Repeater Networking
Why are so many repeaters networked together?
GB3RF covered a massive area when it was located on the BBC transmitter mast on Hameldon Hill and it was busy all day long. When the BBC sold its transmitter to other companies they started to charge the commercial rate for amateur repeaters and the costs became too expensive for repeater groups like ours. GB3RF was moved to a group member's house fairly high on Willows Lane in Accrington. The coverage was far less compared to its previous location with very little coverage to the South and reduced coverage in almost every direction. This move and the decline in amateur radio use in general saw GB3RF used less and less until it was only used for the early evening net and the occasional QSO during the day. A few years ago we made enquiries about the cost of moving back to Hambleton Hill mast, they wanted £1000's just to do a study before we even agreed on a price per year so we abandoned the idea. Instead, we increased the coverage of the repeater by linking GB3RF to other North West repeaters to achieve coverage similar or maybe better in some direction than when GB3RF was on Hameldon Hill. We did this by linking with our friends at The North West Allstar Group.
The idea of linking repeaters together isn't a new idea, EchoLink and IRLP have been around for many years. Allstar is our preferred repeater control and linking method for our FM repeaters and gateways. We use Raspberry Pi single-board computers running a version of Allstar called HamVoIP developed and maintained by David McGough, K4FXC.
HUBNet is one of the biggest Allstar networks and is based in the UK and run by a few friends. GB3PF and GB3PT are NWRG repeaters and MB7ANM and MB7IRX are 4m gateways connected to HUBNet. HUBNet has been very innovative in the technologies used to link digital modes with analogue FM and has a custom-written last heard system that shows which repeaters and digital users are accessing the system.
In 2022 a decision was made to start affiliating other repeaters into the group, at the time we were a repeater group with just one repeater and some group members owned and operated more repeaters than the group. The affiliations started with GB3PF and the gateways MB7INM and MB7ANM owned by Neil M0NFI. Neil had been working with other repeater keepers in the North West for several years and had built and installed repeaters for several people. Many of these repeaters quickly joined the group and took advantage of our website and Facebook pages for their promotion and our custom written control panels for remote control including Telegram messenger warnings and control messages. This includes our unique method of saving live data from the repeaters in our databases and displaying information on our website. This helps repeater keepers control and monitor their repeaters from anywhere they can access the internet. We also provide almost live streaming and audio archives of our networked repeaters. The stream is useful for anyone wanting to listen in who is unable to use a radio and the audio archive allows people to monitor the quality of their audio and check what they might have missed from the many scheduled nets across our networks.
Two of our affiliated repeater keepers, Dave M0DKR and Sean M0OEG wanted to link several repeaters to create a North West Network. We have named this the North Western Repeater Group Hub, detail can be found here on our website. This network gives almost continuous coverage from Accrington to Blackpool, East to West and South of Liverpool to North of Preston. Coverage along the M55, M65 and M6 in this area is very good and we are always trying to improve it with more repeaters and gateways.
The North Western Repeater Group Hub also has several digital repeaters and gateways, several of which are linked to our friends at the North West Fusion Group, please see details on our website here.