Monday, August 12, 2019

Bay of Islands ARC Repeater Site

Following on from the Auckland VHF Group Repeater Site post, some more pics from the archives. This time of the Bay of Islands ARC Repeater Site, photos I took from around 2007 when I had the task of reinstalling the equipment after it had been removed for re-alignment.

This site was established with the help of the Auckland VHF Group in the mid 90s to get the national link extended north via a sister site between here and Auckland called Brynderwyn. NZART map here - its approximate at best. Google Map that I created here, the locations are with-in tens of feet in most cases.

Since these photos were taken when I was last there, the 2m repeater has had some changes with the addition of CTCSS for IRLP node 6398 link, there are more recent pics on their homepage and some from when the tower was erected.



Pic of the tower and antennas. Like Klondyke, the 2m repeater antenna is constructed from angle iron, welded, and hot dip galvanized, but is a simple pair of 2 half waves in phase for around 10 dBi of gain, hard to see as they are end on in this pic. At the top is a 4 dipole stack for the the 70cm repeater. This configuration resulted in the 2m and 70cm repeater performance and coverage being closely matched in most cases. The link to Brynderwyn is a set of four 7 element Yagis with around 17 dBi? of gain, the Brynderwyn end has the same antenna configuration, this is needed because the 70 mile path is not ideal.



Inside the building.
Tait T300 gear.
146.750- also had a 50W PA in the back.
439.975- had the matching Tait 50W PA.