AARC

I want to thank everyone out there for the help. I forgot to say thank you on the net this evening. I did get it fixed. As I monitored the outage I found that only in the evening around normal people bed time so I am not sure if someone on the other side of the wall was turning something on or what. But anyways I moved the antenna about 3 ft over and I have not had any more problems. Thank you to everyone who posted here and sent e-mails.

Murray Hunt
KB3LZV.com

Murry,
Did you double check to see that the transceiver's tone squelch is off? It is not uncommon to accidentally set the TS on the radio when you think you are setting the DTSS PL tone that you want to "squawk" to open the repeater squelch.

Barry
K3NDM

Hmmm, I've run into a similar thing occasionally, I was able to hit the club repeater, but I could not hit a closer repeater to me. Turns out it was that I had the antenna too close to a wall that appears to have absorbed most of the RF in that direction. (A temporary antenna hung up inside the house). Another thing could be that it was raining over the past day or so, maybe a surface of the house now had some more water on it, it will be interesting to see if over the next day as it dries out, maybe it will 'come back'?

Just some ideas. Interestingly I had a similar event yesterday, put up a new antenna, had really bad to no reception, got the HT and full quieting, turns out I somehow shorted the shield to the center on the cable feeding the new antenna. I've _got_ to learn what I'm doing wrong with soldering PL-259s. ;)

Glenn

Murray, Some of these questions have been asked already, but I thought I would clarify since I hadn't seen them answered.

Check to verify that tone-squelch(t-sql) wasn't accidentally activated. Tone-squelch affects your receive, it requires the sub-audible tone to be present on the repeater output frequency when you are receiving it for the squelch to open on your radio. However the repeater does not transmit the sub-audible tone that it receives, so your squelch doesn't open and you don't hear anything even though your S-Meter may be showing S-9 or better.

What antenna are you using on the 857 and have you verified it's condition and integrity of cables and connectors?

How far are you from the repeater?

Were you able to hear your transmitted signal from the 857 through the repeater on your HT?

Tune your HT to 147.705(repeater input freq.) and verify that your 857 is putting out a signal. If you don't hear anything, tune your HT to 147.105(repeater output freq.) and remove the antenna from your HT. This will probably prevent you from hearing the repeater on your HT, but we want to check and make sure that the 857 is not transmitting on the repeater output frequency(Duplex/shift turned off)(It should be +600khz)?

Enough questions for now, hope they help narrow down the problem.

Bill

N3PZB

Use your Ht and verify your transmit is FM and on 147.705 on the Ft857 set. You can also verify the sub-audible tone on your transmit signal. Verify there is output power and a connected antenna (of course!)

-Mike.
WA3SKN

I may have located the problem but I am not 100% sure. I have taken up the ironing board that was located a few feet from the antenna and things may be working once more. I will have to have a QSO to be sure. Still not sure how that could have been the problem so I am still a little worried that was not the fix I was looking for.

Murray Hunt
KB3LZV.com