As mentioned on the mailing list here we have a planned outage today at the main Tampa site will take HamWAN and our Tampa Repeaters offline until about 6-7 pm tonight.

Our Tampa GMRS Repeater on 462.575 has been updated with a separate voting receiver on the 467.725 D546 / NAC575 channel. This will run in parallel with the existing 467.575 receiver. Previously the single receiver in the repeater would scan, but this is not as quick as having two receivers. It was also possible that strong on channel interference would cause it to dwell on non-active channels. This would mean the first second of a transmission would be clipped.

We’ve fixed this by adding an additional Astro-Tac receiver which will vote for the strongest signal and use it. As part of this receiver pre-amp was reconfigured and we should expect 6 dB more gain in the receiver path. This should greatly enhance the performance of handhelds using this site.

We encourage all people to use the alternate input if your radio support it.