443.450+
This is an open repeater located in South Nashville. It has been put on the air by a group of friends that enjoy computing and ham radio.
The repeater is an open IRLP node, so feel free to to use it.
The repeater is cobbled together with various commercial and homebrew boards, modules, and accessories.It has some neat features such as a homebrewed board, using a 555 timer, for extended carrier. CTCSS is dropped about 3.5 seconds before carrier is dropped. Audio quality could be better, but it would take a complete rework of the controller and exciter to improve it. This is our first effort, so please cut us some slack ;)
There have been a couple of challenges in getting this system on the air. The largest one being the use of a Mobile Mastr II. We have found that there is a spurious signal that is radiated in the Mastr II exciter when it is operating in the 443 MHz region. This signal does not come out the RF output, but is radiated from the board itself. After about a year of attempting to figure out how to "cure" this problem, a radical step was taken. We completely isolated the exciter from the receiver by placing it in the Controller's 19" rackmount case. This solved all of the noise we were getting on weak signals and the intermittent activity of the repeater "curchunking" itself :) Hope this helps someone else that has the same problem with a converted Mastr II mobile.