Wichita Amateur Radio Club, Inc.
WØSOE 146.790 Repeater
The 79 repeater is located in
Derby, Kansas
. The call sign is WØSOE. It is one of three repeaters
owned and operated by the Wichita Amateur Radio Club.
IMPORTANT NOTE: as of this 14th Feb 2008, the 79 machine is down for an unknown period, due to issues
at the site. We will update this site as circumstances change.
Thanks to Repeater Technician David Hagood NØYKG for the description and pictures, and to
Grid Editor Kent Stutzman KBØRWI for formatting help. Kent has also assembled these pictures on his
photo web page.
The report below is also available as a PDF file.
Welcome back WØSOE-79
By David Hagood NØYKG
Well, the WARC Derby repeater, also known as WØSOE-79, is back on the air. I'd like to give everyone in
WARC a quick look at what went on, and who we have to thank.
The Past:
First of all, let's recapitulate what went before, so that we know how we got to where we are now. The 79
machine had been living quietly in a building located on the tower site south of Derby for over a decade,
along side of a pair of 150MHz paging transmitters owned by First Page, Inc. We had been given tower
space and free electric power by the owner of the tower, and when Southwestern Bell took the site over we
had an agreement with them for things to continue. The site really wasn't all that fancy - a concrete
cinderblock building with a concrete slab for a roof and a concrete pad for the floor. Two windows, one
blocked with a board, one with a window air conditioning unit in it, and a door completed the picture. Not
fancy, but a repeater doesn't need a fancy building.
The Present:
However, there were issues: the concrete was not painted on
the inside, and as the years went on, the tarpaper on the roof
began to wear away, and the paint on the outside began to
crack. Water would seep through the cinderblock and
collect on the floor. The air conditioning unit died, and with
no ventilation the water would build up.
Illustration 1: Standing water in the site
Trash - broken equipment, old boxes of "stuff", and other
detritus built up on the site, and wasn't hauled off. It really
wasn't the most pleasant place to be, and I (NØYKG) always
wanted to clean the place up, but I didn't want to do
anything that would be perceived as intruding on the
equipment of the paging company - after all, they were
paying to be there, we weren't, and I didn't want to be a bad neighbor.
Last year (2006), the paging company contacted the repeater control operator Al (KBØSGY) and indicated
that they felt it would be the neighborly thing for WARC to replace the air conditioning unit. This was
approved by the board, but it was late enough in the season that, rather than putting the unit in place only
to weather the winter, it was decided to buy the AC unit on the end-of-season specials, and store it out at
the site still in its box, and put it in place this year.
Sometime around March, after a normal Kansas thunderstorm, I received a call from Al that the repeater
was signaling that it was on battery power, and would I check it out. I went out to the site and found that
while we were still in operation, the two paging transmitters were off-line, and the circuit breakers to their
outlets were tripped. As a good neighbor, I tried to reset the breakers for the paging equipment, and the
breakers immediately tripped again - the pagers' power supplies had been fried.
16th June 2007, John NØUBQ and I went out to the site to put the AC into place. We found the doorknob
bashed off the door, and located around the side of the building. I couldn't explain that by any natural
phenomenon: somebody had done that. However, upon inspecting the building, nothing was missing -
including the AC unit, still in its box. I don't have a good explanation why somebody would climb over or
slip through a chain link fence with barbed wire on the top, bash the knob off a building, and then do
nothing else.
Illustration 3: 79 Site door, missing exterior knob
Illustration 2: Location of knob
John and I proceeded to put the AC unit into place, and I informed Al that he needed to call the paging
company about the damage to the building.
I also noticed that the paging equipment was still off-line. This surprised
and worried me - if your pager isn't up serving pages you aren't making
money, so to leave them off-line for a month meant something was up.
On 3rd July, I got a call from Al that the site was down. There was no
power, and the battery that was on the site to provide backup power was
flat. Upon going out to the site, this is what we saw:
Illustration 4: Paging company feedlines are gone
Illustration 6: Power meter red-tagged by power company
Illustration 5: Breaker panel, conduit, and outlets missing
Illustration 7: Damaged outlet box
This is serious: it looks like the paging company came in and removed
their equipment and antennas from the tower, and somebody (not
necessarily the paging company) came in and ripped out the breaker
panel, removed all the electrical outlets and light switches (save the
electrical outlet for our equipment and for the air conditioner), and some
of the conduit.
