Technical detail

The System is made up of several input satellite receivers on 147.80 MHz mostly in Spokane with a few out of town in Eastern Washington. Four System transmitters are on 147.20 MHz at Spokane, Wenatchee, Omak and Yakima to cover most of the East side of the state with base station (or better) coverage. The satellite receiver's signal in Spokane are sent to a control point, which has all repeater functions, such as tail, time out, IDer. The other six coverage area signals, Wenatchee, Omak, Yakima, Chelan, Colville and Tri-Cities are sent back to the control point (MCP). From the control point output, the user's signal then is processed and up-linked to the seven coverage areas for user reception for wide coverage, to balance the receivers' coverage.

All the remote Spokane receivers are carrier squelch (CS) and sent back to the control center (MCP), which has CTCSS decoders for most of the satellite receivers. One or two receivers can be left in carrier squelch mode to assist a newcomer without the proper access information. Normally, current supporters have the correct information so they can access the entire System.

The remote receiver signals are RF sent with very short squelch burst times, making them transparent and to make the System nice to listen to. The slight burst that is heard is enough 'que' a user had un-keyed therefore, a (dis) courtesy beeper is unnecessary. Some receivers such as the Motorola Micor do not need shortening of the squelch, thanks to the special I.C. with dual constants. In fact, the "short" constant has a phenomena which "blanks" out the user signal intermittently during a mobile with some multi-path propagation into the System. The cure for that is increasing the "short" constant cap, which add just a little longer squelch instead of the "click" you hear on a stock Micor squelch.

Previously the user signals were time domain voted in the Spokane area. The TDV logic lets only one satellite receiver (path) through. If the user nulls out due to moving, the TDV looks for another satellite receiver path available, and lets it through the System. There is one limitation it had. The TDV logic is not a signal quality "voter". If the user's first receiver access is a noisy path, it would stay that way, even though another receiver path is much quieter. This would normally happen only with a non-moving station. Most mobile/portable users move around a little which probably would null out that first receiver and get into the better path. As of 2007 a "real" voter was installed on the System which takes care of that "stuck on noisy receiver" problem.

The System will sound close to simplex. This is a difficult task when you consider you will get repeated 3 times in Spokane and 2 more additional times for Central Washington. This is accomplished by making the receivers and transmitters flat and direct F.M. for response of 40 Hz to 4 KHz.

You probably noticed the repeater has a long tail (some folks call it hang-time). There are several reasons. Because of the (transparent) connections for the repeater functions there is a slight delay on first time the System comes up. If the System dropped out each time a user made a transmission the first word or two would be cut off. Once the Spokane part of the System is keyed up all transmissions go through quickly without anything cut off. Therefore, by keeping the System up with a long tail the System is transparent to most users. It also aids as a test for coverage out of town. It also discourages "kurchunking" which is keying up the repeater without identifying. The transmitter in Wenatchee does key up immediately, presently. Another reason is sometimes folks give (annoying) long calls to another because the called station might be scanning several frequencies; by having the repeater carrier up for a while their scanning will probably stop on SRG and be able to receive the call, thus, the user can avoid long calls.

The connection between some of the area coverage points uses a two channel, scanning repeater. When a signal comes in the transmitter frequency is steered for the proper traffic direction. This allows one Tx-Rx unit, duplexer line and antenna (sometimes one site unit rent). When linked to Seattle there are more linking repeaters used, another one being a scanning repeater as well. In between this are Hub stations used for connecting from East to West and back. These are transparent stations. They have no effect to you, the user. The only repeater you observe is the 147.80/20 or 144.85/145.45 frequencies. There are a lot of things happening when you key up, but as far as you are concerned it is ONE large repeater on the Eastside.

These connections cause some delay. One drawback with the scanners, it takes a about 1/4 second for it to come up completely. Therefore, users need give this time after keying up before talking. It's real easy to forget that when everyone's having a good time with snappy comments back in forth in a 'round table'. The only thing will happen the distant listener will just miss the first word. No big deal, unless the first word is a yes or no answer. With some practice, the user allows for this delay.

Users only need to change their mobile transmitter CTCSS (tone) when commuting across the state and stay on the same frequency of either .20 or .45. There is some overlap areas to be aware of. Present amateur standards don't allow high stability transmitters therefore, the overlap areas will be difficult to listen to. Attempts to minimize the areas left mainly in Lincoln County, Chelan County (up North) and one part of Adams County, I-90 mile post 206-191 area affected. Refer to the coverage map in the index. These affected areas change as much as 10% from weather propagation.

The repeater equipment is several brands, including Motorola, GE, Johnson and Midland. Most of the System, was designed and built by Karl. In 1994 he evaluated the first commercial controller in 1994. Later it was scrapped. The controller was good quality, just not designed for a flat audio System. There's another plan to add the 7th receiver for better mobile coverage in Pend Oreille County.

147.20 coverage is based on a +47 dbm (ERP) mobile,(50 watt, for math challenged readers) except for Spokane city limits, which is based on a +30 dbm (ERP) hand held. ERP means Effective Radiated Power. You take you transmit power out and multiply the power ratio of the antenna gain factor. Most mobile antennas are unity gain. Most hand held "rubber duck" antennas are a loss of 10:1 or -10 db, or worse.

The station control is configured for eight (user) input receivers. Starting with the bottom unit is the "local" 80 receiver on port 8. Next, above is some of the remote receivers listening at various sites. They take the remoted user input signals and feed them into the next panel above, the CTCSS panel, AKA, the decoder. The decoder is an 8-port "AND" gate, where is, the user signal has to be active in at least one receiver, with the correct tone. The left image shows an actual conversation in progress, while being aligned and tested. The yellow lights indicate carrier activity on seven of the eight-port decoder panel. The red lights indicate a valid (tone) decode. In this case would be the "Spokane" tone. The right image displays the tone decoders, with the logic board to the far right.

PM's are important part of running a repeater. Proper physical design consideration pays off for maintenance as well. The unit needs to be able to be "pulled" for easy access to the electronics inside. Being able to do this "hot" is a big plus. For example, a known user for that part of town was noisy and not getting into the repeater very well with his portable radio. During a non-scheduled PM, during an actual conversation in progress, was an easy task to pull and troubleshoot the decoder live and "hot". It was quickly discovered that port-6's tone decoder had an intermittent DIP switch, causing that (remote) receiver to be "ignored". With a quick switch "exercise" the contacts came back 100%. Within minutes the decoder panel was screwed back onto the 19" rack and operation as normal with port 6 now selected on the voter, as you can see on the image.

Another part of the repeater (System control) is timing of the complex switching and user habits. There are some delays on audio paths when accessing the repeater. A skilled operator will know how to work with this, especially on a "round table" going on. Here's a chart to display the various senereos and thoughts a user may have to deal with.

The MCP is powered by a 12v station battery made up of two 6-batteries. Although each battery is heavy this provides fair coverage during a long AC (grid) outage. On the left shows old battery bank since the '90's. Being end of life they were replaced with a smaller string, mainly due to cost restraints. The custom battery "box" has a (removable) shelf covers the battery to serve as a working bench for other tasks. There's a gap under the shelf for proper ventilation. The image on the right is a typical arraignment with the (good quality) charger, fuse protection (with cover), battery and other documentation such as a schematic of the PDU or battery maintenance checks.

For general information you can click on repeater operation in general or repeater operation for SRG.