Colorado Repeater Association, Inc.

The 447.575 IRLP/Echolink Node is not available for a couple weeks starting 5/12/2013.  This is a planned outage while the Internet connection is moved to a new location.  If you have questions, you can email us at cra@w0cra.org.

[Update 5/10/2013]  On Friday, 5/10, Dave, WA1JHK, and Matt, KB0KZR, installed a spare antenna and feedline on the Lee Hill tower.  This fixed the repeater.  During an upcoming trip, the repeater crew will troubleshoot the issue with the repeater's main antenna.

[Update 5/9/2013, WA1JHK]  On Thursday evening, May 9th, Dave WA1JHK and Lexi (his soon-to-be-a-ham XYL), travelled to the club's Conifer repeater site to make a change to the 147.225 antenna system.  147.225 is now transmitting from a tower-mounted spare antenna.  This change has been made to test if the noise has now been eliminated from the repeater.  If so, this narrows down the cause of the noise to the antenna it was using or to some equipment that was recently mounted on the tower near that antenna.  Please send all reports o

[Update 2/2/2013]

The 447.575 repeater is back on the air!  Thanks to Doug, K2AD, and Mike, K0GUR, traveled to the club's Squaw Mountain repeater site to repair our 447.575 repeater.  This site is normally not accessable in the winter without over-the-snow equipment.  The warm weather allowed them to drive up in a 4-wheel drive Jeep with minimal problems.  They replaced the failed repeater power amplifier with a spare and returned the repeater to service.  Thanks guys!

[Original Post 12/13/2012]

[Update 2/2/2013] The 145.160 repeater is back on the air!  Dave, WA1JHK, Barry (N0KV) and Lexi (No Call Yet) traveled to the club's Cheyenne Mountain repeater site.  They replaced the repeater's intermittent power amplifier with the repaired power amplifier returning the repeater to service. Thanks for your efforts!

[Update 12/12/2012]  Replacement hardware preparation continues.  We're planning a trip sometime in the next few weeks to perform this repair.

[Update, 2/2/2013, WA1JHK]

Today we crossed two more items off the list below.

[Update, 1/27/2013, WA1JHK]

The 147.225 change has been installed to mitigate the noise when the noise is intermittent.  We still need to track down the noise to eliminate it for good.  We'll look forward to hearing from any volunteers comfortable working in 0-degree weather on a tower that want to help find the noise.  Also, the new IRLP node has been built and is in final testing.  We will install it shortly.

[Original post, 1/6/2013, WA1JHK]

[11/17/2012] The 447.575 IRLP Node has been repaired and is back on-line.

[11/3/2012] We have a temporary, underpowered PC running the node while we build up a new one.  This work is underway.  In the meantime, expect intermittent operation.

[10/19/2012] The part arrived, fixing the radio.  Now we've discovered that the parallel port circuitry on the PC motherboard has been damaged.  A replacement PC is being acquired and programmed.

[Update:] The link is still down.  Testing on the hardware is continuing and going well.  We don't yet have a scheduled date for installation.

[2/27/2012:] Users have been hearing a weak signal on 147.225/145.160/224.980.  After a little troubleshooting we discovered that the link from 145.460 to the rest of the 147.225 System is not working properly.  We have disabled the link for now.

I suppose it's somewhat obvious since you're reading this that the new CRA website is now the one you will see when you go to www.w0cra.org.  What you're seeing is called a Content Management System, a more efficient way of delivering both stable and changing content to users.  The underlying software driving the site is Drupal.  (For those of you that are curious, you can read more at www.drupal.org.) 

On Sunday, 2/26/2012, Dave, WA1JHK, and Doug, K2AD, traveled to the club's Conifer Mountain Site to investigate issues with noise on 147.225 and poor sensitivity on 53.050.  Here's a summary of what we found: