Well its been a long 2 weekends working on the Meadow Lakes VHF box. We have final achieved the required amount of isolation to get rid of the desensitization happening to the VHF repeater from not just our transmitter but the FM broadcast transmitters at the site.
It took splitting the antenna system with two Telewave ANT150D3 2 bay dipole antennas one mounted at the top of the tower at 80 feet and the other one mounted at 60 FT. Three Telewave TPRD-1556 pass reject cans and a DCI filter 4 MHz window filter final bring the noise floor down to a usable level with two TPRD-1554 cans on the transmitter.
The bottom line is the receive performance has improved since the original launch of that repeater in ~ may 2016. But unfortunately the usable noise floor at that site is still quite high. But over all I’m pleased the repeater was usable with 50 mW on a handheld in the parking lot of Starbucks. Something that could not be done before.
Special thanks to K6WGJ & Son for providing us with the site and tower climb, to WA6PKY for the Telewave ANT150D3, W6WLS for the DCI filter, and K6TS for the extra Telewave cans. KC6UDC, W6WEB, and K7MJD for coming out last weekend to install the antenna and take some pics!
— So try it out guys the hard work has been done its time to have fun!
