March-June 1991
Contents
1. Advanced Computer Controls Repeater Mini Notes ID of the Month A great collection of synthesized speech IDs from Kevin Ritchey KD8IE Caution you re in a QSO zone This is KD8IE This is KD8IE ei eio Even with the ability to record IDs using our DVR there s nothing quite like letting the folks inside the repeater have their say They re a great part of the personality of the machine More great IDs on page 2 Amateur Radio Week We heard this on a local AM radio talk show This is Amateur Radio Week Just tune around the dial and you ll hear a lot of that going on Read About Other Groups We ve gotten lots of feedback from our request in the last issue to tell us about your repeater systems Much of this issue shares some of what we ve heard More neat time SSEqR EET Also in this issue Flathead Valley Repeater Group 2 More Great IDeas fram KDAIE 3 On the Bridge 3 lridium Nuggets 3 Into the Telecosm 7 More Feedback From Readers 8 acc notes AMATEUR RADIO May June 1991 March Ap Version 5 Software Hardware for the 85 96 Through a combination of techno logical advancements and software design innovation we ve been able to offer a major upgrade for your RC 85 or RC 96 Repeater Controller We ve added ail of the most re quested features to the new software They include Time of day clock calendar2. permitted area codes and selectable 7 or 8 digit count for more flexible toll restrict FC 900 operational improve ments including lockout of band units not present in your stack Don t Answer COP command to allow sharing a phone line with a modem connected to an 8S0 Tone panel regeneration 96 The new upgrade is easy to install the modules just plug in Here are the caveats Very old 85s shipped approxi mately before 1988 may need an 8Kx8 EPROM upgrade 35 If your link port connects to a fixed frequency BCD or FC 900 link or Spare Audio source it isn t available for HF HF suppor with the 96 requires ACC s 96 serial port board 50 Availability of the upgrade is from stock and the Amateur discount Price is 250 Now you can have even more fun with your repeater An ACC RC 850 controller ties the system together Integrated Repeaters Ill Flathead Valley QST Magazine featured the Flathead Valley Repeater Group in its monthly FM RPT column You might not expect a state of the art repeater system in north westem Montana but the Flathead Valley Repeater Group FVRG has just that on 146 02 62 and 442 075 447 075 MHz The system is 400 feet above the northem end of 35 mile long Flathead Lake on Chapman Hill in the rustic community of Bigfork 3300 feet above sea level The location is a former telephone microwave site with a 62 foot tower and con
3. Several time and date run time variables are like speech words but instead of being fixed wards these variables say the current time date AM or PM moming afternoon evening and day of week when pro grammed into messages The run time variables can be included in IDs tail messages builetin boards etc using the message editor And the time can be interrogated with a Demo command e Scheduler The scheduler works with the clock calendar and your existing macro sets It relieves you of the chore of manually selecting different macro sets at different times of the day and days of the week It s like an automatic control operator Expanded vocabulary We ve added female words and sound effects along with a few more male words The vocabulary now totals 535 words Juliet the new female voice announces the time e Support for an HF remote base Since we discontinued our ShackMaster product several years ago many people have asked for the ability to operate an HF transceiver connected to their repeater Now you can use the link port on your 85 or 96 to add HF to your repeater We selected the Kenwood TS 440S transceiver and others that are 100 compatible for this purpose Miscellaneous improvements Some of the many additions and im provements include Can interrogate Autodial num bers aver the phone There is no need to extend the telephone timer when loading numbers Added 5
4. is pos sible at this time a fully outfitted RC 850 controller a fully outfitted DVR FC 900 Interface and 2 meter ICOM module t includes full bat tery backup capable of 12 plus hours of continuous operation The tower and building are worth an estimated 125 000 The repealer equipment and ACC hard ware and accessories are valued at 20 810 This may seem like a lot of money for one person to invest in a repeater system but the fact that it is rated the number one 2 meter re peater in the area makes it all worthwhile would like to thank you for your time but most of all for the great equipment and dedication you all have for ham radio operators na tionwide Your equipment makes the standard repeater reach out and say I am here at your service Before I used your equipment on my repeater most non hams did not even know about our ham repeater Now many people have 146 820 programmed into their scanners They tell me they like to hear it talk David Mohre KA8OFE iR Trustee and owner of the 82 ma chine in Williams County Ohio Cellular Fraud Your amateur radio repeater isn t the only kind of radio system that can have problems with security and unauthorized users Cellular companies across the country are losing about 200 million a year on widespread fraud In one scheme phones with the same ID as legitimate users are sold on the street for up to 5000 The buyer gets 30 to 60 days
