Since I do not have my ham radio gear, and do not live in Del City anymore, I had to improvise to be able to talk on the Del City ARC repeaters. As most of you know, we sold our Del City home in July 2010. All of my ham radio gear went into storage until we get a new house. The only thing that I kept out of storage was my dual band, 2 meter, 70 centimeter hand held radio. We temporarily moved into an apartment in Midwest City while we wait to get our new home. I can reach the repeaters from this apartment but not very good from inside with the low power that the hand held will produce.
Since both repeaters have IRLP/Echolink capability, I put together another, Internet Radio Linking Project (IRLP) node so that I can connect into either of the repeaters. This is the third one that I have put together and this one is for personal use. It signed on the air May 18, 2011 from Midwest City, Oklahoma. Sure it can be used for a mile or so but will not have much range for others to use. Anyone can use it but it will not be of much use for very far. This new node is a simplex node on 445.95 MHz. It has a PL tone of 162.2 It has an IRLP node number of 7734 and an Echolink node number of 23943. The node does not carry the Del City Amateur Radio Club call sign of W5DEL but rather K5GLH for IRLP and K5GLH-L for Echolink.
This node will help resolve my inability to have reliable communications through our own repeaters. I have tested it and it performs very well. I may play around with it and add Allstar Link capability to it and if it works out, I may add it to the other repeaters as well. As you can see from the picture, it is running on a magnetic mount dual band antenna stuck on top of a metal filing cabinet. We will be living in these apartments near Regional Park until around August 2011. If you are near that area, you can likely reach it without much power. Again, since it is simplex, there will be no courtesy tones or anything like that. If you hear a once sided conversation, then you are probably hearing the node speaking to me on my weak handie talkie. I am excited to get this one on the air and so I can get back into ham radio, at least a little bit.
Paul, K5GLH
