NEW REPEATER: Naneum Ridge – Eastern Washington

Installed today thanks to AF7PR and N7ER at Naneum Ridge. Naneum Ridge is at 6,700 feet and about 1 mile
East Southeast of Mission Ridge, about 21 miles North of I-90 near the town of Kittitas and 11 miles South Southwest of Wenatchee. The repeater will cover Wenatchee and North, Ritzville and East, Yakima, Tri-cities and Walla Walla to the South, and Ellensburg and West.

146.4875 Mhz Tx Output, 147.4875 Rx Input (+1 Mhz Rx Offset), Color Code 1

The I-90 Vantage Gulch shows mobile coverage as does Ritzville and most of I-90 past Spokane. Naneum should surpass the coverage of the Moses Lake repeater.

This has been a project that PNWDigital has been working toward for the past 3 years. It will be interesting to determine the “useful” range of DMR from this site as the coverage is far greater than the Motorola specs for usable DMR operation due to the slot timing of Tier II DMR. Motorola specs it at ~35 miles though. If both timeslots are busy then the useable distance is even less. Reporting on this will be interesting.

Coverage reporting would be appreciated. This is a remote, difficult site to access for maintenance and the service window is narrow due to snow, which is still up near the peak.

The repeater is listed on the Repeater Map and the Repeater Listings.

Visits: 448

This Post Has 11 Comments

  1. Dale - N7KLT

    Mike,
    I see in the system status page that it is up right now but, I got “Repeater not found” yesterday when trying to use Naneum Ridge yetserday.
    Was it down? Or should I double check my radio settings?
    Thank you Sir!

    Dale McKenzie
    N7KLT – 3120771

    1. Mike - NO7RF

      Dale, I noticed the repeater offline during my morning report review, offline for 3 days actually. I was out of town, so missed my normal reviews. I power cycled the repeater this morning and it returned to the network. Your not found would indicate the repeater was down. I am not able to remotely determine if the repeater is down or just off-network as I do not have the agility to hit the repeater directly. At this point, it appears that the repeater is operating nomally but I can not independantly verify the RF side of the operation.

  2. Dale - N7KLT

    Mike,
    As we had discussed on the air the other day, so far with my 578 and Anytone tri-band antenna on my rig it has worked great. I haven’t done a lot of traveling because of the the fuel costs currently but, if I do get the chance I will submit my observations.
    My comment earlier was because I had seen your post about the D-APRS and SMS being enabled and I decided to try it yesterday. I forgot yesterday to check to see if my D-APRS packets got through and checked this morning. When i couldn’t find any listed on aprs.fi I looked on the PNW Digtal APRS-D Dashboard and didn’t see any listing for me (N7JKT-1) there either.
    So i thought I’d let you know.

    Dale

  3. Stephen

    I just got back from RV camping at River Rue Campground next to Lake Roosevelt (Keller Ferry area on WA21). Mike NO7RF had suggested I try testing coverage of this Naneum repeater during our camping trip, so I programmed in this new repeater into both my Anytone 578 mobile and 878 portable radios to test coverage.

    I was unable to connect to the repeater using either, even the 578 on its highest power with my hi-gain Diamond 7900 antenna, from the campground, which sits on a hill overlooking the ferry dock on Lake Roosevelt. That campground sits at a lower elevation from the grasslands/wheat fields above it where Wilbur is located a half hour drive south of there, so I took my 878 with me into Wilbur one day (rode with some friends camping with us so did not have the chance to try the 578 from there), and again no success making a connection. Ditto for Odessa directly south of there. Upon our return drive today, I tried with my 578 from Dry Falls SP lookout, from Soap Lake, and from Ephrata again with no success connecting.

    Now I’m wondering if perhaps I made a mistake in my programming as I have gotten tthe impression that perhaps I should have been able to connect from somewhere along that US2/WA17/WA28 route toward I90. I did not try testing with the Ephrata VHF repeater, which on the map may make more sense for getting to Wilbur and where we camped. But at least I tried to see what I could do with the Naneum one.

  4. Mike - NO7RF

    I have enabled Naneum to support 31999 on TS 1. Was more an oversight. Thanks

    1. Mike - NO7RF

      Stephan, Campground may not be covered but almost all of Hwy 21 should be HT coverage from I-90 north to the last 10 miles or so to the Columbia River. Did you look at the heatmap? My guess is that your radio is not programmed correctly.

      A fellow used an HT and mag mount and got in from Hwy 174 east of Bridgeport, then Hwy 2 in Wilbur, Creston and Davenport. That is 61 miles LOS to 100 miles LOS from the repeater, out on an HT. The heatmap shows this coverage and an HT supports that computed coverage. Let us know if it was your programming please.

      We am heading to Naneum on 9-1-22 for the final installation of amplified preselector and tidying up.. I will be confirming coverage as I travel the 5 hours to get to the site. It will be my first chance since the repeater was put into operation.

  5. Dale - N7KLT

    Just out of curiosity, is this still in the “testing” phase? Or will the settings be added for D-APRS and maybe D-SMS to pass through?

    1. Mike - NO7RF

      Dale, no longer testing and SMS/APRS-D is supported.

      1. Dale - N7KLT

        @ Mike NO7RF,
        I saw this and went to the store yesterday with my 578 set to Naneum on Cascades with D-APRS active. With no record showing on aprs.fi or the PNW Digital APRS-D Dashboard.
        Any ideas? I didn’t check to see if it worked on Wenatchee as I wasn’t expecting it not to work.

        Dale – N7KLT

        1. Mike - NO7RF

          Dale,

          Naneum is enabled for APRS/SMS. You were hitting it fine.
          14:03:02.1 Aug/24 0.0 3 Naneum TS1 g 315319 3120771 Kittitas WA – Naneum Ridge – WA7DMR 315319e N7KLT – Dale – Wenatchee WA 3120771 311999 0.01 PNW-E 0.0

          The gateway is not reporting to aprs.fi and a ticket is in as of this morning.

          I’d be very curious about the coverage you experienced. This was a huge effort for the admin team to deploy this repeater and none of the team lives or works in the coverage area to test it out. Please provide details, radio, antenna, locations, your experiences, does it work close to home. Please!

        2. Mike - NO7RF

          The service between the APRS gateway and aprs.fi has been restored as of about 1230 today.

          Use this link to check for WA7DMR’s Date/Times for the most recent report. They should be no more than 60 minutes stale. https://aprs.fi/#!mt=roadmap&z=11&call=a%2FWA7DMR

          User position updates from PNWDigital sent to aprs.fi generally will appear in 10 to 30 seconds in my experience.

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