Fixing the Repeater

Seriously though,  the plight of the few hard working guys and gals that go up every week the grease the wheels on the K6BJ repeater:

Remember that there are many phases to building repeaters:

  1. The decision that another repeater would be a good thing.
  2. Acquiring parts.
  3. Mounting all the parts in an open workshop rack.
  4. Locating smaller parts since not everything fits.
  5. Making the assembly of parts work as a unified whole.
  6. Rebuilding parts or locating replacement parts since you don’t discover that everything doesn’t work together until you power it up.
  7. Making the new collection of parts work as a unified whole.
  8. Spending hours and hours programming and reprogramming the controller to get it “just right”.
  9. Beating the final gremlins into submission, including the intermittent that only shows up at 4am on fifth Sundays during a full moon.
  10. Finding a permanent home for the new repeater, and envying those that get their sites for free.
  11. Taking the wife out to dinner a few times to make up for the evenings you spent in the workshop.
  12. Preparing the site (backup battery bank (if needed), tower-mounted antenna, feed-line, etc).
  13. Installing the repeater, item by item, into the permanent cabinet rack.
  14. Making longer cables to replace the ones that no longer reach.
  15. Making everything that broke works again.
  16. Transporting the cabinet to the repeater site (which may require borrowing a 4×4 vehicle).
  17. Fixing what broke during transport, including retuning the duplexer.
  18. Spending several evenings and weekends beating the last gremlins into submission.
  19. Taking the wife out to dinner a few times to make up for the evenings and weekends you spent at the repeater site.
  20. Formal announcement that the repeater is on-line and available.
  21. Locating and fixing the intermittent that only shows up at 4am on fifth Sundays during a full moon.
  22. Listening to the users whine that they can’t “get in” with their fleapowerd HTs from 100 miles away.
  23. Listening to the jammers.
  24. Listening to the users whine about the jammers.
  25. Listening to the other users whine about the users that whine about the jammers.
  26. Taking the wife out to dinner a few times to make up for the evenings and weekends you spent at the repeater site.
  27. After a few years deciding that the user-caused hassles aren’t worth it, and selling the repeater to some other ham for about one-tenth of the money that you have into it, and realizing that the hundreds of hours you spent on it are worth zero.
  28. Becoming a repeater user yourself for a few years.
  29. Realizing that having another repeater would be a good thing.

And, so it begins again….