This was the 146.970 repeater before the formation of the Repeater Committee. All of the control knobs, programming buttons and even the duplexers were open for the general public to tamper with. It was located at the end of an unsecured hallway. The duplexers were sitting on the concrete floor in an unsecured room off of the hallway.

The first thing was to locate a cabinet large enough to fit everything inside that was well vented and could be secured. One of the clubs members informed us that a local bank was getting rid of a lot of cabinets and other electronic equipment that we might be able to use. Not missing any opportunities, we made arangements to visit their surplus warehouse.

We found this cabinet which use to house a central computer system complete with multiple routers, switches, etc. for the computerized banking system. It has a real nice 12" high flow fan mounted on top of the cabinet for forced air cooling, locking front and rear doors, locking and removable side panels to access the equipment from any side of the cabinet. As you can see the 6 cavity duplexer and all of it's critical and delicate tuning componets fits nicely in the lower portion of the enclosure. The shelf directly above the duplexer is setup for power distribution of both 110 volts AC and from deep cycle back up batteries with a charging system.

In the upper portion of the cabinet (from top to bottom) is space for a 100 watt power amplifier. Next is the ACC-96 repeater controller, the ICOM repeater, and a Astron RM-50-BB power supply. The power supply is rated at 50 amps ICS and has built in back up battery automatic switch over. As you can see in the photo, all equipment is securely locked inside the cabinate and can still be viewed through the heavy glass door. Operation can be verified without opening the cabinet! There is also a commercial grade SWR bridge meter mounted on the right side wall on the level of the power distribution shelf for monitoring the output of the machine and any antenna problems that may occur.

Thunderstorm winds have destroyed two Super Station Master antennas on top of the 280 foot tower. The repeater committee applies for a grant to pay commericial climbers to take down the old antenna and 7/8" aluminum feed line and put up all new. In the process we had them lower the mounting bracket to accomodate an upper support arm. This will help to stabilze the antenna against strong winds so the "whipping" action doesn't create cold solder joints inside the antenna. Once the old antenna was on the ground and inspected, we found it to have a flattened tip from taking lightening strikes and orange paint and scrape marks along the upper 4-5 feet of housing where it had come into contact with the top beacon light several times. The new Station Master antenna was installed with about 3 feet exposed above the tower top. New 1 5/8" cable was ran from the antenna to the building and new grounding kits were installed in several places on the new hardline. In 2007 we added a Battery Tender to the charging system to maintain the deep cycle battery. During a power outage at the site, the deep cycle battery ran the repeater for about 48 hours, including the Thursday night net that went for an hour. No one even knew the commercial power was out until the battery went dead!