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Wednesday 14 February 2018

The future of GB3HG and some QRM hunting in the home QTH

Today I received in the post March's RadCom, it was this that told me of GB3HG's future, that future is that LAMCO have sponsored yet another Yaesu System Fusion repeater and that said repeater would be going into service at GB3HG, however on investigating this further I have yet to find what I am looking for.

I am well in range of HG given it's prominent location on Sutton Bank near Thirsk and I should be able to hit it with an HT, though none of these are System Fusion as they are all Chinese HTs, this sudden turn of events makes me even more eager to get a Yaesu FT2D, however I still have my FTM-400XDE in the car.

As part of this turn of events I have been monitoring HG all day, and given that there has been no change to the NoV (as this would show on ukrepeater.net) it is clear that the existing repeater hardware is still operating, however HGs output was full of QRM so I had to investigate that too and I found the culprit, my Raspberry Pi Zero which operates as the most energy efficient IRC bouncer on Earth, seems like I will have to place it inside a metal enclosure, either a pre-made one or an off the shelf one from Maplin customised to accommodate the Pi Zero, though since the reboot to determine the QRM it is not as bad at present.

If indeed what I have seen is in fact reality (a picture in RadCom and a tweet by LAMCO back this up), then a gap will be filled between 2 YSF repeaters already operational on 2-metres, this would be GB3CD in Crook and GB3NA in Barnsley (I'm unaware of any other 2-metre Fusion repeaters closer than those), and this should see an increase in Fusion operation in this area, however I plan to keep using GB3IR as well as that has the Echolink and IRLP facility (and probably the best place for FM use after the switch of HG to Fusion anyway), and I also intend to, at some point, use the newly opened MB6RY simplex WIRES-X gateway in Richmond operated by Andy M1SDE.

I have to say this has transpired to be a very interesting turn of events that I certainly will be keeping an eye on.

73 de 2E0EIJ

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