08-09-2024, 03:45 PM
Hi all - just another update on this, probably the last one! I finally got vehicle access to the site so I could bring some of the equipment back for disposal. I opened up some of the boxes out of curiosity, and it looks like they used handheld radios to run the repeater.
I expected perhaps a commercial repeater product, so I was surprised to see hacked apart handheld radios! No idea what brand or model they might be but they look a bit more recent than the 1984 date on the solar panels would suggest, so I wonder if these were installed more recently at the site, perhaps in the 1990s?
Some photos are here: https://imgur.com/a/7AS71so
I briefly powered them up with 12V just out of curiosity to see if they still work and three of the four units come up with a channel number on the display, with the fourth unit being a model variation without a display. I didn't try transmitting anything (not licensed and having no antenna being the two main reasons) but it looks like they would still work.
I was thinking maybe they are standard CB radios and some sort of converter was used to move the signal onto the allocated frequencies, however it appears that the FM828 and other equipment is not actually connected to anything, and these handheld radios go out direct to the antennas on the mast. So I wonder if they have been modified to transmit outside their factory range. Or maybe they aren't CB radios at all! But it ties in with the fact that they look newer than the rest of the equipment, so it seems they are a more recent addition to the site.
Any theories on the possible age of these units? I'm curious to find out at what point the site was last accessed.
EDIT: Managed to get one out of the enclosure, it's a Kenwood TK-360
I expected perhaps a commercial repeater product, so I was surprised to see hacked apart handheld radios! No idea what brand or model they might be but they look a bit more recent than the 1984 date on the solar panels would suggest, so I wonder if these were installed more recently at the site, perhaps in the 1990s?
Some photos are here: https://imgur.com/a/7AS71so
I briefly powered them up with 12V just out of curiosity to see if they still work and three of the four units come up with a channel number on the display, with the fourth unit being a model variation without a display. I didn't try transmitting anything (not licensed and having no antenna being the two main reasons) but it looks like they would still work.
I was thinking maybe they are standard CB radios and some sort of converter was used to move the signal onto the allocated frequencies, however it appears that the FM828 and other equipment is not actually connected to anything, and these handheld radios go out direct to the antennas on the mast. So I wonder if they have been modified to transmit outside their factory range. Or maybe they aren't CB radios at all! But it ties in with the fact that they look newer than the rest of the equipment, so it seems they are a more recent addition to the site.
Any theories on the possible age of these units? I'm curious to find out at what point the site was last accessed.
EDIT: Managed to get one out of the enclosure, it's a Kenwood TK-360