Friday March 17th at 12:00 PM
Steve Werner K5SAW and myself N5KWL met at the Jane MO N5BVA repeater site. The problem we were addressing was the poor quality of the RF link between what I call the BVRC North (Jane) and the BVRC South (Springdale) repeaters. Days before both repeaters were determined to be in good working order.
The first action was to insert a Telewave wattmeter between the link transceiver and the Yagi antenna feedline inside the equipment cabinet. Our results were 5 watts forward and 5 watts reflected. It was obvious that there was a big problem with either the UHF Yagi or the feedline. Steve climbed on top of the equipment cabinet to access the first of the waterproofed connectors that provided the proper ground connection from the feedline to the tower. Well, we found our smoking gun! After undoing one of the connectors, Steve shook out at least a teaspoon of water.
After replacing the barrel connector and drying out the connectors, Steve did an overkill waterproofing job. Now we were measuring 5 watts to the Yagi antenna and only a slight needle movement of reflected power. Success! The link to BVRC South was almost full quiet as it was before. We don’t have a line of sight path between the two repeaters so we decided it increase the link transceivers transmitter output from 5 watts to 20 watts so we’re using a little “Brute Force” to make the link FULL quite. After all this was done we got the satisfaction of a Job Done, packed up our stuff and went to our homes.
