My HF Winlink station is divided between two setups that can operate from my home and a remote setup located on Rabbit Hill in Georgetown. Normally one operates here with one as a spare and one at Rabbit Hill but the one at Rabbit Hill developed problems recently.
I have rebuilt the Rabbit Hill station and am burning it in here for a while before taking it back to Rabbit Hill and would appreciate people pounding on it - let me know if something doesn’t seem right!
It runs PACTOR or VARA HF and handles all the 80M and 40M frequencies for my station – those are the frequencies I am requesting additional pounding on.
Thanks!
73 Tom N5TW
What are the Freqs for the station?
Thx.
Dom, N5TCB.
They should show up under the N5TW station if you update the channel list. The center frequencies are 3596.0, 7066.0, 7091.5 and 7102.0 KHz. Subtract 1.5 to get the dial frequency.
It was still running this morning but noticed the power would drop to the radio if I wiggled the power connections – turned out to be this cheap Chinese replacement power cable for my TS-590S. Fixing that and doing a Windows update had the station off from 6:00 to 6:53AM
Apologies to at least K6KUF who I saw trying a PACTOR connect in that interval.
Tom N5TW
The freqs are in the winlink catalog/directory/whatever you call the session address book , station n5tw . I’ll be happy to send some traffic your way Tom 
Regards,
Jeremy
I want to thank everyone for helping to beat on this setup! I am now in the process of returning all the gear including a new computer and replaced UPS batteries to the Rabbit Hill site.
73 Tom N5TW
Hah. Oh, Tom has backup power…
If I remember correctly, the dual Power Wall got him through the entire week of the ice storm with no power, nearly, with only the last night spent in the Tesla to keep warm.
I can’t remember what we did for the .64 repeater way back when, but I’m sure it was less than the N5TW QTH. Someone will remember from that project, but it was sufficient for most scenarios.
~AA5JE
We have 4 repeaters linked with Allstar and that gives us some redundancy although we need all of them to cover the county. Our principal repeater and our repeater in Taylor, Texas have 100AH LiFePO4 batteries powered by a Victron power supply that can recharge it at 30A – so they can recover in a hurry. These repeaters are set at 5W through a Henry repeater that puts out 70W – these power amplifiers are NOT battery backed up so don’t add to the load. It should run 5 days with transmission duty cycle managed.
BUT, That principal repeater and our other two are located at hospitals and plugged into their red plug generator power backed up power.
So we have defense in depth! Before moving the main repeater to the hospital, we had 3 100W solar panels connected in and they could power that system indefinitely – an hour of sunlight recharging at 30A buys a lot of run time!
73 Tom N5TW
The repeater systems failed miserably in that storm. That lead us to the system I described for Patricia.
Tom N5TW
The repeater systems failed miserably in that storm. That lead us to the system I described for Patricia.
Tom N5TW
My radio stuff was up and running through the ice storm. The thick coating of snow then ice eliminated solar production for nearly two weeks but we had 4 PowerWalls (now 5) and a small generator that ran the radio room, the refrigerator, the entertainment stuff, a few lights and our power hungry ISP with their 3 microwave dishes on my towers. House heating with sub-zero temperatures will run Power Walls down in a hurry so we had the house thermostats set at 50F.
A broken limb that fell across the power line feed to the house appeared to cut power but investigation showed it was a broken neutral line. After removing the large branch, I switched off the breaker to the house and using rubber soled shoes on an insulated ladder, I connected an automotive jumper cable from the house neutral line to the power side using only one hand and then switched on the house breaker. That got us power until the rolling blackouts started – the longest one was 36 hours. Those PowerWalls recharge quickly and were able to keep the house at 50 degrees throughout the event.
We did use the Tesla as our Apollo 13 LM to warm up once.
73 Tom N5TW