On this bright sunny and rather cold morning Bob N9GMT, Dave KA9FUR and I took a road trip to the Allenton 442.350 repeater. After a brief stop for a doughnut for Bob and coffee for me we arrived at the site. We unloaded the usual collection of service gear and went to work. As we had surmised the voter/prioritizer had failed and was not passing any audio. The culprit was a failed IC (Op-Amp) that Dave quickly found and replaced. We adjusted the audio levels on all four channels and called it good. I went to check power output from the repeater but my fancy Bird meter refused to show any readings at all! Oh well, back to the bench for some disassembly. We put the repeater back on the air and did some checks to confirm operation. Thanks to Bill KA9UCU, Al KB9DRZ, and Jack K9JAC for providing test signals.

On the way back home we stopped at our Menomonee Falls remote receive site “F” as it has not voted much as of late. As we exited the freeway and headed to the site we tried to hear the link transmitter, it was not on the air at all. Whatever was intermittent was now completely dead. We suspected that the link receiver or transmitter had failed but it turned out to be the power supply. It was probably 10-15 years old and had served us well until now. Fortunately John WA9GAR was at the site and let us use a spare GE supply that he had available. The transmitter, receiver, and antennas tested fine so we packed up and headed out. We were back at Bob’s house before 5pm which is fairly amazing as most of our projects seem to take all day and half the night. More adventures coming soon as we need to visit other sites for updates and tweaks.

73, Emil N9FBF