The repeater is located at 34º 17' N 078° 58' W in grid square FM-14 on the New Hanover County communications tower near Flemington in the northwest corner of the county. It is the primary New Hanover County ARES repeater for training and during activations. Being on an emergency communications tower a generator is always available and switches on automatically should commercial power be lost.
A Peet Brothers 2000 weather system is interfaced with the repeater and is polled periodically for up to the minute weather information at our weather homepage. A CAT WX-1000 (SAME) weather receiver is also part of the system alerting hams and short wave listeners of severe weather in our area. The repeater consists of the following equipment:
- Micro Control Specialties MR-4 receiver
- Micro Control Specialties MT-4 exciter
- Henry C130AB power amplifier
- Andrews 7/8" heliax
- Decibel Products DB-224E antenna at 400 feet.
- Computer Automation Technology CAT-1000 controller
- Computer Automation Technology WX-1000 weather receiver
- Computer Automation Technology DR-1000 digital voice recorder
- Wacom WP-641 BPBR duplexers
- Astron RM-50 power supply
The repeater transmits a tone of 88.5 hz at all times to allow the use of tone squelch in high intermod areas of town. If needed a tone access of 88.5 hz is required to eliminate unnecessary interference. However the repeater is normally open to all. An open auto patch shares the phone line with the weather station. Should you attempt to use the auto patch and receive a message "phone line in use", please wait about three minutes and try it again.
Commands open to the public are as follows:
- 725* - to hear your signal as recorded at the repeater.
- 99 - to hear the present weather conditions at the site.
- 400 - to get the current time
- 375 - to test your radio's DTMF
- *xxx-xxx - auto patch access (x=phone number)
- # - to hang up the auto patch.
Since being placed on the air at its present location the repeater has only been off the air for about four months due to flood damage after Hurricane Floyd.
