I thought I would post this because it is a very wide area repeater that some of us here use. htperry had a thread going on that 'other' site once and suggested it because of it's wide area food print and central location. This explains why it was so quiet on there last night and this morning, as well as the increased traffic on the Burlington, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro (GARA) repeaters.
Hello, GARA Members.
It saddens me to have to report that the Guilford Amateur Society's 145.250 W4GG Repeater is down and may be for an extended period of time. I understand that it has essentially served the area non-stop for about 15 years. Initial reports from GAS indicate the repeater may have suffered a receiver failure and since the repeater is 1400' up the tower GAS does not have the ability to simply make a trip to their site and access their machine as we are able to.
I am writing this email on behalf of the GARA Board to let you know that, in the spirit of HAM radio and to show our appreciation to GAS for extending the use of their repeater to us in the past, we have offered the unrestricted use of our VHF machine to them. The W4GSO repeaters are open machines and everyone is welcome to use them at any time, but especially while GAS works through a solution to this issue GAS members are of course welcome and encouraged to use the W4GSO repeaters, namely W4GSO VHF in place of W4GG VHF including for their weekly net, Wednesdays at 8:45pm.
Fortunately any downtime of the W4GSO VHF machine was mostly pre-planned for maintenance and they always made their repeater available to our members in the interim. Also fortunate for us is that we have access to our repeater at a moment's notice so most of our down time has been short lived. GAS does not have that ability.
Also affected by this are the Randolph Amateur Radio Club and Triad SKYWARN who's primary repeater 147.255 K4ITL has been down for about a year now. They are in the same situation as GAS in that the repeater is up on the tower and they do not have access to it. As a result they have been using 145.250 W4GG. We have also reached out to both of those organizations and offered the unrestricted use of our repeaters in the interim. We have always been the tertiary SKYWARN machine and you can now expect to hear the weekly SKYWARN net on our repeater Tuesdays at 8:30 pm. We have not heard back from RARC yet, but you may also hear their weekly net on our machine on Monday nights at 8pm.
In the spirit of amateur radio, please welcome any newcomers to our machine and make them feel at home. We all might make some new friends we otherwise wouldn't have.
73,
Patrick Moore, K2CPR Greensboro Amateur Radio Association
www.W4GSrg