Jonaskop maintenance

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On Saturday 2017-05-20, Paul ZS1V and Rassie ZS1YT headed to Jonaskop to investigate a problem with crackly audio on the 145.675 Jonaskop repeater and to attend to some pre-winter preventative maintenance.

The weather was sunny, but cold, with a fresh cold breeze that could be felt as soon as one was a few meters up the tower.  Most of the area to the South and East of Jonaskop was under thick cloud.

Overberg under a blanket

The SWR of the VHF antenna was found to be good.  On previous visits water had been found in the connection between the feedline and the 4-stack antenna, despite there being a good water seal at that point.  The phasing harness has a plastic tube section and extra precautions against moisture entering the system at that point were taken.

The link controller was also attended to, and audio crackle eliminated by re-seating some of the ICs.

An adjustment was made to the repeater configuration to make it go back to the desired setting after a power interruption.

Repeater Installation Bottelary 20170319

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Panoramic View

The first digital repeater high site in the Western Cape was installed on Sunday.

ZS1VDV and ZS1DDK completed the main install on Sunday 19 March 2017.

UHF MMDVM Repeater and ICOM VHF DSTAR repeater and controller

The install on site started around 08:30. All equipment had to be carried a few 100m up the hill.

Uninstalled old equipment from rack.
Cleaned out all dead animals and dust.
Installed power supply unit.
Automatic transfer switch with low voltage dropout on battery side.
Power pole distribution block.
Installed networking router.
Did all network cabeling.
Installed MMDVM UHF repeater (DMR and DSTAR configured)
Installed ICOM ID RP2C controller and ID RP2000V repeater.
Installed VHF duplexer.

Equipment Rack

Made up coax fly leads.
Installed UHF HD 400 antenna.

ZS1VDV installing antennas

Did a final cleanup.

Returned home by 14:30