February Club Meeting A Blast!

With close to 30 people present, last night's club meeting was standing room only as we began our 3-part series de-mystifying ham radio repeaters.  At last night's meeting, we discussed how the FCC defines a repeater, some of the general differences between repeaters on different bands, and we gave a general overview of all system components normally used.

We then broke off into a hand's on session with our laboratory repeater, a Tait T800.  We discussed the process of setting up the repeater, getting software and programming cables, and some of the general alignments required to make the repeater work.

By the end of the meeting, the T800 repeater was now on our new lab frequency, and we confirmed the transmitter was on frequency, making proper power without harmonics and checked receiver sensitivity.

Next month, in part 2 of the series, we will be discussing the SCOM 7330 site controller in depth and the TX RX duplexers and interfacing both components to the Tait T800 repeater.

At the conclusion of the series, we will have a working ham repeater, and users will get to try it out at the March meeting.