My wife and I purchased some property at an elevation over 2100? on a wooded ridge which is part of the Cumberland Plateau. It?s in a relatively remote area, over 10 miles from the nearest small town. The parcels in the area range from 5 to 250+ acres. Interestingly, several folks in the immediate neighborhood are preppers. However, like many preppers, they don?t have a comms plan.
Most of these preppers don?t have radios or radio licenses. My wife and I are both licensed amateur radio operators, and we do use a variety of different radios and modes, and we have a GMRS license too. Since GMRS just requires an FCC fee, we decided to go that route for local communications. The downside of GMRS is that it operates on the UHF frequencies, so it?s mostly line of site and it?s effected by vegetation. We wanted to effectively cover our immediate area, say within a two mile radius of our property, just using portable radios.
I had a couple of 120 watt solar panels sitting around, so they were diverted to the repeater project. A simple rack was made out of slotted angle metal. I decided to try a Retevis RT-97S repeater as the core of the system. It?s a 10 watt unit, and it comes with a speaker/mic, an AC power supply, and a 12 volt DC power cable. It?s an easy to program unit that comes in a weatherproof case. It also has a built in duplexer. I purchased an inexpensive 20 amp mppt solar charge controller made by Voominhtec from Amazon. We?re using a 100ah lithium battery by Guaiglong which comes in its own weatherproof case. All of this goes into a plastic waterproof container made by Plano. In an effort to keep the costs down, I elected to use a couple of nesting fence top rails, so the antenna is 20? above the ground. The Hys omnidirectional antenna is fed with LMR-400 coax. I painted the antenna supports and they blend well with our vegetation.
I?d say the total cost of the system was about $1000.00. It works well locally, which is what we wanted. The repeater audio is excellent, very clear.
