The 224.56 Packet Repeater

First in the Pacific Northwest!

Photo of 224.56 RF deck

The 224.56 repeater is located on Gold Mountain, west of Bremerton, Washington. Thanks to TV Station KCPQ for allowing us to place our repeater in their transmitter building. The antenna is mounted to their transmitter building at an approximate elevation of 1500' (450m) above sea level.
The repeater was built in the early '80's from a Midland 13-509 mobile radio, with the addition of an AEA PK-90 to act as the identifier. In the early 90's we added a home brew regenerator and an all-digital design of the True-DCD circuit to improve performance. Until the regenerator was added, the repeater would pass voice traffic, however with the level of packet traffic that the repeater was loaded with most of the time, this was not normally an effective (or fun) voice repeater!
The repeater was a popular local lan for AX.25 (unenhanced) traffic until TCP/IP became popular. Since then, the 224.56 repeater has been very popular for "backbone" activities, where higher speed systems are not available, and for serving those users not in range of one of the several simplex LAN's where TCP/IP is used.
The owners of the 224.56 repeater plan to replace the existing system with a 9600 bps packet repeater in the near future. Watch the SEATCP mail list (seen elsewhere on this web site) for up to date information.
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