Ocean Shores
Grays Harbor County, WA
47.060369, -124.114598
240 Feet
Call: W7EOC
444.200 +5MHz 118.8Hz
Ocean Shores UHF Repeater
09/20/16 This repeater was
moved from one building and
tower to another at the same
site.
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Location: The Ocean Shores repeater is located
about five miles north of the city of Ocean Shores,
and a few miles inland,
at the county's Saddle Hill, site. This site is used for
911-Emergency
communications, and has extensive security and surveillance features,
including 24/7 video monitoring. This Amateur UHF repeater is included to
provide an additional layer of communications, when all else
fails. In normal day-to-day operations, this machine provides
convenient routine communications from this remote corner of the county.
In September of 2016 the county radio technicians finished up their
new building and tower, adjacent to the old cargo container and utility pole.
As a measure of the value Grays Harbor County puts on having Amateur radio
available as a back-up, they offered a berth in the new building, space on
the new tower at the 85-foot level, including moving our equipment over for us,
as well as mounting the cable and
antennas. They offered to install using new half-inch hard-line. We offered to
supply a length of used 7/8-inch hardline with connectors and hangers. They
graciously used the larger cable, and did a wonderful job of installing
the entire station.
Coverage: Although the area is already
served by several repeaters, including the
145.390, Cosmopolis (20 miles east),
145.310, North Cove (17 miles south), and
444.700, Neilton (30 miles north) repeaters,
all of these are fairly distant and
near the limit of their coverage,
particularly for hand-held transceivers.
The Ocean Shores UHF repeater
provides high quality local access to the
BeachNet
System, particularly along the Pacific Beach area.
The coverage is good over the entire south shore of Gray's Harbor,
including Westport.
The north shore coverage is useable as far east as the outskirts of
Hoquiam, where it becomes spotty.
Along the ocean beach, there is good coverage,
as far south
as the Pacific County line, and north well past Copalis Beach.
The town of Ocean Shores is well served. The coverage extends more
than 20 miles seaward, as detailed on the coverage plot to the left.
Hardware: The repeater consists of a
GE Mastr-II
40-watt continuous duty
base station
(running 30-watts)
with a CAT 200B controller mounted in a site-supplied open rack and using
a
generator backed-up battery power supply.
The duplexer is a 4-cavity Sinclair BpBr feeding a
multi-bay folded-dipole array antenna mounted at 85-feet on the tower,
and fed through 100 feet of LDF5-50
(7/8-inch) hardline. The remote base uses a GE Rangr 16-channel
UHF transceiver running a few watts, with a 6-element directional Yagi
antenna mounted at 45-feet on the tower to provide flexible linking.
A Weather Station is included at the site to provide
Wind Speed, Direction,
and Temperature readings with the station identification, and on
demand. The Ocean
Shores repeater originally went on the air January 4, 2013. The move to
the new location was finished September 20, 2016.
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