Introduction:

    The call sign used at this site is SNE. This site is located in downtown Sault Ste. Marie near the International Bridge, it was originally started in January 2004 using an ADI transceiver and a magnetic mount antenna sitting on a metal shelf, output power was five watts. After the ADI transceiver, came the Motorola CM 300 and later the radio of choice, the CDM 1250. Later the Aprs equipment became active on November 2004. This site was intended to be the secondary site, however, because of it's proximately to the largest population of amateurs in this area, usage was greater then expected. This site has seen large amounts of money being spent for construction, upgrades and new equipment. There are currently eleven antennae being used, which has caused space congestion on the roof, fortunately a neighbor was kind enough to allow five antennae to be installed on his building to help solve this problem. A new means of feeding the cables through the roof was developed to shorten the length of each run by approximately twenty feet per feed line. Antenna height above average terrain is very low, therefore signal propagation is lacking, however this site is ideal for connection to the Internet as high bandwidth connections with low latency are easily obtained in this area.

Equipment:

    This site contains three interfaces, two for the main VoiP networks, and one for Aprs. Echo Link can be connected on any of three link computers.  Purchased interfaces are used for the serial port conversion and homebuilt interfaces are used for mixing audio and controlling the transceivers and fans.

    Backup power is supplied by four uninterruptible power supplies  and two seventy two amp hour sealed lead acid batteries for the radios. A fifty amp rack mount Astron power supply feeds all radios as well as trickle charging the two lead acid batteries. For approximately one year the UHF repeater was located at this site, using a Motorola DeskTrac, later it was transferred to SNT.

      For years amateurs in this area have discussed the idea of setting up a six meter repeater, all agreed the task would be very expensive. Not having any experience with six meter FM signals, no one knew if the coverage would be sufficient.  Another main concern was that of interference from the local channel two television transmitter. Of course, it was uncertain if the local users would support such an idea. It has been said that approximately twenty local operators have six metre equipment, however, the activity is limited to SSB. The SN Cluster has decided to experiment with a temporary six metre repeater in order to determine if activity will warrant a permanent setup. The purpose of this repeater is to bring distant stations into this area, and to supplement the repeater activity, a worldwide linked network will be connected as well.

     The most expensive part of the repeater is the duplexer.  A duplexer is not needed if the transmitted signal is weak enough to have no desense of the receiver. Reducing the signal strength can be accomplished by physically separating the two antennae. To solve this problem, the antennae were located fifteen miles apart, instead of using a coax cable to connect the antenna, a RF link was used.  This repeater consists of two radios, two verticals, and one beam antenna.

    Here is how it works; the repeater receive frequency is 052.450 and the transmit frequency is 053.450. The receiver is located in Heyden at the SNS site. The antenna is a quarter wave at the fifteen foot level. The transmitter is located at SNB, using a folded dipole approximately thirty feet high.  The Link between the two sites uses VHF. The output of the transmitter is only five watts, so if you can hear it, then you can work it!

    Local stations wishing to listen to the output of the six meter repeater can tune to 147.450 and / or 053.450, this is where a multiband radio will be an asset. Input frequencies are 147.450 and / or 052.450. The PL tone for the input and output is 100.0 Hz. This repeater became operational June 24 2006.

  Another change was made to the six metre repeater in May of 2011 with a change in location of the receive antenna to the SNS site. This change increased the antenna height by four hundred feet, greatly increasing the receiver sensitivity. About the same the the cross band radio was replaced by a GE Mastr Exec receiver, also increasing sensitivity and reducing out of band interference. More info about the six metre repeater can be found on the SNB page.

 Weather:

    A weather station was installed at this site in April 2007, the weather data  was transmitted on 433.100 and 144.390 megahertz , on the internet via the Aprs network, and to this web page via live updates every twenty minutes. This is the second weather station to ever exist in this area, both stations are operated by this cluster. During the winter months the rain collector is covered to prevent breakage. During the winter months the barometer power failed. In 2010 the weather station was disconnected because of more sensor failures. In Sept 2011 another station was added to the cluster, see the SNB page for more info.

    The UHF repeater was taken off the air in November 2007 as the duplexer was lent to a local radio company to solve an emergency that arose. A new replacement duplexer manufactured by Comprod arrived In April 2008.  The original repeater came equipped with a built in controller which lacks a lot of features compared to modern controllers. While waiting for the duplexer, a new controller was ordered. In April 2010 the UHF repeater was moved, see the SNT page for more info. Later all UHF antennae were removed from this site as the low elevation makes continued financial expenditure in the seventy centimeter band fruitless. UHF repeaters now exist at SMT and SNB where elevation is higher.

