We added an extension to this system in Greenville, Tx (about 50 miles NE of Dallas) located on the roof of the local hospital. We had an input on 426 with a beam for the Dallas feed and on 43x? to allow local crossband repeat to the 900 mHz band. We later installed a 1296 input when a radar was installed at Majors Field in Greenville. We would switch from the Dallas feed to the local feed when the weather became more local to the Greenville area. We did ID the 900 mHz output every 10 minutes, but when we had bad weather in the area, we did not allow any local repeat operations through the ATV repeater. The repeater was TT controlled through a 440 receiver, which selected the input frequency and turned the system on/off.
73 - Jim W5ZIT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was in a group that operated a 426 MHz ATV repeater (transmitter) for over 10 years in Dallas (1980's), whose initial purpose was the "rebroadcast" of color weather radar from a local TV station for mobile storm spotters. This was well before the days of the Internet providing free and easy access to their weather radar images as they do today. Back then, it was a big deal to have the radar image in your car as you storm spotted. We got the video from the TV station, beamed it up to the top of a building on 1.2 GHz, downconverted and then fed all of this into an ATV transmitter/amplifier to a 5 dB omni gain antenna atop a 73 story building, the highest in Dallas. We controlled the system via phone line at the station. We eventually shut down the system after Internet images were becoming easy to acquire and we eventually gave up our cheap rented location. We knew the FCC was aware of the system from the first, as we approached the local FCC office in Dallas with our idea and they said "Great idea". We took that as a "yes" and the rest is history. The system was only active during severe storm times and regularly scheduled RACES training nets. We never heard of anyone mentioning that the system was indeed in the broadcasting mode for over a decade. Roger W5RD __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
