N8UKF

443.200 Repeater

Muskegon, Michigan

The Past

The 443.200 repeater has been operational since July 1994. The repeater was originally put on the air using a Motorola Micor repeater purchased at a very reasonable price from WD8MKG. Later on an Icom repeater was purchased and is still on line today. The repeater was then mounted on a 60-foot tower alongside Pulaski Lodge. In May of 1998 a cell tower was erected on the Pulaski Lodge site and the 443.200 repeater was provided with a new home at the 100-foot mark. This happened just in time since the very bad horizontal winds that caused havoc throughout Western Michigan took the 60-foot tower down on May 27^th. 1998. A few days later we were up and running again in our new building at the base of the new cell tower. Our antenna is an 8 bay folded dipole commercial antenna purchased at the Dayton Hamfest and oriented to the Northeast. The duplexers are RX-TX Duplexers. We use Andrews ¾ inch feedline for the antenna

In the early days we used a couple of home brew controllers until settling on the Cat-1000 controller. These controllers are great! In addition to the controller a voice mail system was added to the repeater. Later on the voice mail was removed for lack of use and a weather station was added.

Over the years we have had links for the repeater in Fruitport and in Holton with good success. Mainly the links were under used so they were taken down to save maintenance time and funds.

The Present

Well the repeater is kind of in maintenance mode. I don’t have any plans for it right now, as the honey doo lists are still lengthy. The repeater has a very good coverage area for handhelds in the metro area and mobile coverage north to Whitehall and south of Grand Haven. There is one dead spot at the corner of Jackson and US-31 in Grand Haven. You can’t hit the repeater there with hi mobile power as a leg of the cell tower completely nulls the signal in that immediate direction. Pretty strange stuff, go east or west a short distance and you can get in with handhelds many times.

The Future

Well I have been toying with the idea of putting a digital repeater on the air and in fact have had one up for awhile using 2 ID-800 Icom radios. It was indeed a neat experiment and showed the strengths and weaknesses of Digital. It still has a ways to go folks but you should get your feet wet! Unfortunately my interest is in ATV. When I can get back to it I expect to explore that portion of our hobby next.

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