Recent NI4CE Repeater System News, Events and Information Pebbledale Update ... 10/03/09 Project Pebbledale is still ongoing, but let us refresh everyone, and then update... WMOR TV32 owns the 1000ft structure we are at 800ft on. WMOR is a Lakeland station, but the FCC permitted them to move 18 miles to the west to Riverview (same tower we are on in Riverview as well) for their 8VSB digital transmitter. As the DTV analog cutoff date has come and went, the tower now sits with NI4CE being the only active (non revenue generating) tenant at the site. WMOR's owners have not decided what to do with the tower yet; most likely, it will be taken down at a date unknown to us at this time. So with this, we have been for the past year putting a plan of action together to accommodate this potential tower loss. We earlier this year installed another equipment cabinet on the 805ft platform in Riverview. A new duplexer was purchased for the 220 linking repeater to replace the very old one that was not temperature tolerant and is in service now at Pebbledale. A smaller 2 bay 220mhz antenna our gracious tower hosts in Riverview approved was also purchased, however, has not been installed yet, it's been too hot to do much work up there. The game plan is to install that antenna and move the 220 linking repeater from Pebbledale probably end of next month, users will not even notice this change. This also puts our 220 linking repeater on a tower that meets the new 130mph wind survivability spec as well, which was a huge reason for putting the hub repeater at the site, and it's more central to our network. Structural upgrades to the tower were just completed, so we can plan for a date on this move. More to come. Now moving on to the 442.825 system. There has been some confusion and misinformation about this repeater, we're hoping this update puts to rest. We are currently evaluating three other options for locations in Polk County to move that repeater to. 442.825 will NOT be taken off the air; however it will clearly be moved. One option would move it further east, at a few hundred feet less, but it would still have similar east coverage. One option would put it on the ridge on US27 in Babson Park, which would push signal further east. The final last chance option would be a reduced coverage repeater in central Polk. Again, 442.825 is not going off the air, but it will eventually be moved. Since we have no timeline to work on, and you just don't take a 1000ft tower down in a day with no advanced planning, we have time to finalize these plans before enacting them. We'll keep you update here on this important project... 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. Photos of the picnic are in the photo album. 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. 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 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. 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