Knysna Town gets repeater coverage

The Port Elizabeth Amateur Radio Society, the Southern Cape Radio Club and the Garden Route Radio Club joined forces last week to improve repeater coverage in the coastal hamlet of Knysna in preparation for the Christmas holiday season.

Visiting radio hams to this area will know that repeater coverage in the town itself was poor, due to the location of the existing Knysna repeater high up in the forests to the North of the town. An additional repeater has long been on the cards, and steps have been taken to get it installed and commissioned.

A work party comprising Dawid, ZS1PC, Chris, ZS1M, John, ZS1ZR, Trevor, ZS2AE, Trevor, ZS2AZR, Chris, ZS2AAW, and others descended on the new repeater site at Brenton, overlooking the town of Knysna, with equipment and tools ready for a hard day's work on Friday the 16th.

SARL President Graham Hartlett, ZS6GJH, has a personal interest in this repeater, and he made contact with the work party to assist on site, being in the area on leave with his family. Graham had kindly pursued the site sharing permission from the site owners Sentech during the course of 2005.

Brenton is an addition between the old Knysna repeater site, (which is to be renamed the Plettenberg repeater) and the George repeater. A complete installation was necessary, including two UHF links to tie into these existing sites. The addition of the new repeater at Brenton has improved poor UHF link signals between the old Knysna and George repeaters, thanks to the new link paths via Brenton being clear of the mountains.

The new location for the Knysna repeater on 145,675 will allow handheld coverage in town, and down to the coast. The shuffle in locations meant that a new Plett repeater at the old location was also brought online the following day, this one is on 145,775 MHz and provides coverage of the Plettenberg Bay and forest areas, as well as the N2 towards the Tsitsikama toll plaza. The change of UHF link equipment at the Plett repeater finally allowed the linking of the Swartberg repeater into the coastal network, which had been prepared with the necessary UHF link many months back by Dawid, ZS1PC.

Not content to leave it at that, the PE Amateur Radio Society repeater team also fitted a new VHF coverage repeater at Kareedouw Mountain, to fill a longstanding gap in coastal coverage nearer Humansdorp. This change was necessitated by the shuffle in the Plett and Knysna repeater link frequencies, and all sites are now linked with wide-spaced UHF link channels. The Kareedouw repeater is operative on 145,725 MHz, linked to Lady's Slipper and Plett.

The Cape Repeater Network now provides coastal coverage from Umtata to Cape Town, and inland from Grahamstown up to Aliwal North and Bloemfontein. It also includes sections of the N1 route between Beaufort West and Laingsburg via the Swartberg repeater. Most repeaters are DTMF controlled. For a new repeater network map, please visit the PEARS web page at www.qsl.net/zs2pe.

Many thanks to all hams that assisted with this expansion project.

Courtesy of The South African Radio League

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