Always a good thing when Hams use our repeaters so we know that the RF side is working properly. Nets are excellent opportunities to jump on a repeater and let the NCS know at time of check-in.
PNWDigital has a large network of repeaters and the admin team is not able to use all repeaters on the network. This has been a problem on occasion as repeaters tend to have issues over time and we were not finding the problems until long past their development. So we have developed a program for volunteers to initiate some basic testing to insure that our repeaters are working properly. The initial rollout took the form of a poll in September of 2018 on our IO Group.
We need to test for 2 primary conditions, RF output and sensitivity are “normal”. So what follows is that procedure as well as a brief reporting mechanism. The testing can be done at any time and then when checking in on the Gathering. This should take less than 5 minutes a week and less than 15 minutes a month for a devoted guardian.
From a practical sense, not all repeaters need exacting diligence for monitoring or reporting as they are used extensively. But a number of our repeaters have very low use (or no use sadly) and their issues may go unnoticed for sometime. The BawFaw repeater is a good example. It is an I-5 travel corridor repeater primary with few local users (why have it?). So it is a a good example of why we need adoption volunteers.
So if you would like to help us, latch onto a seldom used (or any repeater), get used to the normal (Rx and Tx) coverage characteristics and if you notice changes, mention it on the Gathering, leave a comment of this page below or Email the Tech Team at: tech@pnwdigital.net
First Published: February 9, 2022 Last Updated: 3 months ago by Mike – NO7RF
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