5. KD8IE Hi this is KD8IE Repeat Repeat explosion Repeater It s not casy be in me This is KDS8IE j More Great IDeas From KD8IE 79 The lean mean repeating nine This is KD8IE Ham it up o 79 This is KDMIE Sct yo 78s for DXCC on our ten meter remote basc This is KDS8IE Wakc up you may have missed the dinner meeting Call me This is KD8IE With two times ten to thc minus four mega watts ERP this is amateur repeater KD8IE Why is it called two meters I havc one This is KD8IE As onc of the thousand points of light this is KD8 E Icy winds are decreasing snow is not for long Next come rain and storming Root Root Root it s April 1 This is KD81E Warning don t try to record some of these messages on your DVR Only Romeo and Juliet could possibly say them with a straight face On the Bridge The following customer asked that his identity be withheld so that he isn t besieged with requests for space at his ideal repeater site Iam happy to report that the RC 850 controller we had pur chased from your company is now in operation with our local Rapid Transit system installed on top of the Bridge I am learning and have learned a lot about the 850 by working with it The equipment has lived and performed fine during the cold winter days and believe me it gets cold up there We installed t
6. WR6COP Repeater
7. alled num bers All control and operational parameters can be accessed by telephone Computer users may access the RC 850 controller via a telephone modem A personal computer can do all the program ming and file downloads for system status and accounting With 45 members the FYRG had a successful first year of Operation The 62 machine offers a regular Tuesday evening net local information and goodwill for travelcrs and has coordinated emergency services for highway accidents a boating emergency on Flathead Lake and an emergency situation at an area campground If you re traveling in the Flathead Lake area and have an emergency or just want to ragchew with a fellow amateur give a call on 146 02 62 or 442 075 447 075 and you ll get a friendly response Harry M Johnson NV7K Kalispell Montana Here are some more great 1 _ S submitted to us avitchey and the Heic Ro Sreant Athos es 6 Win e vast Ahio on 146 19153 To get acuon on our repeater push your mike button and identify This is KD8IE For what s new in computers check out the computer net Mon day night at 9 This is KD8IE Watch your p s and q s it s April fools This is KD8IE This is 76 April Fools 79 KDS8IE Motor on down the road with 79 This is KD8IE Please wait 3 seconds for other traffic This is KD8IE A bored ham radio operator is a terminal one This is
8. eco nomic or other reasons and would provide full time handheld to handheld telephone service between any points on earth Telephone ser vice could be provided anywhere for example a simple solar pow ered phone booth could be set up in the middle of the Arabian desen Here are some technical details we ve picked up that we found in teresting All 77 satellites will be in polar orbits in seven planes 11 satellites per plane Having all in polar orbit might seem inefficient relative to other configurations but it offers several advantages Redundancy as the satellites converge on the poles will allow satellites to periodically shut down to recharge their power systems The symmetrical nature of the orbits simplifies crosslinking calls can be passed through several satellites to reach distant destina tions Keeping track of where to aim is simplified through the symmetry The two satellites in front and behind are reached through fixed antennas and the two in the adjacent orbital planes are tracked by mechanically steered antennas Iridium is the reverse of conven tional cellular In terrestrial sys tems the cells are fixed and the users move Cell boundaries are determined by the locations of the cell sites and geography Users travel from cell to cell creating the need for complex handoff of users by the system In Iridium however the users are stationary relative to the speeding satellites e
9. elecosm A twelve page article in the Harvard Business Review March April 1991 by George Gilder offered a unique perspective into the future of telecommunications His fear is that archaic regulations which are hampering our communi cations infrastructure will cripple our ability to benefit from the rapid advances in computing and our ability to compete globally The cost of computing power is dropping at a rate of as much as 50 per year And the number of transistors that can be put on a chip quadruples every three years These trends are leading to distributed computing power that is growing far more quickly than the ability to communicate over public networks In the next decade the mismatch will be enormous Gilder defines a telecomputer as a future device which will not only perform computations and display numbers letters and graphs but will process voice video news education sports film and photos Its output will be high resolution video and sound even three dimen sional images Computers will offer a virtual reality travel in imagi nation but will require gigabits of data While hardware to support these capabilities is under develop ment and software will follow there isn t sufficient bandwidth in our country s communications infrastructure to support these advances That s where regulation gets in the way says Gilder He expects to see a flip flop in how information is carr
10. he system in December The antennas had been installed last August and had to be walked up the suspension cables because a 25 fiberglass antenna does not fit into the eleva tor Bringing the antennas up was a job by itself We had to start from the center of the bridge and slowly walk up to the bridge tower where the cables are at a 45 angle Special foot gear and safety bells were a must The remote temperature sensors inside the 850 outside on top of the bridge and power amp heatsink are helpful Forward and reverse power sensors are working OK as well Altogether the selection we made incorporating the RC 850 controller into this system was a good one I can say nothing more but keep up the good work We are pleased with the performance of your product Dayton Notes This was a great year for the Dayton Hamvention and a great year for us as an exhibitor The excitement over the codeless license was apparent with all the newcomers to the service We seemed to make a lot of repeater owners happy with V5 and as always enjoyed the chance to meet you face to face See you next year Iridium Nuggets In an issue last year of ACC Notes we described an overview of Matorola s proposed cellular satel lite system consisting of 77 LEO low earth orbit satellites Iridium named after the element with 77 electrons is intended to supplement terrestrial cellular systems where cell sites aren t feasible for
