Recent NI4CE Repeater System News, Events and Information May 20th, 2009... A open letter to the community... A pdf copy of an open letter from the President of the West Central Florida Group, Inc to the amateur radio community is available online. Click here to read the letter. The Third Annual 2009 NI4CE Annual Picnic was a success! The 2009 Third Annual NI4CE Picnic was on June 20th, 2009. Was very hot at 96 degrees, and a heat advisory. Even with that everyone had a great time. Unfortunately the date was set back in February, and we had no idea it would have been that hot, given we're way above average temperature wise. Next year we'll do it considerably earlier in the year. Nonetheless, we still had around 100-120 people show up through the day. According to the National Weather Service 37 folks are now Skywarn Spotters from the training. As far as VE testing, 17 tests were taken and 10 hams upgraded or got licensed. We'll get some photos up on the album here in a day or so once Dave gets all the photos from everyone sending them in. Work at Riverview completed 04/11/09... Dave KG4YZY, Ed WA4ISB and Bill KI4SWY got some items done at Riverview. Lots of smaller, yet just as important jobs got done, but the notable ones were... Prep work to allow us to move our 220 linking repeater from Pebbledale to Riverview was started (more to come on this). We had a chance to put up a new anemometer for the NI4CE-12 Weather Station that's up at 800ft. The old one lost a cup during the high winds last week. You can view the wind/temp data yourself at 800ft via NI4CE-12 on APRS. You can also compare the 800ft conditions to the ground mounted weather station at the same site by viewing NI4CE-11 on APRS The ground mounted station is also on Weather Underground as KFLRIVER5. Verna 145.430 - New Repeater Online 03/08/09 We are proud to announce that all work on the brand new 145.43 repeater has been completed. It has actually been online since mid February, we've just been tweaking the new system for optimum performance before making the official announcement of the system's turn up. Shown below are just a few generic photos, more detailed pictures of the new system and its duplexer & RX/TX filtration system will be published in the Verna section of the photo album here shortly. The new system itself is a Hamtronics PLL based (no crystal) receiver and 3 watt exciter along with a Link-Comm Motorola Squelch card, a Comm-Spec TS64 Tone board, and a Crydom solid state relay for PTT action. The RF modules are installed inside the visible 2U rack box in their own isolated RF tight enclosures with feed thru capacitors. For those of you that are in or have worked in broadcasting, yes, the 2U cabinet is an enclosure from a Marti RPU receiver. The final power is derived from a 100 watt TE systems rack mount convection cooled power amplifier. Receiver sensitivity with a Angle Linear PHEMT preamp is down at .11uV. In order to accommodate the new repeater, the entire DC power plant was also upgraded at the Verna site with the shown Samlex America 80 amp fully redundant supply. This is the same power supply we use at all of our other sites. The fault tolerance of this power system allows us to lose one of 20 amp power modules and still stay at full power. This supply also has a battery backup module that allows the 70AH gel cell battery in the box under the supply to hold the entire system up at full power during generator starting times. Listen to NI4CE when you are not near a radio... If you do not have your radio, or are somewhere you can not use a radio or echolink, you can listen to the NI4CE repeater network online. To listen to the repeater using Windows Media Player use this link to start the playback. Note this is a updated address. There are also instructions for playback on smartphones on the new page as well. Website update 01/05/09 Happy new year! We've made some updates to the website. Some new images in the photo album, additional information now on the D-star page about the gateway, and most importantly we've created new coverage maps of the system. On the NI4CE map & frequencies page, you'll see we now have a easy to read tri color map that easily shows where hand held, mobile, and base operations work. Additionally there is a link under that image on the map & frequencies page to a new set of detailed maps, one for VHF and one for UHF, showing predicted signal strengths in a rainbow scale. We hope these help you better visualize what our coverage footprint is. Here's what the tri-color map on the main map and frequency list page looks like now... NI4CE D-Star Initiative June 14th - Project complete! The NI4CE B D-Star Digital Voice Repeater at 444.425mhz is now on the air from 805ft above ground level at Riverview. We have created a new webpage specifically for D-Star. The link to it is on the toolbar above, or you can get to it directly via http://dstar.ni4ce.org. We have posted more information, links, and FAQ's about the repeater and the gateway on that page. Pebbledale 442.825 Antenna Orientation Change With the completion of the 442.550 repeater in Riverview at 805ft in January, the western pointing antenna on the 442.825 repeater caused a expected overlap that was unnecessary. Since 442.550 now blankets Hillsborough County, we have as of April 11th taken the antenna off the west leg of the Pebbledale tower site at 800ft and moved it to the east leg of the tower. What does mean for users? The tower has a 7 foot wide face, which creates a null that is created behind the antenna. This null used to face a huge portion of Polk County. By moving this antenna to the east, the null is now facing essentially Brandon/Riverview, where 442.550 is now located at 805ft. So far we have gotten incredible results from users in eastern Polk County. Some users in Sebring reporting almost full scale signal, and mobile users with hand helds on 27 at 5 watts can use 442.825 now. None of this was previously possible. So with this move, expect to hear more Polk, Osceola and I-4 corridor area users making it into the network. Special thanks goes out to David Duke, KI4OYX from Tower Communication Maintenance for making this change possible. This is David you see on the tower on the photo just above. NI4CE operates several APRS weather stations and digipeaters at repeater sites: NI4CE-10 has the latest weather conditions at the Verna (Manatee Co.) repeater site. NI4CE-11 has the latest weather conditions at the Riverview (Hillsborough Co.) repeater site. NI4CE-12 has the latest wind and temp at the Riverview repeater site, but from 810ft high. KG4YZY-11 has the latest weather conditions at KG4YZY's Port Richey (Pasco Co.) repeater site. You can view all of West Central Florida's APRS stations real time and with street level mapping online at http://www.aprsfl.net/javaprs.html APRSfl Callsign Lookup QRZ Callsign Lookup findU Callsign Lookup