The N8UKF Repeater Group Story

147.380 KE8LZ Repeater

Originally located in the Grand Haven area it was re-located to Fruitport in the early 90's with remote receivers in Grand Haven and Muskegon. Bruce, KE8LZ, Ted, N8TED (sk) and John, N8OCT worked and tweaked the repeater until it was working at its peak. The repeater remained at Bruce's home on a 100' tower until the tower was taken down in the great wind storms of 1998. With Bruce soon to retire, the repeater was turned over to N8UKF and moved to Muskegon and placed on a local cell tower Mike, N8UKF, had access to at the 100' foot mark. It remained there until new owners of the cell tower asked Mike to remove his equipment due to upcoming sales negotiations. The repeater was then moved to the roof of a tall building in downtown Muskegon where it resided until moved to the roof of the local Holiday Inn Hotel a few years back. The repeater is a Yaesu System Fusion repeater running in Auto receive and Auto transmit modes.

443.200 N8UKF Repeater

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 is now a Yaesu System Fusion Repeater in Digital only mode. 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 27th. 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 TX-RX 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. For current repeater information go to the repeater page. The “Group” Currently the core group of volunteers are Mike, N8UKF - Barney, KC8LLN - Bob, K8RKO - Bill, WD8MKG - Tim, KD8YWN - Doug, WM8F - Dave, N8LMP and a couple non-hams Les and Jay. Thanks to all of their efforts we have been able to keep the repeater on the air. The times of free and low cost tower space are all but over and it has become more challenging work. We do owe a hearty thank you to the owner of the Holiday Inn Muskegon for granting us some tower space at a very fair rate !! The hotel owner has been very understanding of our plight and helpful whenever possible and the staff has been very helpful as well.