That’s very cool Chris thanks for sharing. Marvin N5RKW Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 22, 2026, at 10:14 AM, Chris Boone via BVARC <[email protected]> wrote: This Message is From an External Sender Caution: Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Here is a summary story of 146.88 in Houston.. I was involved with 88 in the early 90s when I was living in Conroe and Byrum Huddleston was trustee of the 146.88 and sister 444.6 both 103.5 PL then. His son Don and I made several trips up the old DeWalt tower elevator. The new GE Master Executive 2s that had replaced the old tube type repeaters had some S-Com controllers on them but the audio sounded too tiny and 444.6 had a receive issue that needed to be looked at. After the elevator took us to the top 1400 ft platform of the old Channel 2 DeWalt tower, I proceeded to correct the audio problem and reset the levels. Then looking at the 444.6 receive antenna I found it was bad with a high SWR when RF was put into it. I took the bandpass cavities that were being used and converted them into a duplexer. I told Don they'll probably be some desense as the UHF repeater had a preamp on the front end and I didn't have enough isolation in the bandpass cavities for that. And I didn't have time to remove the preamp then due to approaching storms. Yeah like we wanted to be on a 1400 foot lightning rod during a thunderstorm.. actually Don said it was somewhat safe since we were inside the shelter on the top but when lightning struck the tower it would glow and make a loud humming noise and at the time I didn't want to experience that LOL ..Sure enough there was about 6dB of degradation with the transmitter key but it was acceptable. 444.6 was living again and usable. All of us were extremely pleased with the audio. Another trip up later and we removed the preamp on the receiver and got rid of the desense on 444.6 I could key both repeaters with my handhelds in my house on the upper floor in Conroe.. One call sign and name that hasn't been shown in the history is John Hill W5HX. John is a now retired broadcast engineer living in Lumberton. John was part of the group that installed the original 146.88 on the old DeWalt Tower. At the time he was an electrical engineering student at University of Houston..and he said most of the work was done at night. He asked me if I knew what the nickname of the repeater was back then. I told him I had heard there was a nickname but I wasn't sure. It was called a "jigger". I kind of looked at him with a raised eyebrow and said okay? Why is that? His response was well when you're working at 1400 ft at night and working for a couple of hours, when we got down to the bottom, there were a lot of shots put away!! LOL Hence the nickname.. And as a former co-worker of mine used to say, NOW you know the reeesst of the story. 😁 Chris WB5ITT Trustee W5APX WRXZ789 GMRS Society of Broadcast Engineers Vice Chairman and Frequency Coordinator, SBE134 SE TX and SW LA ________________________________________________ Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club BVARC mailing list [email protected] http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org Publicly available archives are available here: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
________________________________________________ Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club BVARC mailing list [email protected] http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org Publicly available archives are available here: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