This left WARC with a serious problem - we could not just replace the missing gear and go on as though
nothing had happened. First, as the site was not secure, it was decided to remove the repeater to a safe
location (my garage). It was decided to have John KFØM call the tower company (as he is the trustee for the
repeater - it is his name which appears on the FCC paperwork, and he is ultimately responsible for the
repeater). We didn't want multiple people contacting the tower owners and confusing the issue.
The WARC board and the WARC technical committee began making plans for what to do:
- The worst case scenario would be if the tower owners told us to take a hike: we would have to try
to locate another location for the repeater.
- The next best case would be if the tower owner said "we will let you fix the electrical and put it into
your name". This, however, would represent an ongoing expense for the repeater, and a drain on
the club's treasury.
- The best possible case (who are we kidding, the dream case) would be for the tower owner to say
"We'll fix that for you, we will let you have free electricity, and let you stay." Yeah, as if we could
get that lucky, the pessimist in me said.
We contacted the tower operators, American Tower. The person responsible for our tower manages
something like 300 sites, over a three state area. He had never been to our site since American Tower took it
over. He came out and looked it over with John KFØM, and then called the police to file a "copper theft"
report. He then told John that American Tower would have their electrical contractor repair the damage,
restore power, and would allow us to clean up and remain at the site and provide power to us free of
charge - in other words the best possible case scenario. American Tower is glad to have somebody who
will be "keeping an eye on the place"!
So I want to everybody to take a moment to give a big round of applause to American Tower!
OK, so, now comes the hard part: cleaning up the site and painting it. On 4th August 2007, John NØUBQ,
John KFØM, and I NØYKG went out to the site. We hauled off the detritus in the building, pressure washed
the inside of the site to remove all the dirt and loose salt build-up, put a lock and hasp on the door, and put
down a first coat of DryLok on the inside. Keep in mind that we were working inside a concrete building
with no air conditioning, in Kansas, in August. It was not exactly what I would call "fun".
The next weekend, on 11th Saturday, John NØUBQ, two of his co-workers Donald Low NØUBI and Tom
Schmitzer WØSTI and I NØYKG went back out to put down a second coat of DryLok on the site, a coat of
roofing compound on the roof, and generally cleaned up the area around the site.
Later that evening I went back out and installed a grounding block:
Illustration 8: Grounding plate. The site's formerly unused grounding strap is soldered to the brass plate, and the
wires bond the plate to the electrical service and to our equipment
Illustration 9: Nice clean walls
Illustration 10: View from outside. Notice how much brigher it is, even with the lights off
Illustration 11: Where there was a board across two cinderblocks, now there is a proper shelf.
Sunday 12th August Leland Bittle NØZVB, Wayne Bittle KBØSYF,
and Judy Bittle KBØTIK moved the repeater from my garage back
out to the site. After lunch, Leland and I put the site back on the
air.
OK, so, life is good, all the hard work is done, and we can just sit back and relax, right?
WRONG! Let's look at the outside of the building, shall we?
Illustration 12: Notice the peeling paint.
Illustration 12.5: Another view.
Illustration 13: We need to put an ice shield over the AC, or it won't last the winter.
Illustration 14: We really ought to do something about the cable entry, to keep the bugs out.
Illustration 15: The door is more rust than metal.
Illustration 16: We need to replace this rotten out board with something better.
Now, you might say "So what? Why should we spend any more money and time on this?"
Well, if we don't clean the site up and maintain it, it will get nasty again - and as one of the people who
has to go out to care for our equipment, I really don't like dealing with it.
Also, by putting forth the effort to clean the site up, we send a message to American Tower: "Hams are
good neighbors. You want them on your sites!" Tower space is hard to get and getting harder all the time -
don't you want to give the tower owners a reason to work with us?
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