While COVID may have reduced work party sizes we adjusted plans and still got a lot done for the 2020 Summer mountaintop maintenance season. Fall and winter are upon us, so now we turn attention to our repeaters that are accessible year-round.
Colorado Springs
Our big push for this winter is to improve the Colorado Springs repeater system to increase its reliability and provide redundancy.
- Voting receivers: The Cheyenne repeater site has great coverage, but is a crowded site, so we do have some intermod issues. Our plan is to add one or more voting receivers in the area to increase signal quality when available, much like the Denver voting receiver system
- Install an upgraded repeater controller located on Cheyenne Mountain: This controller is needed to support receiver voting. In addition, rather than sending all Colorado Springs traffic to the remote Denver “master” controller, complete repeater control operations will be delivered locally from the Cheyenne Mountain site.
- Redundant microwave link to our main system hub: The link from Denver to Colorado Springs is through two microwave link sites. if either of those sites has issues, Colorado Springs becomes unlinked. A redundant link gives us two paths for the signal to link back to our main system hub
- Backup power: While the Colorado Springs site has good backup power, the link sites between Colorado Springs and the rest of the system does not. This effort is ensuring all link sites (primary and backup) have backup power as well.
Estimated cost for these upgrades are just over $2,500. Your donations can be earmarked for this project to improve the reliability of the second busiest repeater in the system. We appreciate all donations to the Colorado Connection repeaters Inc. Your donation is tax deductible, please check with your tax advisor. We will use funds in excess of the amount needed to go toward our other system improvement projects.
