what lured me into the hobby. I recall our club having 2 repeaters on a broadcast tower and having to have an additional receiver on the output frequency. In those days, if someone was on your output frequency, your repeater could not come up and interfere with them thus the need for the system to monitor the output before transmitting.
I also recall one bright fellow who programmed a Commodore Pet computer to control both machines. With TouchTone pads, you could make an autopatch or play a couple of welcome tapes from broadcast cart machines. That was VERY cool back then.
The same guy, Jack, KB4B, helped me start a repeater using his BASIC code modified for my one machine and his schematic for the computer-to-repeater interface. He even threw in most of the parts and charged nothing for any of it. I added some additional features like being able to tone up NASA Select audio so that we could listen to the space shuttle via my backyard C-band dish and I also made use of one of the "voices" in the computer to generate the CW id. The machine consisted of 2 Icom 22-S transceivers, some VHF Engineering 220mhz gear and a couple of yagis (to link the split sites), 2 Hustler G6 antennae and a Commodore 64. Audio mixing was accomplished with an old Radio Shack stereo audio mixer, left channel for audio to the repeater, right channel for audio to the phone line. Some simple EQ on each input allowed me to have very nice audio unlike some other linked repeaters that sounded "tinny." The whole machine was as ugly as a mud fence but worked beautifully.
A marine deep cycle battery on constant charge ran a voltage inverter which, in turn, powered the station and provided continuous operation when AC power failed. Not the most efficient power chain but it never failed once in the many years the repeater was on the air.
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I grew up in the Chicago area and while a senior in high school in early 1970, I was introduced to 2M FM by my "Elmer" WB9OUD. At that time, there were two active repeaters on tall buildings in the city. Both were quite busy most of the time and fun to listen to on a VHF-Hi tuneable receiver I had. A ham that was retiring to Florida and selling a 2-channel Motorola 41V that he had modified to operate on 146.94 simplex (the precursor to 146.52) and one of the repeaters. It was in excellent shape, offered at a price I could afford, so I bought it. It took a bit of doing, with my father's help, to get that thing installed in our car with all the cables running from the trunk to the dashboard and battery, but we did it. I had a ball with that radio. It worked great and it didn't hurt that it looked like an "official" police radio either. Later I went to college in Tennessee and bought a Regency HR2B which I loaded up with crystals so it would work repeaters located along the way on my trips to and from school. The nine hour journey went much more quickly having that rig in my car too. One thing that I remember so well was how many cities had 146.34/.94 repeaters back then. They were everywhere which was great because I only needed one set of crystals in my HR2B for use in so many different cities. PL was not in common use at that time so it was fun to see how often you could key the mike and bring up two or more repeaters at once, especially if you elevated on a mountain somewhere. Great memories from the early 1970's.
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You can't "whistle up" a CTCSS ("PL") activated system, at all.
That works only for "tone burst" activated systems, which are popular in Europe but not in the U.S. The tone burst opens the system with a single burst of a high frequency tone (like 1750 Hz), so a "whistle" can often make that work.
Our systems here are almost entirely CTCSS at much lower frequencies and the tone is required continuously.
Reminds me of the old stories of whistles, and then "blue boxes" being used to access tone-encoded long distance phone systems :)
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I think the 1970's were the real "heyday" of ham repeaters. There seemed to be about 100 active users for every repeater, All having a great time, Including fooling with autopatch, Allowing telephone calls from your mobil! LONG before the days of cellphones!
Nowadays it seems there are about 100 repeaters for every user, And no one has fun anymore.
Exactly.
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With HF you have the ability to talk to a wide range of people located all over the world. In addition, working DX and contests successfuly takes some degree of skill. HF can offer the challenge that is missing in 2M repeaters. IMHO it's not much of a challenge to press the PTT button and say "AA4PB listening". In the early days when you had to cobble togther your own equipment for 2M it offered a technical challenge that kept things interesting.
Yeah that is true to an extent, I started with old Motorola junk that weighed a ton, and took work to keep it on the air, BUT even after all of us had compact Japanese 2 meter gear, the participation and fun level was still very high. As said above you always had hundreds of people to talk to any time of the day or night. Then the changes happened. Some hapless people decided that a 2nd repeater was needed. The splintering began. Then soon the 3rd 4th and upteenth repeater was needed. To the point that there is a repeater for each licensed ham, and each ham monitors his own repeater and NEVER has to talk to anyone else. Instead of one nice big fat "watering hole" with hundreds of people all listening and communicating on that one good repeater, we have hundreds of repeaters. Total Balkanization. Totally useless. I knew several years ago when I threw a 2 meter rig into the company car and took a trip from Missouri to Dallas Texas and back and keyed up and identified on dozens of repeaters and did not make even ONE QSO that the jig was up. 2 meters was a vast wasteland. Now someone please tell me why this happened?
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On the old MTARA K1ZJH repeater we had interstate truck drivers active 24/7, salesmen on the road all day chatting and keeping the activity levels up. Quite a few husband/wife teams as well passing routine family stuff (get a loaf of bread, etc.) or their for the autopatches. Club had well over 300 active members. We had nets with 100 check ins on Wednesday nights. Now they are ghost repeaters... IDing and no one there.... also, many, if not most, of the old stalwarts have either passed away or moved to warmer climates.
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Out here in Kansas, they used a lot of GE radios as repeaters. Most of the out of Santa Fe RR when the changed out radios. Lots of 6146 tubes hanging around because the Prog Line used those in the final. Lots of repeaters were on broadcast towers but quite a few were on grain elevators. But thet would go for Mike's out here in the flat.
