[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Back in '05 I unsuccessfully tried accessing the 2M & 440 repeaters on > Pike's Peak from Mt. Sunflower (highest point in Kansas, almost right on > the CO-KS border). The repeaters there use low gain antennas (I assume the > owners are worried about lightning - anything more than a 3 dBd antenna > would easily make it the highest point on the building & maybe the entire > mountain), so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some other systems in > the surrounding ranges that actually have better coverage to the east. > > Bob NO6B
Pikes is a great site, because of it's 14,000'+ altitude, but yeah... I hear the group there is antenna-limited. It still is the only single repeater setup (well, there's two there... VHF and UHF) that can actually shoot over the Monument, CO area "Palmer Divide" to some extent and be used by mobiles in the Denver area. The building is tiny, and the arrangement they're in there is some old grandfathered deal which will never be duplicated again in my lifetime, from what I hear. Most clubs in the Colorado Springs area (including my own) have their equipment at the lower and easily accessible Cheyenne Mtn. (Yes, the one NORAD used to live inside of.) For Denver, Squaw Mtn at 11,440' is a good site, as well as Centennial Peak (unsure on the elevation, probably about 10K) for the Denver Metro area, as is the Mt. Thorodin site. Squaw is a commercial facility made from an old "stone house" that was where the person working the fire tower used to live. For raw "gain" on receive, there are three VHF machines sharing two 8-bay VHF Sinclair monsters. They talk well, even after combining losses at VHF on TX. But on receive, too much pre-amp will kill you up there. The noise floor at the site is incredibly high, due to all the "stuff" it can "see". Squaw also has a large "H-Frame" tower system and the amount of abandoned and broken stuff on the towers, legs, and cross-frames is amazingly bad... adding to the noise and mixing issues. Thorodin is slightly lower, and further north, and a much cleaner site. Also more expensive, since the owners/managers are active. The winds are so high there during the winter there is no tower, they designed the building to have a pipe across the East face where antennas would be directly mounted. I don't think the machine on/near Evans is there anymore. It's definitely not a well-published or club machine, if it is. There are about four or five other "medium height" sites, including the "hub" for my club... Conifer Mountain at 9,900' or so. All cover the Metro Denver area well, with small areas of shadow, depending on which site you're talking about. We have a glut of repeaters that cover large territory out here on analog. The joke is we have an analog machine for every active user. :-) The "excitement" about this, is of course that it's digital and different than all of that. Another VERY exciting thing would be to find enough techies to handle the care and feeding of a high-site with voted receivers... but no one has tackled that yet. That would make HT coverage a much more viable thing... right now, you go to a window to make sure you're not noisy 20 miles away... on these mountain-top monsters. Our problem isn't TX coverage, it's getting the RX's close enough to HT end-users to make them full-quieting. Pre-amps can only do so much... Some of the "medium" height sites actually work better for HT users, since they're closer in to the city. Guy Hill, Lookout Mtn, Centennial Peak, Critchell, and Eldorado Mtn fit that bill nicely... all of which are commercialized or have machines on them as grandfathered deals with other tenants. An interesting "dream" a few of us techies shared with each other, but the stars haven't aligned in any significant way to do it, would be to put an individual receiver on a whole bunch of those... and vote those into a high site with a nice high-power transmitter. The biggest problem we have out here is too many clubs, each one struggling with only one to three people that REALLY understand how to build repeaters that perform. A "mega-merger" like in the regular work-a-day world would have happened by now, if they were businesses... but with personalities they way they are in ham circles, it'll never happen... people get attached to frequencies, and sites, and stuff. One "mega-club" that could remove the machines that are duplicated efforts (or lower the number of them), re-use the gear for things like a voted receiver system or low-level linked repeaters in parts of town, etc... would sure be interesting. I don't think I'll ever see it happen in my lifetime though... Nate WY0X