11. ied What s carried now over wires like voice will be carried over the air with wireless pocket phones and what now goes over the air TV video will be carried over wires Not copper wire but extremely high bandwidth fiber optic lines Fiber will be combined with high speed digital switches to form a nation wide network linking tclecomputers The present regulatory environ ment prevents U S phone compa nies from laying fiber networks into the home to get the ball rolling The initial application for this home fiber network would necessarily be entertainment video to create profits for developing other applications in education culture etc The cable industry has been given a monopoly for entertainment video in the home locking out the only industry with the capital to fiber wire the nation the phone companies Gilder sees fiber in the home as the driver to provide the momentum for linking future computers with their high data rates A public communications infrastructure to support telecomputers will allow the U S to reap the fruits of its computer technology If you re interested in a wide ranging futuristic discussion of communications find the article in HBR in your library RBI 1 Remote Base Interface Doug Hall Elecironics has made available its RBI 1 Remote Base Interface The product makes it easy to connect any ACC controller to the Kenwood TM X21 through TM X51 series mobile radios The inte
12. of unlim ited calling until the legitimate owner gets the bill and complains Ina more sophisticated scheme the memory in the phone is altered to produce a bogus ID Since cellular users can legitimately roam into any area of the country these illegal users are considered to be roamers By the time the differ ent cellular companies can com pare notes the illegal phone user may have made lots of calls The simplest approach to fraud has been phoney applications to obtain service The users of these illegal phones are drug dealers who want untraceable inobile and pocket telephones to keep in touch and service providers who operate phone booths out of their cars offering cut rate telephone calls to anywhere in the world Some cellular companies have shut off direct dial service to South America because that seems to be the destination of many of these illegal calls In New York recently six peaple were arrested for running an illegal operation Undercover officers posed as customers and made calls The felony offenses included computer tampering and falsifying business records Law enforcement tries to uncover scams and cellular phone compa nies are working on technical solutions Faster communications between cellular companies will end the roaming fraud and tight ened security checks will reduce fraudulent applications But there is no total solution to the problem Into the T
13. peater controller from Bellingham is very handy The re peater is on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands The site is at 2400 feet and our antenna is at 275 feet on a 400 foot tower Allen Hart N7FYU Most of our equipment is homebrew We recently converted our 220 MHz aux links over to 900 MHz using homebrew transventers Our group has about 150 dues paying 15 year members and maybe 50 100 other non contribut ing users We advertise open auto patch and emergency autodialer with all other functions reserved for members only We publish a 60 page user manual and give out membership cards We average 20 30 autopatches per day max 100 min 5 10 The alarm system is very important We have had one suc cessful and one unsuccessful break in in the past four months Alarm sensors worked well Robin Rumbolt WA4TEM The synthesized voices on our 850 acquired the names Harry and Nancy this is a long and spicy story and any repeater problems are usually blamed on these two s antics For your readers Bermuda of fers a pleasant and friendly environ ment particularly to enjoy ham ra dio Reciprocal licensing is quickly and easily accomplished free too For holders of U S General and higher classes of license more information is obtainable on 14 275 MHz Sundays at 0830 castem time on the Bermuda Net Thomas Trimingham VP9KG Radio Society of Bermuda Archive of KECOP
14. r Burst and More Hams are among the very few people in the world who know that meteor trails can be used as passive repeaters for brief periods of time that is We ran across what may be the only book on the subject Meteor Burst Communications by Jacob Z Schanker It describes theory applications and includes details of an HX 25 meteor burst packet protocol It also details the pro posed Federal Standard 1055 Protocol for meteor burst communi cations to insure interoperability among government systems Artech House the publisher has other interesting specialty commu nications titles as well ask for their catalog Meteor Burst Communications is 60 plus 4 shipping a companion software disk is 30 Artech House 1 800 225 9977 x4002 In Mass 1 617 769 9750 d Other Notes of Interest Land Mobile Radio Systems This book from Prentice Hall is a good primer on two way radio It describes techniques used in eom mercial services that can be of value in amateur radio particularly as our VHF and UHF bands become more crowded It also offers technical explanations of the components that make up two way radio systems It s available from Prentice Hall 200 Old Tappan Rd Old Tappan NJ 07675 36 sales tax 4 shipping Your equipment makes the repeater reach out and say I am here at your service Williams County Amateur Radio Club You asked in your last newslet ter for info