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Check out W6AQY, 1966 2M FM repeater in CQ Magazine:
“W6AQY, Early VHF FM Mountain Top Repeater in Southern Calif”,
Dec. 2019, p. 42 - 43.
It was a battery powered Motorola running 5W at 3,500 feet.
Paul w0rw
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Helped standup the first repeater in Duluth, MN in '71; 34/94 located at one of the television transmitter buildings up on 'the ridge'. That was also during the regime of Probst Walker of 'FCC enforcement' fame. He had some many convoluted rules, you were almost afraid to say anything that even approached 'prohibited transmissions' lest you would be cited.
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I know for most of us repeater use came to be in the 70`s. That`s when it really was popular. Recently I read that Steve,WB2WIK had a repeater set up in 1966. For anyone that operated back then what was it like? How many machines/people were on then? Was it just 2m? Thanks,Mike.
This era started for me in the mid 70's to which there were about 6 or 7 2m pairs populated in the cnj area
and most of them had excellent coverage, later on about a decade or so some of us started experimenting
with with 440mhz equipment and we quickly learned about the hi power paging transmitter interference
and how to reduce it with either bp or notch filters.
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Helped standup the first repeater in Duluth, MN in '71; 34/94 located at one of the television transmitter buildings up on 'the ridge'. That was also during the regime of Probst Walker of 'FCC enforcement' fame. He had some many convoluted rules, you were almost afraid to say anything that even approached 'prohibited transmissions' lest you would be cited.
A. Prose (not Probst) Walker's reign of error during the Nixon/Ford years almost destroyed repeaters. To his credit, however, he was the first to propose what became the 30, 17, and 12 meter bands.
I managed to get a repeater call (WR7AEV) for the short-range repeater I built as a 1974 college project only by doing the minimum: Submitting official US Gummint tropo maps (two were necessary in my case) showing the elevation in 8 directions, 2 thru 10 miles from my home QTH. The repeater was under local control -- radio control required additional paperwork and FCC authorization. It only ran about 5 watts output, good for 10 miles range tops. There was some additional stuff I had to file that I don't remember now.
I kept the repeater license long after I finished the project, until it expired in 1979, but I never put another one up. Even by then, there were too many repeaters on the air.
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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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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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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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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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Oh, and some of the early repeaters in the Los Angeles area were FM in and AM out.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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See “W6AQY, Early VHF FM Mountain Top Repeater in Southern Calif”, https://www.eham.net/article/47343 (https://www.eham.net/article/47343)
Paul w0rw
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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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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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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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I recall reporting crimes in progress and traffic accidents via phone patch, used to chat on my hour commute... One club was in court over who owned the repeater. A guy used to rant every evening about it. The court gave one party the physical equipment and the other party the callsign... the situation of assignment of frequencies was said to be very political when there were just too many repeaters
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If you can find a copy of it (now out of print), The Practical Handbook of Amateur Radio FM & Repeaters, by Bill Pasternak, WA6ITF and Mike Morris, WA6ILQ is a great way to see how it all started.
Stephen
N5VTU
Used copies available on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/practical-handbook-amateur-radio-repeaters/dp/0830699597/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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2012 post.
-Mike.
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Now they are ghost repeaters... IDing and no one there.... also, many, if not most, of the old stalwarts have either passed away or moved to warmer climates.
Passed away, moved to warmer climates....or both.....
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I have a hypothesis on the repeater boom of the 1970s-90s and the following bust:
It used to be that when a person was out driving they were quite isolated, particularly if driving alone. There was AM broadcast radio, which could be great or awful, depending on the market. There was 11 meters if one was into that. And...amateur radio.
Amateurs were doing mobile 2 way radio in the 1930s, mostly on 5 meters. As FCC regulations changed, mobile operating became more popular. But there was a catch: A good mobile setup was rather expensive and power hungry, and required a rather big and odd antenna. On VHF/UHF, your coverage was very terrain-limited.
Then came repeaters. A small QRP FM rig - 5 to 25 watts - and a simple whip antenna would hit repeaters many miles away. The audio was high quality and the rigs were easy to use - and over time they got less expensive.
Lonesome no more! Great stuff! Almost always there was someone to ride along with you.
Even better, features like autopatch and linking were often added. You could call 911 or home directly from your car or HT - you were never out of touch as long as you could hit a repeater.
Then we got better car audio systems - FM stereo receivers, Satellite radio with no commercials and all sorts of channels dedicated to specific kinds of music, Cassette and CD players that sound really good - all of them as standard equipment. Interfaces to iPods (remember them?) came along. Audiobooks and such. The days of just AM BC radio were gone.
And...cell phones. No more isolation - talk or text while motoring! Yes, one should NEVER do either, and folks are learning not to - I hope. But if you had a breakdown or accident, or saw one, you could get help easily and quickly.
Trouble is, with cell phones, people's expectations of "connectivity" changed. Employers EXPECT people to reply to calls, texts, emails, etc., even if away from home. All that "isolation while driving" stuff is OVER. Getting some uninterrupted time to oneself is not so easy today. What used to be a safe haven for some solitude is no more.
In my case, when I went driving alone, I'd usually bring the 2 meter rig so as to have a nice QSO to pass the time. If I wanted some time without interruption, I just didn't turn it on. Now, I bring some CDs and hope that I won't get a call or text!
End result: two of the main reasons for repeaters to be busy have simply disappeared.
73 de Jim, N2EY