The 6m repeater has been experiencing a hum on the receiver for quite a while. The cause, so far, has eluded us but we were reluctant to take it off the air completely.
A pair of Motorola CDM750 mobile radios in the correct band were made available to us so these were tuned up on the repeater pair and an interfacing cable and mounting tray were fabricated after Christmas. The first try at installing the "NEW" repeater did not work as the signals coming out of the radios did not match the older unit. A solution was found and implemented and the "NEW" repeater went on the air today, March 16, 2020. VE3ODR was the first to check it out from Washago. If you have equipment for 6m FM try it out and give us some feedback.
Had a minor flood at the VE3LSR site this past week. The rains and melting, coupled with the frozen ground saw us mopping up another 80 litres of water from the floor today.
Fortunately the water alarm we installed a few years ago notified us by email and VA3VD organised a cleanup. There was no damage due to the flood to any radio or computer equipment but exercise was had by both Dave (VA3VD) and Chuck (VA3SD).
We have a new plan for this summer that will involve some digging. We will let you know when to show up at the site!
The Wet/Dry Vacuum we used to collect the water from the floor decided to quit during this latest exercise, so we are on the lookout for anyone with a surplus wet/dry vacuum, preferably in the 5gallon size the we can use at the repeater site. We need to leave it there so that any of the responsible people can respond when we get an alarm. Let us know if you have one that we can use. Email us at
As many of you will know, the Procomm Net has been suffering with packet loss causing some of the transmissions to be garbled and unintelligible. Some of the more technical people involved will be trying a new hub to connect the Procomm Net repeaters this coming Thursday March 28, 2019. Instead of connecting to node 2248 they will be using node 2200. Our system automatically connects the UHF repeater to node 2248 just before 8:00 pm so we will try to manually effect the change just after it connects. An assessment will be done after the net to see what improvements, if any, are noticed and to determine next steps. Please be patient as we try to properly diagnose the issues.
The following regulation indicates we, as amateur radio operators, retain an exemption to the Hand Held Devices portion of the Distracted Driving Legislation until January 1, 2021. It is suggested that all amateurs keep a copy of their license as well as a copy of this regulation in their vehicle.
The regulation can be found here.
LSR's ISP was in the process of cleaning up their IP space, and requested we update our IP address to a new area. We happily obliged, and went through the processes required. There was very little down time identified and the process went generally smoothly.
While tackling this process, our technical admin team took the opportunity to put additional measures in place to enhance security and spam prevention - We added DKIM and DNSSEC services (and fixed a few bugs while at it). This should help with ensuring email from LSR gets to where they need to be.