15. rface converts your controllers BCD data stream into the control format accepted at the Kenwood radio microphone jack Using information supplied by your controller in response to DTMF commands by recall of remote base memories and by selection of macros the RBI 1 interface provides CTCSS control high low power frequency and band control It also supplies 8 User Function remote control outputs RBI 1 Doug Hall Electronics 815 E Hudson St Columbus OH 43211 1 614 261 8871 ACC Notes 7 More Feedback From Readers The combination of our RC 85 controller FC 900 remote base and DVR make it easy to project a friendly fun and welcome personal ity for our repeater Users enjoy that and respond in kind The flexibility of this combination is especially useful when originating and export ing our nets to other repeaters or importing nets from other area ma chines for enjoyment by our users ACC makes our repeater a fun place to be Scott Bogue KE7LE Our small group was not seeing any growth or activity We pul up the 440 machine with the RC 96 controller It seemed that everyone then wanted to get involved We have gotten five new hams in the last year and a half Not bad fora small rural area Danny Lloyd KB4MDD Line of sight from Bellingham to the repeater site is about 19 miles but to get to the island it s a 45 minute drive then a 1 1 2 hour ferry trip So being able to program the re
16. rmation about our club Our s is called The Williams County ARC Williams County is the northwest most county in Ohio We are bordered by Indiana on the west and Michigan on the north and 28 miles of the Ohio Tumpike runs through us In 1982 I becaine a ham and a quick lover of the club s 2 meter re peater This machine was located on the area s CATY tower at 2 980 feet using an Antenna Specialists ASP 602 antenna 1 2 aluminum cable and a home built machine us ing Spectrum RF boards We have come a long way baby I was made aware of a tower that was for sale that had never been erected so I went looking Af ter six months of work I had moved this tower from Cleveland to Wil liams County It is a Rohn 80 guyed tower stands 340 tall is double guyed and is capable of supporting 4 ACC Notes five 10 solid microwave dishes and ten Super Stationmaster antennas This thing is strong I then built a 10 x8 steel build ing complete with A C and heat and alarms I installed a state of the art electrical service and lightning pro tection systems two Antenna Spe cialist ASP 602 antennas one at 345 for receive and one at 320 for transmit both fed with 1 2 Heliax and a3 dB gain base station an tenna on the torque arm at 125 for the remote base also fed with 1 2 Heliax T have purchased a Motorola MSR2000 100 watt continuous duty Tepeater It is equipped with as much ACC equipment that
17. trolled environment build ing There are 12 telephone lines 200 ampere electrical service and ample ground provisions An additional 20 feet of tower was added to the existing structure The system includes a Motorola MSR 2000 2 meter repeater an ICOM IC RP3010 440 MHz repeater Wacom duplexers ar 1 ICOM FM remote base me ies u 10 and 2 meters and 220 a 40 MHz An ACC RC 850 contruder tes the system together The repeaters use Celwave collinear fiberglass verticals and the remotc bascs are equipped with Hustler G 10 G7 144 G7 220 and G6 440 antennas The controlled environment shack houses an automatic change over 12V dc auxiliary powcr system that announces itself as it comes online A 117V ac generator powered system is ready for use when necded The 2 meter and 440 MHz repeaters are hard linked so that transmissions on one are sent out on the other and vicc versa The digital voice recorder DVR can immedi ately play back short transmissions for testing should a uscr wish to check a new antenna mikc ampli 2 ACC Noles fier etc The DVR will record and hold messages for the mailbox system and a DTMF pad test function is available The autopatch includes access to police fire and ambulance services in four counties FVRG members use personal DTMF codes to access the auto patch and remote bases and each member is assigned five autodialer slots in the autopatch system for home or other often c
18. ven some one on a jet airliner is effectively stationary and the celis move ina predictable way up and down the earth The handoff issue is simplified There will be 1628 cells covering the earth each moving at about 7 400 meters per second Each satellite would produce 37 antenna beams creating up to 37 of these hexagonal cells on carth each one 372 miles in diameter The satellite altitude of 413 nautical miles above the earth was chosen to lie within two constraints Below 200 miles drag makes it difficult to keep the satellite up long term without carrying on board fuel Above 600 miles it becomes more costly to protect the satellite from radiation effects Motorola expects to have an operational system by 1997 85 96 PC Terminal Program Updated Andy Kadvan updated his PC terminal program to include new features and support Version 5 software The terminal program uses your Hayes compatible modem to generate DTMF to the controller just like you do on the phone It can also reduce the need to refer to the manual for programming A new feature is the ability to control the repeater through its control receiver input rather than phone for direct connection to the modem if your repeater is at home Andy can provide a detailed description of the program send him an SASE The program is 39 95 plus 3 shipping Andy Kadvan 1835 Lynn Mar Avenue Poland OH 44514 ACC Notes 3 panny fa ay Meteo
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