The local vhf repeater is situated on the hill of Torsliasg, this is midway between the towns of buckie and keith.
The repeater,s callsign is GB3SS ( IF YOUR PC IS EQUIPPED WITH A SOUND CARD AND YOU GIVE THIS PAGE LONG ENOUGH TO LOAD ( about 1 megabyte WAV file )approx 2.5 mins YOU WILL BE ABLE TO HEAR A RECORDING OF THE REPEATER)
The reapeter,s input freq is 145.00MHZ and output freq is 145.600MHZ with access being by 1750HZ tone burst, if your set is not equipped with this try whistling, coverage so far seems to be pretty good, reports include a S7 from Aberdeen and a QSO between Elgin and Laxford bridge (near Cape Wrath)
The site is owned by the Hydro Board and the club is gratefull to them for permission to locate there
Seen above is the hill of Torsliasg situated between Buckie and Keith but at this elevation the repeater itself is not visible
As can be seen there are several towers on the site belonging to different owners B.T,. the Hydro board, British rail, etc but the hydro ones are the two on the left
If you have ever wondered why the repeater suffers from pager break through then you can see why in this pic as the tower is absolutely stacked with antennas
The repeater has had a number of modifications during 2000. Firstly a new power supply was designed and constructed by Matthew, MM1EUI, which has faultlessly operated since installation. This is designed to be able to supply up to 20A and 12V almost indefinitely without forced air cooling. The heat sinking is substantial, and the toroidal transformer and associated control circuitry is all built into a rack mount box which fits the repeater cabinet nicely.
Interference from pagers has been a continuing problem, and filter arrangements have been adjusted several times to compensate.
At year end the following is the filter arrangement:
Antenna is connected to the standard set of 6 cavity filters. Three of these are on the transmit line and their task is to remove any 145.000 noise from the transmitted signal. Any signal on this frequency would of course swamp the receiver.
The other three cavities clean up the 145.000 received signal, with a sharp cut off at 145.600 to eliminate any TX signal swamping the RX
On the receive line, after that, are three more cavities setup as notch filters on 153mhz. This is one of the the frequencies of the "Page One" pagers which are located in the next cabinet to the repeater, and whose antenna is on the same tower. After these 3, is another cavity set to be a band pass filter at 145.000, to further clean up the received signal, and especially to reduce the effect of the Military pager on 149mhz.
All of this receive filtration introduces about 3dB insertion loss on the desired frequency, and the coax losses might be another 1-2dB. This means the receiver in the repeater hears less than half the signal arriving at the antenna. On TX, the coax only gets about half the output of the linear amplifier, and the antenna even less.
The actual amplifier output is about 35W, and about 14W goes into the coax. So the actual signal at the antenna could be only 12W.
Despite all that, it works surprisingly well. A QSO from Tongue to Keith, and another from Aberdeen to Wick have been heard recently under quote normal band conditions.
A full technical report on the repeaters status and setup will be given at the AGM