Good afternoon everyone!

Yesterday, 13 Dec 18, we noticed the 146.7 repeater began to have an intermittent static during transmit.  It seemed to begin almost simultaneously with the arrival of the cold front and the high winds.  We planned on doing some trouble shooting on it as we found time but it appears this afternoon the repeater has died, or at least the power output has died.  It receives a signal but barely even moves the power meter when transmitting.

In the short term, we are going to swap the repeater out with one of the backups until we have time to work on the main repeater.  The backup repeater will have a different courtesy tone and probably an out of date announcement but if you can ignore that for the short term, we’ll have it back on this afternoon.

One more thing, the audio levels on the IRLP system are unique to each repeater as the circuitry has varying impedance that are not exactly the same.  This results in the audio out of the repeater into the node being either too loud or too low, depending on the repeater used.  Each time we swap one out, we usually have to reset the audio levels to match the repeater in use.  Again, this takes time and we don’t have time today to make these adjustments but can do it as we get time.  Just keep in mind if you dial up a node and someone on the other end tells you that your audio is too hot, or too low. In all likelihood, it is on the repeater (node), not on your end.

We just wanted to let you know the reason the repeater is either offline, sounding different, or giving strange announcements.  Thank you in advance for your patience.  We provide our repeaters and nodes free of charge with no financial or technical support from anyone but four family members, with the vast majority coming from our Trustee, my proud dad, W5QO, so our time and resources are limited to work on these as time allows.

Thank you,
Paul, K5GLH