johnmichaelwelton wrote: > Nate, what type of coverage are you getting in the Denver area for > 1.2 data and voice? How well does the building penetration compare to > 440MHz FM voice rptrs up on the mountain? > > John/N4SJW
Crappy right now. ;-) The temporary site near Boulder, CO has a ridge-line between Boulder and Denver. It can just barely "see" over it, but it's not doing so hot. Well, at least not down where I live. Another problem is we're all so spread out... I'm a LONG way from the repeater site and don't really have a clear line-of-sight shot for 1.2 GHz. Just about everywhere in the city will be line-of-sight once we get it up to the high site. So, I've put off all the DD testing (unless I feel like going mobile in my relatively small Jeep with a laptop and a borrowed ID-1 that I really don't want to damage or even scratch up in any way)... for the moment. An opposite-polarized 34-element yagi (yeah yeah, I know... it's also borrowed and I didn't want to do major surgery on it to change it's mounting brackets, since the boom is thin -- end up drilling holes and that boom's gonna break someday after I give it back to the VHF+ contesters that own it!) is barely able to get into the system in DV mode from my QTH 35 miles away. I don't always hold the repeater open. DD just isn't gonna happen... So when we get it up higher, we'll see how it does up there. I am hearing rumblings of "2 weeks" for that... but I'm not in charge of the move, and there's a crew hard at work changing other things on UHF up there to make the site capable of having the UHF D-STAR module there. (There were some UHF links real close to the repeater frequencies now used for digital/narrowband on UHF in Colorado, and the group using them is graciously changing their linking frequencies so the UHF D-STAR repeater will work up there at the same site. That's what's been going on up there and why we're not up there yet... they had a number of sites to change, not just the "hub".) Nate WY0X
