Recent NI4CE Repeater System News, Events and Information There's alot of current news as of April of 2008, so please scroll thru the entire page! There's information about the picnic and our D-Star initiative all below. Make special note of an antenna pattern change on the 442.825 repeater listed below. Second Annual NI4CE Picnic!!! Mark Saturday May 10th at 11am on your calendar for the second annual NI4CE Picnic! It will once again be at group shelter in E.G. Simmons Park. The park is located at 2401 19th Avenue N.W., Ruskin FL 33570. That is just off U.S. 41 in South Hillsborough County between Apollo Beach and Ruskin. A map of how to get there is online via MapQuest. Talk in will be on the NI4CE repeater network. We'll be serving up hamburgers and hot dogs will all the trimmings for free to show our appreciation to the Amateur community of West Central Florida in supporting our efforts. We'll be having free VE testing courtesy the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society's Laurel VE team at the picnic again this year. This year will also have courtesy of the National Weather Service a Skywarn Spotter Training session! This will be a great time to get your spotter certification, or renew, remember you have to renew every three years. Let all your friends know, everyone is invited! Photos from last year's picnic are on our photo album here on our website. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for this year's picnic, by all means, drop Sean (N4SCF) a line at sean at ni4ce dot org. 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, a mobile user with a hand held on 27 at 5 watts using 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. Verna back to full power... This is one example of the damaged NI4CE transmission line at Verna that was replaced on Valentine's Day. A tropical system last year pulled the line out of their butterfly hangers over about 200 ft of line and allowed that section of the cable to bash up against the tower. A tower crew replaced over one hundred fifty feet of 1 5/8" heliax cable that had been compromised by water and physical damage. The West Central Florida Group, Inc. wishes to thank the following people for their generous donation of $5,500.00 in materials and time: Ed Allen, WA4ISB Dave Anderson, KG4YZY Cox Radio, TampaBay Roz Clark, KI4WIF Tower Communication Maintenance David Duke, KI4OYX Richard Sharp, KQ4KX Bill Stillwell, KI4SWY Now that the transmission line has been repaired and the damaged coax is on the ground, watch this space for an exciting opportunity for you to have a piece of NI4CE for your very own. Project Riverview is complete!!!! Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 16:09, the NI4CE Riverview 442.550mhz repeater was activated from its new home at 805ft AGL. You should be able to use the repeater approximately 40 miles from the site, our coverage map shows the details. It took us longer than expected to get all the work done because of delays in getting power, but the wait is finally over. From signal reports we're hearing from users, the wait was worth it. The site is on the air, as promised with generator backed up power, and a fully sealed environmentally controlled enclosure to keep the gear safe and secure. With this move our APRS digipeater is also now running at 805ft, running the callsign of NI4CE-12, supporting the WideN-N method of operating. The NI4CE-11 weather station will return on air in the next week or so. You can visit our photo album for all the photos of the new site listed as Riverview v2.0 and also view some of the photos of the days we were working up on the platform as well under the Candid Shots of us section. NI4CE D-Star Initiative May 8th Update 05/08/08 - The D-Star gear arrived, and a gateway server was built and setup. The NI4CE B DV Repeater is on the air at our engineer's office at 40ft in New Port Richey on a spare duplexer for a burn in period. The transmitter combiner system that will allow us to run 442.550 on analog and 444.425 for D-Star DV has been ordered, and still has 3-4 weeks before delivery. Once this TX/RX T-Pass system arrives, we'll be taking the gear over to Riverview for installation at 805ft. Once again, the board of directors of the NI4CE repeater system would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this project! Work was completed on January 10th & 11th that moved our 442.550 repeater and APRS digipeater up to the platform. This work also went hand in hand with other work needed to get this D-Star repeater running. Generator backed up power is in our cabinet, the cabinet's environmentals are working, the UHF antenna for D-Star is hung and it's feedline and lightning arrestor are now installed! Visit our Photo Album for tours of the work days and of the Riverview site itself. The NI4CE-B DV D-Star repeater will be operated as a seperate system, and will not affect any of the existing analog repeaters. You will need a D-Star capable radio in order to use this digital voice repeater. If you have technical questions about D-Star, just send a message to the Technical Committee at tech@ni4ce.org. The D-Star repeater will be operated from our Riverview (Hillsborough Co.) site at 880 feet above sea level (805ft above ground level) on a platform on the tower. This new system's coverage with include all or portions of Hardee, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Sarasota Counties. Below is a estimated coverage map using the standardized RF propagation formula known as 4/3 earth as the inner circle, and the estimated coverage based on the reduced signal strength needed to carry on a QSO using D-Star Digital Voice as the outer circle: Click on map for a larger version Listen to us on the web... You can also listen to the NI4CE repeater network on the internet! If you find yourself without a radio, or are just a intersted scanner listener you can listen to the network via your PC. To listen to the repeater using Windows Media Player click here. There is about a 5 second delay in the playback compared to the actual repeater network. 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. KG4YZY-11 has the latest weather conditions at the Port Richey (Pasco Co.) repeater site. All of the digipeaters listed here follow the New Paradigm use of unproto paths 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 Some other locally generated weather links of interest: Nexrad Level II High Resolution Doppler Radar Imagery is available at http://www.aprsfl.net/radar. Real time weather alerts via the web, e-mail or SMS are at http://www.aprsfl.net/weather/emwin Latest GOES and Tropical Satellite images are at htp://www.aprsfl.net/satellite Current lightning activity and intensity is at http://weather.aprsfl.net/lightning APRSfl Callsign Lookup QRZ Callsign Lookup findU Callsign Lookup