By Chip Coker KD4C
On Tuesday September 6, Andrew KE5GDB, Bryan N5HL and myself took a trip to the UTD Repeater site to do some long-awaited repairs to our equipment there. The trip was successful and everything at the UTD/TAGER site is working as intended. Here’s what was done:
K5RWK DMR Repeater swap – The existing Motorola DMR Repeater had experienced a failure in the Power Amplifier awhile back, probably from something induced at the antenna (a somewhat known problem of these units). The repeater was replaced with a later model Motorola XPR8400 that was identically configured. The repeater has good power output, connected to the CBridge, and sounds good on the air. DMR is back!
K5UTD 145.43 Repeater antenna change – The 145.43 Repeater has been experiencing some intermod causing some receiver desense. Andrew switched the transmit for that repeater to a spare antenna on the north face of the TAGER tower. This seems to have returned the performance of the UTD repeater back to expected levels (and maybe improved the performance to the north).
Ubiquiti Network Switch replacement – the network switch that we have that interconnects all of our UTD equipment to the Palisades site was performing poorly and has been replaced with a more capable Ubiquiti 16 port EdgeSwitch. This switch interconnects all of the local equipment and also provides network and PoE to all of our 2.4 GHz AREDN and 5.8 GHz backhaul network equipment at the top of the tower.
Thanks to Andrew for his hard work on obtaining the replacement equipment and pre-configuring it so that the swaps went without issue, and thanks to Bryan for getting us access to the Repeater Site. We’re now back to full operation. Use them and enjoy!
