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Tech
ReportWhere has the year gone? Less than a month from now, we will be exchanging gifts, and enjoying friends and family at that special gathering, and looking forward to a new year. Perhaps some of us will see new equipment under the tree, to our delight, to further enjoy our great hobby.
This is the last technical report of this year, and we wish to take this opportunity to extend our warmest wishes for the holiday season, and Health and prosperity in the New Year.
Your hard working technical committee has had a busy and exciting season, and as technical chairman, I wish at this time to expend my sincere appreciation for all of the help, support, and relentless hours of work the technical members have devoted to this hobby and to the club to keep our repeaters and packet equipment operational. To all of KWARC members, thank you for supporting the technicians, and the club during the year. We have some of the best repeater sites, and coverage in the province.
Its time for a story, about our flagship repeater VE3KSR. During the past while, various users noticed an annoying sporadic hum and audio distortion when using the repeater. Users of higher quality external speaker in their mobiles were convinced the hum was periodically there, while others could not detect any abnormalities. Several trips to the repeater site proved fruitless in catching this ghost problem until we put into service the trained ear of Tedd VE3TJD and John VE3AMZ. What sounded like a AC hum turned out to be the CTCSS output encoder. Here's Tedd's reply on the fix..
"The Buzz on the transmit of VE3KSR has been pinpointed and repaired. The output control (pot) of the CTCSS encoder became intermittent. A good cleaning and re adjustment repaired it. The second issue had to do with the timing of the PL tone. The PL should only come on during a valid input signal, but because of a shorted 2N3906-switching transistor, the PL was always active. Replacing the transistor cured the problem. Thanks mostly to John ve3amz, for all his input, and to the helpers, Dave va3mrj, Paul ve3sy, Ben, ve3bny."
This turned out to be a team effort, with Tedd at the repeater site, and John (amz) and Paul (sy) at their home qth monitoring tone levels with test equipment while others provided the input signal while mobile. Great team job by all, and a special thanks to John (amz) for providing the diagram of the wiring and his knowledge and guidance with this repeater.
Seasons Greeting and 73 to all members from "The Technical Committee"
VA3BNY De Ben Sasiela
KWARC Tech Chairman
va3bny@rac.ca
748-0445
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