I’ve been listening to the local repeaters around Portland Oregon. While I go for walks and while I’m doing menial tasks for my job I like to listen in. The other day there was a group of her telling dad jokes. As a father of two I had something to contribute. Unfortunately when I went to try to go speak it turns out that I was not correctly configured for the repeater. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Then when I got home from my walk I decided to look into the settings. It turns out that I had incorrectly configured the settings for the repeater. As I dug into it I realized that this was actually a bug in the software I was using. The problem was is that the speaking frequency was programmed to be -0.600kHz under the listening frequency when the repeater was configured to +0.600. 

I was literally speaking into the ether while expecting to be chatting with these people. I looked on repeat her book and the repeater was currently configured. Then I went into my programming software saw that when I queried for that repeater the problem came out.

How did I fix this? Well, it turns out that I had to manually export the repeater information from repeater book. Then I manually imported the information into my programming software. There seems to be an import bug for the automatic web-based import.

What did I learn?

Out of this I realize that I should be keeping my own list of repeaters and frequencies separate from those that would be automatically imported via my programming software. I now keep a CSV file that contains the settings that all of my radios maintain. In that file I also have a very special frequency which I have found to be often free that I will use for my emergency comes with my family should there be an emergency. I’ll read an article about that later and how I found the frequency but for now, the Takeaway is to keep your own list of frequencies so that you can keep all of your in order.

How do you tell if your Amateur Radio Repeater is correctly configured?

I learned through a random YouTube video of someone programming a radio that most repeaters will actually do a call back if you try to keep up the repeater. This sometimes comes back as Morse code, or it comes back as an audible message to you that says the repeaters information or maybe even just the temperature or time of day. This was super helpful and now I am able to go through and actually verify all of the configurations settings for all of the repeaters that I use.