Hello Dave, If you really want tears in your eyes, I was in Wacom's Plant a few years ago visiting - they were about 75 km from my home, and they had the entire packaging and testing area filled with 70mhz duplexers - They had a contract to provide duplexers to a European Lottery operator, and they used the band to convey ticket sales and lottery information. There must have been over 100, 2 72 Mhz duplexers being made ready for shipping.
I was dead serious about the aluminum irrigation pipe. They had a local electroplating firm cadmium plate the pipe, then silver plate, until our natural resource commission shut down the electroplating company - too many dead fish in the Brazos. How the Brazos river got it's name is another story, Anyhow, I don't doubt the use of aluminum kegs, and that some folks have had misery, and others success. Lloyd Alcorn (one of the founders of Wacom) always refered to duplexer design as black magic. BTW most of the Wacom Team came from Decibel Products in Dallas, Texas. Lloyd designed the DB224 antenna there. Gene Mulderik, Daylon Johnson, and several others came from DB Products. When I had a 6M FM repeater I used 2, single folded dipole antennas, with 30 m vertical seperation, and took the preselector out of a junk motrac mobile for extra front end protection - the repeater worked OK and mobiles out 200 km could work it, (the antenna was 600m above ground). In 1980, there was not much 6M FM activity in Central Texas. BTW - are many of ur friends operating 60M? I am looking to sked for a US/UK contact on 5403.5 sometime in the wee hours of the morning here. Best 73, good luck, happy new year, and heavy on the INVAR alloy. Steve NU5D
