442.275 Repeater Interference Resolved!

Today, James Adkins, KB0NHX, met with the field technician for Midwest Paging in an attempt to finally resolve the interference we were receiving from his 454.300 paging transmitter.

For those that are not aware, we started receiving interference on the repeater about 6 months ago when Midwest Paging installed a paging transmitter on 454.300 MHz. They installed a 6-element Yagi about 10 feet away from our UHF repeater antenna, running at 600-Watts ERP! This was creating quite a problem for us.

Upon arriving, we took desense measurements. The atmospheric desense measured at 6 microvolts. When the paging transmitter was on the air, it increased to 181 microvolts!

The technician moved the transmitter to another UHF yagi of theirs mounted on the west side of the Cox South penthouse, the opposite side of the building from us. After doing this, we still had minimal desense. Upon James's request, he moved the antenna from vertical to horizontal polarization. After this was done, the paging transmitter would not cause even the weakest signal to fall out of the repeater.

We encourage everyone to try out the UHF repeater if you haven't. It is a great repeater. Just program it in with a positive offset and a PL of 162.2 Hz. Today, Gary Doucey, N0IRN, worked the machine from downtown Aurora, Kent Doucey, N0IRM, worked it from Galena with as little as 2-watts on an HT, and James Adkins, KB0NHX, worked it from Halltown mobile & on an HT with 1/2 of a watt!

The repeater does have an IRLP node, #3995, and stays connected to the Missouri Linking Reflector channel of 9195. Generally, the repeater is also linked with the 444.450 repeater in Lees Summit and the 444.375 repeater in Holden. There is usually a lot of good conversation that takes place on this machine, we encourage you to try it out if you don't already frequent the machine.

You can also check into the Thursday night Nixa ARC "NARC" net on this repeater. So, make it your UHF home channel today!