RBT Upgrade & Tower Climb

A new box has been installed at VK2RBT which combines all the repeater components into one enclosure. Wether we’ll achieve this with the future addition of a 2m repeater is yet to be seen. Inside the new box is a completely new 24V solar charging system although we’re yet to upgrade the panels.

Rain kept us grounded at Eagle Rock on Saturday. In attendance was Kev and Rob as well as ToneZ and Wayne who dropped by early in the afternoon. On Sunday afternoon we had a look at the access to the site and agreed to attack everything on Monday.

I am seriously humbled and so very thankful for what follows…

In the meantime Tony, noting the dire indoor firewood situation at ER, directed Sergeant at Arms (Wayne) to rectify the situation. He immediately identified a large pile of wood around the campfire which although in outward appearance was sodden, Wayne declared was largely dry underneath. Looking around at the assembled WACRS for anyone likely to have a rap sheet, he directed RB to sniff out and break into any car which might have a log splitter and chainsaw sitting on the back seat. To everyone’s amazement, Rob returned within minutes of hijacking a nearby Mitsubishi Challenger and Toyota Hilux.

After fossicking through and splitting a large proportion of the outdoor wood, Clampet then took over and was observed expertly cutting through large pyramids of stacked wood which yielded more than enough for himself and HEY to stay toasty for the remainder of the weekend.

On Sunday we decided to install the new box and also send Kevin up the tower on Monday.

The primary goal of the tower climb was to disconnect the EUPEN 5128 coax and run a simple end to end check of its characteristics. The night before, we ran the same checks through a 100m roll of Andrews LDF4-50 and then a 60 feet piece of the same stuff. Suspecting that we had an issue with the coax, we found the reverse and left the Eupen in place and reconnected the 70cm antenna to it. The only changes in the end was to switch over to the Telewave mobile duplexer and remove the RX cavity filter supplied by Darren.

Due to the fast fading sunlight, I had to quickly finish off everything until next time. Power is still only set to 1W because, due to over-tiredness, I accidentally shutdown the onboard computer remotely and can’t make changes until I next go out there. Kevin “The Legend” had to take over the driving duties from Lithgow back to Sydney as I was completely stuffed and couldn’t keep the Triton in its lane.