What's the Frequency Kenneth?

Good News Everyone!  I went up to La Pine on Sunday to attend the operations meeting of the Oregon Regional Relay Council, the coordination authority for Oregon.  During the meeting the application for coordination was considered, and we were assigned the 434.910/439.910 frequency pair.  This is in the "GMSK Repeater" section of the bandplan, and there's really nobody else up there right now.  It turns out that ORRC allocated this spectrum not knowing that the Icom repeaters can't actually tune to this pair.  This isn't a problem with the KF7LDG repeater because we'll be using standard FM gear that's more frequency agile.  The really good part about being on that pair is that we shouldn't be disturbing anyone on FM, and they shouldn't really be effecting us all that much.  Thanks to Daron and Dan of the ORRC for their help and understanding during the process.

Receive Antenna on the Top Tower Section

In other news, the receive antenna arrived on Friday.  As I said before, it's a Telewave ANT450-D3.  It'll be mounted at the very top of the tower mostly because I'm more worried about hearing folks than being about to get to them with the transmitter.  Note that if you're mounting these folded dipoles on a smaller tower like the Rohn 25G, you'll need a shim kit, which is part number ANTS420.  Note that the description says (2) on it, but you'll need one kit for each dipole.  The (2) refers to the fact that a pair of them shims up a single dipole.

I tested them up in ghetto style by bringing the top tower section over to the trunk of my car and hooking the dipoles up to my ID-880H mobile.  I was able to hit FM repeaters as far away as Eugene and Salem, so I'm thinking the antennas should be plenty good for the purpose.  When all of the tower sections get painted, I'll be mounting the transmit antenna on its tower section.