North Hills Amatuer Radio Club


W3EXW B

The Club's callsign, W3EXW, is used by the our D-STAR repeater. The B means the repeater is in the UHF band. An A would be used for the 1.2GHz band. A C would be used for the 2 meter band.

The repeater is located in the basement of the WQED TV transmitter building. The Club's 146.880MHz analog FM repeater is just to the right of the D-STAR rack.

The 444.35MHz duplexer is located in the top of the rack. It combines the antenna from the receiver (449.35MHz) and the transmitter (444.35MHz) into one antenna. The feedline is 7/8 inch hardline. The antenna is unknown. We have two new antennas to install but have not had good luck getting a tower climber.

The next item in the rack is the Cisco router. This is needed to interface the LAN in the rack to the Internet. It provides routing and network address translation.

The Icom controller is the smaller of the next two Icom units. It can control three voice repeaters and one 1.2GHz data only repeater. The 440MHz repeater is next in the rack. Both the receiver and the transmitter are in the same case. To add a 2 meter repeater and a 1.2GHz repeater, we only need to purchase the repeater modules and the antenna system for each repeater. The controller will handle the additional modules.

The final item is the Internet gateway. This is a CentOS distribution of Linux. The glass CRT is a little old but it was free.