Beginning on Monday, September 2nd, the 2-meter repeater at 147.00 will require a CTCSS (or PL) tone from your radio to be able to transmit. Without this tone, the repeater will ignore any transmissions and will not rebroadcast them.

The CTCSS tone is 123.0 Hz. You must find the settings in your radio and turn on this tone in order to use the repeater.

The club is reluctantly doing this for two main reasons:

• There is increasing interference from a repeater on the same frequency in Mississippi. While talking to other hams at that distance is fun, it’s also annoying when we are trying to run a “net” or to participate in Skywarn severe weather events.
• There is regular interference of some type that keys the repeater randomly and frequently. While this may be some type of radio or electrical interference, it’s more likely that it is someone keying up a radio without identifying (as required by FCC regulations) and speaking. This is annoying and causes undue wear on the radio equipment.

This decision was debated for some time, but the time to implement it has come.

PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS INFORMATION OVER THE AIR ON THE REPEATER! This should help prevent some of the random interference.

If your radio is unable to produce the tone, try using the 146.98 repeater. It will remain completely open until similar circumstances force us to implement a tone there also.

And don’t forget that we have a 440MHz repeater on 443.850.