Repeater Update,

The W9ANL repeater went down several weeks ago after it was found unplugged. When it was once again plugged in it was noted that the output was less than 1 Watt. The vice president Rich, N9KKF, took it home and eventually installed a new set of finals which put it back in business. In the interim it was decided we were way overdue to find a replacement for this repeater as this is now the third set of finals. It was decided that we would get a new Yaesu dual band, analog / digital repeater. I went to the regional rep for Yaesu located in Baldwin Wi and he gave the club a sweet deal basically a little more than half off. I ordered it and it’s scheduled to arrive in 4 to 6 weeks. On this past Monday, April 4th the newly repaired repeater was put back up on the hill and back into service. We noted the output was at 40 Watts. Several weeks ago we also replaced the old antenna with the one we had hoped would be put back up on the state police tower but wasn’t . Now with the repaired repeater and new antenna it’s been noted that the receive sensitivity is very low. It’s been decided that rather than take the repeater down again to investigate, we’ll live with it and when the new repeater is installed we will attempt to improve the receive on the old Veertex repeater and set it up at the repeater as a replacement in the event that anything goes wrong with the new Yaesu repeater in the future. I’ve sent out 2022 membership forms to everyone I have emails for and explained all of this and asked for donations for the repeater fund and to date have received a generous total of donations on just over $700 in less than one week, and the renewal applications continue to come in. A huge thanks to all of you who have thus far pitched in! That pretty much brings things up to date for this first quarter of 2022. Stay tuned for further progress reports.
73s from Tim Smith N9UEB