Ham Repeater interference on RR band 160.560MHZ

KC9JUM · Oct 13, 2012

Ham Repeater interference on RR band 160.560MHZ

I am not sure which repeater it is, I can't decode the morse code ID, but I have been hearing a Ham Repeater coming in on 160.560mhz the CSX RR Dispatcher channel for the Terminal. It comes in on multiple radios I have of different makes. (Alinco, Yaesu, and Icom) It's not one of the local Indy repeaters I believe. Been going on for a couple weeks now. I hear it downtown and on the south side of town.

Anon6083 · Oct 14, 2012

KC9JUM said:
Ham Repeater interference on RR band 160.560MHZ

I am not sure which repeater it is, I can't decode the morse code ID, but I have been hearing a Ham Repeater coming in on 160.560mhz the CSX RR Dispatcher channel for the Terminal. It comes in on multiple radios I have of different makes. (Alinco, Yaesu, and Icom) It's not one of the local Indy repeaters I believe. Been going on for a couple weeks now. I hear it downtown and on the south side of town.

Did you determine that the offending station is, in fact, an amateur repeater based on voice traffic on the output?

KC9JUM · Oct 14, 2012

Yeah there were several ham calls given and the convo was typical ham rag chewing

gewecke · Oct 14, 2012

KC9JUM said:
Ham Repeater interference on RR band 160.560MHZ

I am not sure which repeater it is, I can't decode the morse code ID, but I have been hearing a Ham Repeater coming in on 160.560mhz the CSX RR Dispatcher channel for the Terminal. It comes in on multiple radios I have of different makes. (Alinco, Yaesu, and Icom) It's not one of the local Indy repeaters I believe. Been going on for a couple weeks now. I hear it downtown and on the south side of town.

You could be hearing intermod?
How close are you to your local 2 meter repeater?

73,
n9zas

KC9JUM · Oct 14, 2012

Unfortunately it's not intermod, I have heard it from locations up to 15 miles apart using different brands of Radios. The repeater gets weaker on 160.560mhz on the south side stronger towards downtown and the east side. I suspect that someone has a repeater transmitter circuit that is malfunctioning.

it also does not act like intermod does.

It's also not one of the local repeaters, The Indy repeaters pretty much on 2M have controllers that play back their call thru recorded messages.

I need to write down some of the calls I hear and see if I can get a general location from them

gewecke · Oct 14, 2012

KC9JUM said:
Unfortunately it's not intermod, I have heard it from locations up to 15 miles apart using different brands of Radios. The repeater gets weaker on 160.560mhz on the south side stronger towards downtown and the east side. I suspect that someone has a repeater transmitter circuit that is malfunctioning.

it also does not act like intermod does.

It's also not one of the local repeaters, The Indy repeaters pretty much on 2M have controllers that play back their call thru recorded messages.

I need to write down some of the calls I hear and see if I can get a general location from them

Ok ,then it's possible their repeater could be be transmitting spurs that are being received as images.
are there other people receiving the images you are as well?

73,
n9zas

KC9JUM · Oct 14, 2012

gewecke said:
Ok ,then it's possible their repeater could be be transmitting spurs that are being received as images.
are there other people receiving the images you are as well?

73,
n9zas

Several rail fans can hear it on their scanners.

I have heard railroaders on the channel comment about it, to the effect of "Who the H#ll is that talking?" to the dispatcher, and the dispatcher said "They did not know"

You can hear it over my stream, perhaps you all can decode the repeater ID.

http://inrd.gotdns.com:8000

I am hoping I can figure out who's repeater it is, before CSX brings the massive sledgehammer down on them thru the FCC.

I would rather Ham's self police and the interference go away quietly, then CSX getting the FCC into some sort of action on this.

To me it sounds like it's being transmitted on frequency some how. It does not have that intermod or image sound. Sometimes the repeater and the railroad users double over each other, and you hear the hetrodyne howl of two transmissions at once. One of the two of course will capture the receiver with FM, but the other still causes the howl.

wyomingmedic · Oct 14, 2012

If you can record the morse ID, I can tell you what it says. As long as it isn't digitally garbled or something like that.

WM

mdulrich · Oct 14, 2012

When you hear it on the RR channels, scan through the ham band and listen for the same traffic. It should be easy to figure out which repeater it is. If you can hear it on the RR channels, you'll be able to hear it with a scanner.

Mike

gewecke · Oct 14, 2012

While wrong to do, is it possible that someone may be crossbanding the repeater onto the RR frequency? I would also think that the repeater owner/trustee would be made aware of this as well.

