The Original WA6TDD Repeater on Mount Wilson!

The number of Op's that have QSY'ed here sense 12-27-12

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Burt's Story in PDF

Burt's Story in HTML


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User's Stories

This is the first account of a WA6TDD event from a users. I hope it wont be the last. This one is from Steve Jensen, W6RHM. (Ed.)

Steve Jensen, W6RHM

I thought you might be interested in the story of how the repeater split (146.400/147.435) came about. Today of course it seems a bit odd but all of this happened long before the 2 Meter band plan came out. At the time of the installation on Mt. Wilson, (sometime in 1962 I think) the only other repeater on the air was Art Gentry's K6MYK machine. Its input was 145.180 and its output was 146.980 (I still have the crystals). This one was all AM at the time.

As FM was just starting to become popular, Burt wanted to accomodate that as well and he had an idea to have two inputs, AM and FM for the Mt. Wilson repeater. I was involved in a survey of frequencies on Mt. Wilson using a Stoddart NM-30 receiver in conjunction with a my Heathkit Pawnee as I recall to find a repeater pair for Burt that was relatively free of intermod. We decided on 146.400 for the output and 147.425 for the input. Then it was decided that there should be two inputs centered around 147.425 at +/- 10 kHz which gave rise to 147.435 for the AM input and 147.415 for the FM input. At the time all of this conversation was going on, the repeater was put on the air as an AM repeater using the two frequencies idendified for the AM operation with the plan being to implement the FM operation later. The output was always on 146.400. Well, as FM grew rapidly in popularity during those days and AM diminished, what actually happened was the old AM pair became the present FM pair and the other pair was never used. When the repeater changed hands after Burt gave it away, the input and output was later reversed to its present configuration using 147.435 as the output and 146.400 as the input. (The reason for that is unknown).

73, Steve Jensen, W6RHM

This page is under construction, we are looking for material to add to this site. If you have any pictures or interesting stories about the WA6TDD AM repeater or the early WR6ABE FM repeater at Mount Wilson Please send them to WB6MVP Web Master and Editor.

Last up date was 01-03-2014

Some of the clip art is from Zed Zed.

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