REPEATERS
IN ISRAEL PART 2
From
1948 onwards, with the exception of a very few already operating as ‘Pirates’
during the time of the British Mandate, after the establishment of the
State of Israel, the would be hams started to build their own HF equipment.
There was a large amount of surplus equipment lying around in junk yards.
Receivers like the BC348 and others were available in abundance. Heaps
of Crystals could be had for a ‘penny’. True the frequencies weren’t the
right ones but we learned to take them apart and started to grind them
to the desired ones. Tubes like the ‘Old Faithful’ 807 or 1624 were the
basic transmitting tubes in those times. Surplus equipment was bought and
taken apart to salvage resistors and capacitors. In a junkyard in mid-Tel-Aviv
there were two Mustang fighter planes and all of us were crawling around
to get hold of a ‘command set’ or other goodies.
Actually
it all started in 1974. In that year the Israel Amateur Radio Club received
from Motorola Israel about 100 JRC hand-held VHF transceivers, surplus
from the Israeli Police force and a number of tube-type boat anchor D43GGV
units that served the police in their cars. Looking back to those years,
you can see that Israel was relatively late to enter ‘repeaterization’
of the country. Hams simply didn’t have any equipment, neither for VHF
nor for UHF. The weekly meetings on the air were Saturday mornings on 40
meters. At that time you could hear the boys from Eilat, Jerusalem or Haifa.
In
our last issue we started to tell the story of our repeater network. The
first of these machines operated from Beer Sheva. The second to come on
the air was in Haifa. To find out, first hand, I drove to Haifa to meet
Naphtali Balaban 4Z4RM, the builder of the Haifa repeater.
Naphtali,
at that time still 4Z4NRM, a holder of novice license, heard the Cyprus
repeater, built by 5B4WR and 5B4AP. With a Motorola “GGV” transceiver that
was donated by the IARC, he started to build the first Haifa based repeater.
Aided by 4X1RH Arie Reinharz and Shlomo Feldhammer, who later became 4X6FS,
they build the unit and installed it on the balcony of 4X6DI Yoram Kiesler.
The frequency chosen was R7, input 145.175 and output 145.775 MHz. Naftaly
built the tone-burst unit of 1750 Hz, .that was used mostly in Europe
After
about one year, the Haifa Repeater changed to R-3, when the Tel-Aviv repeater
went on air on R-7.The Haifa Repeater
worked for a few years on that site in Mount Carmel - Haifa.
In 1980, Naphtali and the Haifa group received a more modern VHF Repeater (R-0) from Motorola - Israel, and due to the good services of our late friend Ariel Roth 4X1MR, got permission to install the unit at the highest spot in the Haifa area. It was the site of the Haifa University, a Skyscraper on mount Carmel. The building, at that time, was just s skeleton. But it was the best site one could wish for. The repeater had a tremendous range. But this too had its deficiencies. Israel is ringed by the Lebanon in the North, Syria in the North-East and Jordan in the East. Mostly in the Lebanon non-amateur groups used amateur equipment instead of telephones. They did not have any repeaters and used their equipment on any simplex frequency available on their radios. The net result, we could hear them on our repeaters as long as somebody opened them. Later they found out, that it was convenient for them to useour repeaters.
In
the erroneous belief that this happens only on R0, (input frequency the
round number -145.000 MHz) the
Haifa repeater moved to R3 145.075 / 145.675 MHz.. It only took a few days
till the ‘The people from the North’ (Lebanese para-military and terrorist
groups) noticed that there had been a change. The Haifa repeater became
again a site of constant quarreling and cursing. To avoid this the ‘private
line’ was introduced. A.91,5 Hz constant sub-tone was introduced and, subsequently,
the peace and quiet returned to the repeater.
In
1977 another repeater, based on a “GGV”, was built for the Galilee town
of Safed and installed, due to the good relationship of our late friend
4X4GF Shimshon Lotan with the owner of the Hotel Canaan.This
repeater was later changed to a brand new RCA repeater – of course also
donated by Motorola. The story of the RCA repeaters in our next issues..
In
1980 Naphtali 4Z4RM installed a RTTY Repeater that was donated to the IARC
by an american amateur. It operated on 145.300 Mhz. from “Denia” Neighborhood,
location of the “DIGITAL COMPUTERS” Haifa branch, with aid of Nimrod Shwartz
4X6BG and Israel Berko 4X1OM.
Same
year a UHF repeater was built on R70 in the UHF 430 MHz band, and is working
to this very day, on the very balcony in mid Haifa were the first VHF machine
had been installed.
All
the repeaters in Israel require a 91.5 Hz. sub-tone to be accessed. More
about the repeater scene in Israel in our next issue.
***
PIRATE INTEREFERENCE on 2 metres has been taking two forms both coming
from the “territories” and Palestinian Authority.
Number
one: A multitude of very long-range wireless telephones have come into
use which use the two metre band as one of the frequencies used – probably
that of the base station.As a result,
just about any time of day or night you can scan the band and here a number
of telephone conversations in Arabic.By
the way, our counterparts in Australia report a similar problem with these
phones in south-east Asia.
Number
two:There’s been a report of an
unlicensed FM broadcasting station from one of the settlements in Judaea
and Samaria,spewing out spurious
radiations onto the 2 metre band and interfering with weak signals trying
to access our repeaters.Apparently,
an official protest has been submitted to the authorities which met an
unsatisfactory response.
(Years
ago, Rich 4X1DA, in a packet-radio bulletin, foresaw an entity called “Piratestine”
which would be a source of rdaio interference.Interesting.)
Until
next month, 73 and Shalom from Ron and Ahron
P.
S.As you probably have noted, another
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always, we point out, that Ron and I are doing our work on a 100% voluntary
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