Bay of Islands ARC Repeater Site

Note: As of 2024 this site has been dismantled. The land owner decided the subdivision would fetch a better price with it gone.

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.

New Desk

After using a folding table for the last few months, 'twas time for a something better.

I had considered The Great Ham Radio Desk Project, but after looking around IKEA I found something I liked better, more so since IKEA was having a sale at the time.

The spare room/office/shack is 120" wide across the back wall. What I ended up getting were three sets of draws and two table tops, the table tops are 59" x 29", the 29" width is nice, as it allows plenty of depth for radios, computers etc with space in-font.

• LINNMON Tabletop
• ALEX Drawer unit

The total was about $270 less tax and delivery fee, took an afternoon to put together.



Left to right, Ameritron AL-80B, Kenwood TH-D72A HT on top, Motorola MCS 2000 33cm/900MHz radio, Kenwood TM-731A, Icom IC-7300, 27" iMac (2014, 5K), under the iMac is a Windows 7 laptop which runs all the ham radio applications.

Plenty of room for more stuff! Plan to add some shelves to mount the Kenwood and Motorola mobile rigs, control boxes, and antenna switches etc.

22 Nov 2019:

This arrangement has been superseded with New Desk version 2.

WSPR - 40m, ZL5A Scott Base Antarctica

WSPR pulls out another surprise.

Adam Campbell / ZL5A from Scott Base Antartica:

WSPR - 40m, 1 Watt, 16441 km

Distance wise, this is the 2nd best spot I've reported yet at 16441 km / 10216 mi, from ZS1LCD in Cape Town South Africa who was running 1 watt on 40m [7MHz]. ZS1OA remains king at 16511 km / 10259 mi on 30m [10MHz], and ZS3D is a regular in 3rd place at 16233 km / 10087 mi on 40m.

After running WSPR for about three months, I took a break from it about a week ago having built up a good feel for what I can expect with the current antenna configuration. Last night I had it running again after adding a 20 ft horizontal wire to the top of the 43 ft vertical turning it into a 1/4 wave inverted L on 80m.

With the exception of 60m, Remote ATU has no problem finding 1:1 match 80 thru 10m, 40m was the surprise since the antenna is close to a 1/2 wave. Hard to know with out an antenna analyzer to see what is really going on. I'll soon have a better idea, ordered a RigExpert AA-55 analyzer, and another 40 x 32 ft radials for the vertical / inverted L to bring the total to 60.

Extra Class

This past Saturday I made the trip to Renton where the Mike and Key club run VE testing sessions.

It took about 4 months of study and the practice exams on QRZ to reach an average score of 80%. To pass you need a score of 74%, out of 50 questions you can get 13 wrong.

The good news is I passed!

I think the incentive based system here is a good way to manage access to HF bands, in addition to creating an incentive to further your skill and knowledge, regardless of how "irrelevant" some think the subject matter and questions are.