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Repeater Horror Stories

 

Repeater Horror Stories & Scary 2 Way stories for Halloween.
i love scary stories and this is a good time to recall them.
What drove you out of the 2 Way or repeater business?
Repeater nightmares?

My repeater was sabotaged by a chain saw !

30 Year Transmitter Hunt:?
Sherlock Solves a 30-Year Transmitter Hunt¡±, ,?

Paul? w0rw
 

I can't tell many of my stories as they may have had widespread coverage.? In the days when
gas was cheaper, T-hunting was more popular and large groups would participate, we found?
it important to learn the topography of your area and how signals reflect and propagate.?

On one hunt I had the opportunity to ride along with someone much more dedicated to the
hunt, who had built a rotating beam on the top of his car that spun around at approx 2 sec to
one revolution rate, and had fed a system of rheostats and signal strength to x and y inputs to
a scope so that it showed a 360 degree representation of the direct and reflected signal strengths.

He had become so adept with this setup, that he would always be able to be the first or at least
one of the first to locate the transmitter.? In fact he could drive to a high spot and from there, simply
drive to the transmitter location and do some final sniffing on foot.?

The scary part of this, often police and security guards and sometimes others would take an interest
in these suspicious activities and T-hunters were actually detained for questioning, sometimes at
gun point.

Once upon a time, I was sent to a certain site to service a repeater but I hadn't been there in a while
and forgot which room in the building.? I inadvertently opened the door to the next room and since it
didn't match the picture I remembered, I just shut the door and locked it and went to the right room.?
In less than 10 minutes a big fat helicopter approached the site and what looked like a fully equipped
swat team rappelled from several ropes to see who had blown the silent alarm.? Fortunately I was in
uniform and the vehicle was marked, so they asked for ID rather than shooting me on sight.?
Years later, there was an episode of 24, where the bad guys went to a site and shot some equipment
and waited for a service van to approach, instantly shot the service team dead with head shots and
stole the van and uniforms, and successfully breached the command center.? Fortunately that never
happened (to me) in real life, but there were many suspicious circumstances over the years to help
me maintain a high level of paranoia.
 

Wow that was scary.
What country did that last 'episode 24' happen in?
Paul w0rw
 

Hi all

On the subject of T-Hunts, a couple of decades ago a local club had a "fox hunt". When the first hunters showed at the hidden site, all they found was a large number of garbage bags filled with "green vegetation" and nobody to be seen. They picked up the TX and left quickly not wanting to stick around just in case.

The next morning all the police found was a very clean site with no garbage bags to be seen. One of the club members was a local constable and he probably reported it after a safe delay:)

Around here corn fields are often the site of "green plantations". The harvesters at this field probably had a surprise when a dozen or so cars appeared sporting a variety of antennas.

Burt VE2BMQ



w0rw wrote:

Wow that was scary.
What country did that last 'episode 24' happen in?
Paul w0rw
_._,_._,_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Groups.io Links:
 

Many many years ago worked for a MSS, and we were receiving a pulsing up and down the entire UHF band a growl. It was wiping out all of our Community repeaters and even some PS equipment. So we went searching for it leading us to a Military Installation. We attempted to gain entry by showing that the interference was being generated on base. We were turned around and later were told to forget about any further looking for it. Even the FCC and mother M from Chicago got involved and told us to forget it. About 2 months later it disappeared, never knew why.

This may go as the horror for someone else:
Many years ago we had issues with another repeater operator who put up a machine and put a taxi service on it. Apparently this was there method of clearing a channel for their use after the taxi service chased everyone off. It was located on a tall building downtown, our machine was maybe a mile or so away on another tall building. One of my techs (former military RF engineer) came up with a very interesting solution to clear this service off the channel. We found a 5hz chrystal and put it in a Micor TCXO then proceeded to tape that TCXO hidden within a few feet of the offending repeater. After about one week that repeater went silent and never came back.
It is very difficult to chase a signal that only appears when you are transmitting. The TXCO was swamping the front end of the repeater with a DFQ basically taking it off the air.

Now to as why I left 2-way radio:
Nexthell was very big in the mid 90's they were killing it with their service. I had at the time a 5 channel trunk system with 30 mile coverage and had about 300 units on the system. Back then you could charge each radio individually their time use, this was ok for mobiles, but the base always had overages. N came in and said we dont' do that and so I lost a few customers. I then went one for one with N and charged a flat fee of all units. N came back and said we will give you the radio's for free, so then I just let the system die a slow death. I was very happy to hear when they got bought out and shut the system down. Now with cell phones, it really doesn't matter there isn't any a real 2-way services left.
 

¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

In the early 1990s in Fairfax County, VA we had informal hidden transmitter hunts on 2 meter FM monthly that were lots of fun.? On one memorable hunt the fox was my friend KC3SV, Ed, now a silent key.? He was hiding in a wooded field across the road from 1000 Colonial Farm Road in Fairfax, VA.? The CIA found him in record time, and they were not amused.

73,

Tad Danley, K3TD
On 10/23/2022 12:39 PM, jb via groups.io wrote:

I can't tell many of my stories as they may have had widespread coverage.? In the days when
gas was cheaper, T-hunting was more popular and large groups would participate, we found?
it important to learn the topography of your area and how signals reflect and propagate.?