    This site had a transmitter failure on December 25 2006, the output of the Motorola transceiver decreased to one watt. This failure precipitated purchasing a  better radio with a larger heat sink. The new radio took a long time to arrive, eventually the radio was purchased and programmed. The interface had to be rewired to accommodate the new connector pin configuration. Purchasing and programming the radio took time, which resulted in the main transmitter being off the air for approximately one month. Eventually the old radio was repaired and is still located at the site, it is now a backup for the main radio, very few sites can boast of a spare transceiver waiting to be used! The previous radio was only one year old when it failed, the new radio has a heat sink twice as large as the old radio, and interesting enough, the new radio cost twice as much! With the large heat sink and the continuous operating fan, the radio stays very cool.

    On October 06 2007 this site experienced severe electrical problems due to a very bad electrical storm that sweep through the city at approx 05:00 am. The storm caused a massive failure of the Internet Service for business and residential users in the city. The electrical surge damaged pumps causing flooding and destroying credit card teller machines as well as telephone lines. The Trans Canada Highway north of the city was closed due to the road being washed out. Here is the list of items damaged.

-One business telephone was dead, upon troubleshooting it was determined that a phone was destroyed.

-The modem supplied by the Internet Service Provider was destroyed.

-The four port router was destroyed, but a four port switch was not.

-The high speed Internet connection was dead for three days after the storm.

 One keyboard that was connected to the Aprs computer,  printed strange characters regardless of the keys being pressed,  and a dual port serial card was also destroyed. The terminal node controller was useless in the transmit mode, although it will accept commands, this may be related to the transmitter being stuck in transmit and the com port it was connected to, was destroyed. The weather station would not receive data from the sensors, luckily disconnecting the power and reprogramming the processor brought this back to life.

  On another computer which was responsible for the eQSO link, the computer itself was not effected, but the interface took a beating, three chips replaced, to restore transmit  audio, and receive audio was also effected. The fault was traced to the on board audio card. When the troubleshooting started the interface was stuck in Tx and Rx at the same time! The audio and switching sections were the most susceptible to damage. The on board sound card had to be removed and a new external card installed. This card has less audio gain then the old card, but readjustments to the external amp brought the levels back to normal.

 Another computer, which was just purchased one week prior, would not start. The computer shop determined  the on board video card was destroyed. The decision was made to replace the entire board, rather then troubleshoot other problems and consequently waste more time. The hard drive was not damaged, nor was any of the chips.

 Interestingly, nothing had any physical damage. All electrical devices were protected with surge protectors and expensive UPS's. The Internet feed did not have any protection on it. It is without doubt the Internet cable was the pathway into the computer room and from there through all the computers that were connected and powered up.  The antennae were not damaged. The dial up Internet connection did not fail, and it was used to test the computers and send Email to keep people informed.

 Because the Aprs computer had failed, weather data to this web page and to the on air Aprs network, and of course the Internet Aprs network ceased. As of October 09, weather data was again streaming to this page, however the Digital Repeater was off line until the next day. The new computer was also restarted and became operational on this date, with a new mother board, all seems back to normal.

The new computer had a new secondary cloned drive installed, to protect the main drive. The gateway computer now also has an operational cloned drive as well.

The fifty amp DC power supply and back up batteries were unaffected.

The six metre repeater was never off the air.

 At this time. SNE was considered to be the main site, and the best means of restoring operation was to remove equipment from the SNT site which receives less traffic, and install that equipment at SNE. Even with this method of replacement, isolated operations remained effected for some time.  This was the first electrical failure ever to occur at this site. Equipment failure, no matter what the cause, is always a major set back. It is difficult to move forward with system expansion when extra time, money and effort has to be spent just to maintain the current operating status.

The eQSO system was a large part of this network prior to January of 2009, after that date it was made clear future improvements of that program would not take place, so this system had to move to other programs in an effort to keep pace with changes in communications technology. From that date forward this cluster decided to revert to Echo link which was how it all started.

 As of 2011 an Echolink simplex link and an Aprs digital repeater are the two active networks. No UHF repeaters exist at this site.

The link to SNT now uses a three element beam instead of a vertical, this has increased signal strength to SNT,  and with the overlapping coverage of the other sites, no lack of access has been noticed after changing from a omni pattern to a directional pattern.