Megler Mountain
Pacific County, WA
46.2863, -123.89699
1320 Feet
Call: NM7R
147.180 +600kHz 82.5Hz
444.925 +5MHz 82.5Hz
Megler VHF Repeater
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Location: The Pacific County Megler radio site is located
just northwest of the town of
Chinook, WA. There are several different sites, within about 5
miles that are collectively known as "Megler", and
this is the nortwestern-most and highest of these. The other
sites are prominently visible above the Astoria-Megler bridge while
crossing north-bound. Access to these other
sites is via the logging road across from the "Dismal
Nitch" rest area on Highway 401 just east of the Astoria-Megler
bridge. The Pacific County site is reached by way of the Chinook
quarry. Although not visible from the bridge, the Pacific
County site can be spotted from Highway 101, southbound, just west
of Chinook, look up and to the left, to the north of the highway.
Coverage: The "Megler" repeaters cover
nearly the entire
Long Beach Peninsula, and north along the coast including parts of
Tokeland, Grayland and
Westport, WA. They can be utilized east nearly to Longview, WA, and
south to Seaside, OR. To the west, they have both
been worked from
60-miles or more at sea.
Click here for a Megler site plot.
The VHF coverage is a bit better than the UHF coverage, as one would
expect.
The building and tower are crowded with a number
of commercial, public safety and broadcast stations, including six,
one-kilowatt television transmitters that serve the greater
Astoria-Long Beach area, giving the site a high noise floor,
making operations there challenging.
Even though they are stacked one atop the other in the rack,
the 147.180 and 444.925 repeaters have different missions and operate
independently.
The 2-meter repeater
is normally linked to the
BeachNet
system of repeaters. The UHF repeater is not linked to
BeachNet
and operates "stand-alone".
Follow this link for more
information on the Megler 444.925 IRLP repeater.
The 147.180 Megler Repeater
operates full-time as a part of the
BeachNet
system of linked repeaters. It can be disconnected to
operate as a stand-alone resource, or in other configurations
to address particular needs. The only "regular"
instance of this is two days at the end of August each year,
when the Megler 147.180 and Naselle 440.675 repeaters
are split off in support of the Hood-To-Coast
relay race.
There are four additional remote receivers supporting
the "Megler" repeater (one is a "Spare"
and not presently in use).
These fill coverage in
areas from which it would otherwise be difficult to
access the repeater.
The audio from each of these
is
routed to a "receiver voter", which
evaluates each of the five
channels for signal-to-noise-ratio.
The best of the lot is
"voted" and sent to the transmitter.
Follow this link for more
information on the remote receivers that support the
Megler VHF repeater, and the
network.
Hardware: The 147.180 repeater consists of a GE
Mastr-II continuous duty base station
and matching power supply, running 75-watts out to
to a Hustler G6-144 VHF antenna on the roof of the building,
through a circulator, a bandpass cavity, two BpBr cavities
and 50-feet of half-inch hardline.
The main receiver shares a G6-270 dual-band antenna
at the top
of the 80-foot tower with the 444.925 IRLP repeater. That
antenna is fed with 100-feet of LDF5-50 7/8-inch hardline.
The receive signal passes through two BpBr cavities and
the resultant audio is
routed to an LDC RVS-8 receiver voter.
Each of the four remote
receiver packages consists of
a VHF GE Rangr mobile radio, a UHF
GE Rangr mobile radio
(modified to work in the 430-MHz band),
a DTMF decoder, a Communications
Specialists ID-8
Morse code identifier, and in two cases, a
high-gain ARR VHF preamp
and VHF/UHF diplexer. These two
stations (Warrenton
and Cape D)
use Hustler G6-270 antennas, and the third
(Naselle) receiver package shares a Comet x510
for VHF and uses a Cushcraft yagi for the UHF link.
Each of the four
remote receiver channels is picked up
at the Megler repeater
site on a Hustler UHF vertical,
split four ways
with a home-brew constant-impedance splitter,
and routed to four
GE Rangr UHF mobile radios used
as link receivers
(also modified to work at 430-MHz).
The recovered audio signals are
routed to the LDC receiver voter.
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