On one hunt I had the opportunity to ride along with someone much more dedicated to the
hunt, who had built a rotating beam on the top of his car that spun around at approx 2 sec to
one revolution rate, and had fed a system of rheostats and signal strength to x and y inputs to
a scope so that it showed a 360 degree representation of the direct and reflected signal strengths.

He had become so adept with this setup, that he would always be able to be the first or at least
one of the first to locate the transmitter.? In fact he could drive to a high spot and from there, simply
drive to the transmitter location and do some final sniffing on foot.?

The scary part of this, often police and security guards and sometimes others would take an interest
in these suspicious activities and T-hunters were actually detained for questioning, sometimes at
gun point.

Once upon a time, I was sent to a certain site to service a repeater but I hadn't been there in a while
and forgot which room in the building.? I inadvertently opened the door to the next room and since it
didn't match the picture I remembered, I just shut the door and locked it and went to the right room.?
In less than 10 minutes a big fat helicopter approached the site and what looked like a fully equipped
swat team rappelled from several ropes to see who had blown the silent alarm.? Fortunately I was in
uniform and the vehicle was marked, so they asked for ID rather than shooting me on sight.?
Years later, there was an episode of 24, where the bad guys went to a site and shot some equipment
and waited for a service van to approach, instantly shot the service team dead with head shots and
stole the van and uniforms, and successfully breached the command center.? Fortunately that never
happened (to me) in real life, but there were many suspicious circumstances over the years to help
me maintain a high level of paranoia.

 

My horror story...

I operate an "open system" GMRS repeater at a very good site in Joliet.? Antenna height is 500 ft. AGL. (FWIW, I also have a 900 MHz Amateur repeater co-located at this site.)? I listened to the frequency for a couple of MONTHS before deciding to put the station on the air - I wanted to ensure I wasn't going to interfere, because there are no coordinating bodies for GMRS.? I eventually installed my repeater - at that time, a 50W Micor Community Repeater (CR).? All was well.

The station was up about 2 years when - all of a sudden, in 2017 - another repeater appeared on the pair.? (See YouTube link below for a sample of the issue.) From what we could determine, the new machine had a large area of coverage (like mine) and was using both the freq pair (462.550) and PL (114.8) that I was. Nearly every time someone brought up my repeater, they also brought up the other one, rendering my repeater nearly useless.

So, I changed PL... but the problem didn't go away.? It followed me through 4 PL changes. (If you remember, the Micor CR had a PL card capable of holding up to 4 PL reeds. The station was capable of up to 16 PLs, but I only had one card.)? Well, I started buying reeds to try to find one that wouldn't interfere. We later determined the other station had a combination of 18 PLs *and* 8 DPLs activated in its controller.? I also tried to determine who owned the other machine, so we could come to some sort of amicable arrangement.? No joy... Nobody responded to any calls on either repeater regarding identity of the repeater owner.

The ID being transmitted by the other repeater was invalid - it was not in the FCC database.? Also, nobody ever seemed to use THAT machine on a regular basis.? Based on triangulation, we determined it was somewhere in downtown Chicago - possibly atop the Aon Building - but couldn't / didn't pursue it further.? After about 8 months, it went off the air as mysteriously as it first appeared. And it hasn't been heard of since. Speculation was, someone walked into a radio penthouse somewhere, saw the repeater was inoperable, and decided to reactivate it... and after learning about the interference, simply deactivated it as well.? It remains a mystery to this day as to where it was, and who put it up / took it down.

Mark - N9WYS / WQIV271?
 

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 12:52 PM, w0rw wrote:
Wow that was scary.
What country did that last 'episode 24' happen in?
Paul w0rw
I don't know how many countries "24" was available in.? I don't recall which episode it was either.? The series ran much longer
than it should have.? They jumped the shark when they blew up a nuclear bomb in LA.? Like "Homeland" jumped the shark
when they blew up their own headquarters and went way off the rails into foolish wishful thinking.? The main characters should
have been "managed" at a care facility.
 

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 08:10 AM, J Donovan wrote:
It is very difficult to chase a signal that only appears when you are transmitting.

This is very ingenuous... You get my Award for the effort.
Paul? w0rw
Chris Smart
 

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?

This is very ingenuous... You get my Award for the effort.

?

I think you mean genius ?

?
 

At 10/25/2022 06:40 AM, you wrote:



This is very ingenuous... You get my Award for the effort.



I think you mean genius

I think you mean ingenious
 

On a 'news gathering link' service I assisted running, basically a 150KHz wide FM repeater we found a pirate station trying to use it.
We had remote control of the settings and when not using it changed the output 25KHz CTCSS tone to something like 250HZ and 100KHz dev.

And on another ocassion a different station was trying to use the frequency. We rigged a system near their 'studio' receiving their transmissions, linked on a different band to the area we believed their band II transmitter was located and adding a lot of 50Hz (actually tapped off TX mains transformer) and rebroadcasting on original frequency. We thought the pirate station sounded really cool.

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