Nicolai Mountain
Clatsop County, OR
46.08625, -123.45217
3007 Feet
Call: K7GA
444.500 +5MHz 118.8Hz
Nicolai UHF Repeater
Nicolai Packet Station
The Nicolai repeater
and
packet station
are temporarily
off the
air. We were required
to
move our antennas to a
new (yet to be erected)
tower.
We are hoping to
have it back
on air before
December.
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Location: Nicolai Mountain is a few miles south of the
Bradley Summit on
Oregon Highway 30, southwest of Westport, Oregon.
Coverage: Nicolai anchors the Southeast corner of
our service area. The coverage saturates the Logview-Kelso area,
and north along Interstate 5
to at least the Highway 12 interchange,
well into the overlap area with the
Olympia repeater. The Nicolai repeater is usable west to
Astoria and the Long Beach Peninsula, where it
overlaps the coverage of our other repeaters. It can be
used in the Portland/Vancouver area, and east up the Columbia
Gorge, if you pick your spot carefully.
Affiliated with the
BeachNet
system, the Nicolai repeater is owned by K7GA, the EC/RO for
ARES/RACES in Wahkiakum County. It is primarily intended to provide
emergency communications in Wahkiakum County and the rest of
ARES/RACES District Four (Wahkiakum, Cowlitz, Clark and
Skamania Counties). During emergency situations, the Nicolai
repeater will most likely be taken off the network for
use by District Four.
Originally, there was a wooden forestry lookout tower
on the site. In the mid 1980's, this structure (encrusted in
antennas and feedlines) had fallen into disrepair, and was
rickety enough to be condemned. All the users were given
one year to remove their antennas. The State Forestry Department
erected a steel tower, and rented space on it. Several tenants
provided their own poles to avoid paying for tower space.
The left-most picture
below shows this time period. The old lookout tower is now long
gone, except for the concrete leg bases. The rest of the pictured
towers and poles are still in use.
Hardware: The repeater
consists of a
GE Mastr-II 110-watt continuous duty
base station (running 60-watts),
with a CAT-200B controller in a
44-inch GE cabinet.
The duplexer is a Decibel
Products 4-cavity
bandpass-notch type feeding a
dual-band antenna through 50 feet
of double-shielded coaxial cable,
shared with the packet station.
There is a UHF GE Phoenix mobile
used as a link transceiver, with
a Yagi antenna,
and a VHF Kenwood mobile used for
the packet station. Primary station
power is a GE Mastr-II 35-Amp
power supply with back-up
power supplied by a large
stationary battery system.
Packet Radio:
The "NICOLI"
packet
radio node is located on this site
as well. This is part of the 145.630
MHz 1200-Baud Washington
Coastal EOC Packet Network.
This node is primarily intended
to extend the range of the K7GA-10
Winlink2000 RMS station in
Cathlamet. It is able to connect
with most of the Western
Washington nodes, including
ELYSSA, which overlooks
Puget Sound. The packet station
also has a Telemetry
beacon (every half-hour when
activated) that reports
the building temperature
and battery/power supply
voltage from the site.
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