The Cypress Mountain remote base was constructed and installed in 1994. It resides at about 2800 feet above sea level high above Cambria, California. The equipment has not changed much over the years, fundamentally consisting of a primary 220mHz transmitter and receiver and currently using an Arcom 210 repeater controller.
Also attached to the controller are two tranceivers. The first is a Kenwood TM271A which is configured to be a frequency agile remote base on two meters, The other radio is a 440 transceiver configured to be a half-duplex link to the La Panza Mountain remote base.
The controller allows for any or all of these radios to be in use separately or at the same time as desired. Control functions are sent via DTMF or as scheduled within the controller for autonomous control.
The remote base is intentionally low power on 220mhz as a means to conserve the power supply which is a 100AH AGM battery. The battery is maintained by a 180 watt solar panel array via a Morningstar - ProStar 15A PWM solar charge controller.
The antennas are affixed to a short Rohn 25G tower adjacent to the radio "vault".
The La Panza remote base was constructed and installed in 1994/95 timeframe. It resides at about 3900 feet above sea level high above the Carrizo Plain, California.
The original equipment consisted of a GE Exec II configured as a 440 mHz repeater and a Kenwood TM-2530 two meter tranceiver which I modified to be frequency agile. The controller for the two meter radio was a home brew design consisting of a Micro Chip Technology 16 series microcontroller. An assembly language program was written to read and write instructions to the TM-2530 along with telemetry tones, affording a true frequency agile remote base.
Some years later the GE Exec 2 was replaced by a pair of 440 hamtronics boards and a LinkCom repeater controller. The homebrew controller was then replaced with a Doug Hall controller and Kenwood TM-241 two meter radio. and more recently with an Arcom 210 controll. A TM-271A is used as a remote base on two meters and it has been modified to allow memory scanning start and stop functions remotely using DTMF commands. In this way,a s many as 100 memory channels can be scanned and monitored remotely.
The system has a power supply very similar to the Cypress Mountain installation. All equipment is contained in an underground vault consisting of concrete and diamond plate.
The Paso Robles remote was constructed and installed around 2010 and is located at my home which is about 1100 feet above sea level. It consist of a 440 repeater with a 2 meter frequency agile remote base, very similar in desgin to the other two remote bases. As this repeater enjoys power from the grid, its output is 35 watts out of the duplexer on 440.The primary antenna is atop a 40 foot Rohn 25G.
In October 0f 2021, I built and installed an Allstar node which is attached to the repeater. It uses a Raspberry PI4 using the HamVOIP image along with Supermon for control. The interface from the PI4 to the repeater controller is a USB RIM Lite as designed and built by Scott Zimmerman over at Repeater Builder.com. I highly recommend his products.
