Here's the latest: We went up to our site yesterday. We added a lighting arrestor to the receive antenna. We grounded the chassis/rail/cabinet as it was only grounded via the power cord previously. Didn't expect this to fix the paging problem, it just needed to be done.
I did find a loose UHF connector on the Wacom. This is a two cavity BP filter on the receive side. I don't know if the loose connector was the problem but it's much cleaner now. We ran in carrier squelch for about an hour and didn't hear much of anything. A dramatic improvement and amazing for our dirty hill. Today there have been a couple of pages bust through the P/L but it's 1,000% better than it was and it's still pretty quite in carrier squelch. Do you think the loose connector and/or grounding could have helped or is this some sort of cruel coincidence? -- Tim :wq On Aug 24, 2010, at 3:48 PM, Walter H wrote: > We also had a problem with a 454 pager. > Quintron with a 1/4 k amp. > Only one in the metro area had a spur, but that one traveled as the PA cage > changed temperature. > Got a hold of the paging company, and they turned each one off until we saw > the spur go away. > Final tube had been replaced and not properly neutralized. > > WalterH > > --- In Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com, "Tom W2MN" <w...@...> wrote: > > > > We had a pager spur problem with our repeater (no pl). The problem would > > come and go. We determined it happened mostly with time of day (outside > > temperature). Sometime it was just a short 1 second event and sometimes it > > would hold for a bit more (maybe 2 -5 sec). We setup a satellite multimode > > radio (actually dial in the frequency with widest bandwidth setting) and > > monitored the repeater input with a tape recorder and vox. We did this to > > capture the audio so we could listen to characteristics and THE CW CALLSIGN. > > We captured enough of the callsign that we were able to indentify the whole > > call (and freq) from the FCC database. > > > > With that, we were able to monitor the repeater and the pager for hits. Yes, > > it did hit some times and not others. The reason was, it was caused by an > > unstable spur that drifted up and down the ham band with temperature and the > > amount of pager traffic. It was also hitting other repeaters as it drifted > > but most of the other repeaters had pl. > > > > There was a chain of pagers using the same freq and callsign and we had to > > figure out which tower it was. We used a beam antenna and chased the spur > > up/down the band until we were able to get a definite direction. The next > > step as to visit the site AREA with an HT and just scan the ham repeater > > input freqs during the likely time of day. Bingo, the spur was loud and > > clear!. > > > > Of course the pager owner was in denial but being a pest for a couple of > > weeks got the problem removed. They claim it was a spur in the final PA that > > had been serviced just at the time the problem started. They replaced the > > PA. > > > > Hope this story helps. > > > > Tom > > > >
