On May 30, 2008, at 11:18 PM, Joe Westbrook wrote:
One final note, we can work repeaters any time on 146.340 / 94 if we wanted to.
Actually Joe, you only do that at the pleasure of the guy who built the repeater, too. Even terrestrial repeaters are taken for granted. Badly.
A modern terrestrial repeater engineered and built correctly is about a minimum of a $3000 investment by someone or some organization, and that doesn't include the many hours of time to get it right.
Maybe using terrestrial repeaters to make your point, wasn't such a good idea... those of us that build them know what it's like to be mistreated and taken for granted, just like the AMSAT folks?
Anyway... speaking of terrestrial stuff that's taken for granted... NASA Audio is available for the duration of the mission for your "listening pleasure" from IRLP Reflector 9877.
We just dealt with an uplink problem and it's sounding good right now... the uplink node automatically unkeys every 3 minutes to keep your IRLP node from timing out, and the Reflector is set up "listen only" so you can connect with any IRLP node in any configuration and it'll work... in other words, a number of "behind-the-scenes" folks did it right... again like AMSAT?
:-)
Enjoy!
-- Nate Duehr, WY0X nate@natetech.com