73,
n9zas

KC9JUM · Oct 14, 2012

Possible.. but most radios that do that are two way, I would imagine the hams would quickly hear the rr transmissions on the repeater freq and come looking

W2IBC · Oct 15, 2012

so did you ever get any callsigns? even the users callsigns would help.

n0elb · Oct 15, 2012

Another possibility to consider is the signal that is interfering is a retransmission of the ham repeater you hear. If the ham repeater is not local it could be someone is trying to extend it with their own homemade extender. If that is the case the extender transmitter could have a spur.

If you don't have access to a spectrum anaylzer you could search the VHF spectrum with a scanner. If you do use the scanner approach, limit the search to about 500 KHz in each search.

We have tracked down interference to a ham repeater that has come from a scanner. Walking down the sidewalk with a yagi and receiver, we were able to pin point the room the scanner was in. To make that story more interesting the home owners were watching from the living room window as our group of hams swung the yagi back and forth but always pausing at their house with the yagi. It turned out this was 1/2 mile from the repeater yet was still able to cause interference.

So don't be afraid to think outside the box.

kruser · Oct 15, 2012

n0elb said:
We have tracked down interference to a ham repeater that has come from a scanner. Walking down the sidewalk with a yagi and receiver, we were able to pin point the room the scanner was in. It turned out this was 1/2 mile from the repeater yet was still able to cause interference.

Wow, a scanner. Was it the scanners LO that was being radiated back out of its own antenna?

I've seen some old Bearcat crystal scanners that had very strong LO's. I could detect them with a basic receiver that was not all that sensitive from over 100 feet away. I'm sure with a more sensitive receiver and a yagi, I could have heard that scanners LO from several hundred feet away.
I found it by accident when using that scanner (not that long ago) for some local stuff. I also had other scanners running across the room that were on a different antenna system. I kept getting solid full strength signal bursts of a very short duration on the other scanners. A little detective work later and I turned off the old crystal scanner. My noise stopped. I could see by eye that the noise was in sync with the LED's on the front of the old Bearcat as it scanned. That signal was radiating back out of the rooftop antenna hooked to that scanner.

n0elb · Oct 15, 2012

kruser

Yes in that case it was the LO of a scanner. It just so happened the frequency they were scanning was not one that was in use but had been programmed since it was on a scanner list. They allowed us to remove the offending frequency and all was well. They did have line of site to the antenna. In the old days of scanners I made it a hobby to monitor my neighbors scanners and build up lists of what they were scanning. There is much more to this than I will get into here.

I wish I lived in the area this is happening. It is an interesting mystery and I hope we are told what has been found.

KC9JUM · Oct 15, 2012

I have not yet, I still hear the repeater ID and the occasional courtesy beep. No convos lately, it's not a terribly active repeater.

The courtesy beep certainly does not sound like any on the local repeaters.

This morning I could barely hear the repeater ID from 465 and 31 on the south side.

I will flip to the ham band with my Yaesu FT-1900 and scan if I hear them on 150.560 again.

kruser · Oct 15, 2012

Same here, I also love these types of mysteries!

I've monitored the OP's feed but have not heard the offending repeater over the rail traffic yet.

Years ago, we had a licensed paging system around 32 or 35 MHz (I forget exactly). I was able to use the LO of the boss's pager and determine if he had entered the building. We were a sneaky bunch back in those days!
He entered through a different door and when the signal was detected, we knew it was time to get to work.
The pagers were huge clunky things with an audio alert only made by E.F. Johnson I think. The transmitter was an old tube powered 20 watt unit.
I wish I would have held onto that license but we let it go when real paging companies started offering service in the area. They offered much better coverage which we could not get from our little system.

KC9JUM · Oct 15, 2012

160.560 used to be Conrail Police long ago, but a couple years back CSX redid the frequencies to put the dispatcher traffic on a separate channel from the road channel.

There is not enough RR police in the area any more to warrant a separate frequency.

w2xq · Oct 15, 2012

Wirelessly posted (Moto Droid Bionic: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16)

Repeaters must periodically identify. Roll a recorder, and post the CW ID recording here. Easy enough for us CW ops to figure out. HTH.

KC9JUM · Oct 16, 2012

I am going to mark this issue closed. I have not heard the repeater since a day or two after I posted here. I am guessing someone here found the problem and silently fixed the issue. Which was the point of posting here.

Thank you.

Ham Repeater interference on RR band 160.560MHZ

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