As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I bought a UHF repeater and put it on the air at the Mt. Hope tower site here in Calvert County.  This was a temporary test which allowed myself and other CARA club members (and anyone else) to see what UHF would do in our area.  Turns out, the system did quite well.

We estimated ~3 watts was being seen at the antenna.  That's not a lot of power and we weren't expecting very good performance.  Turns out, that ~3 watts was enough to give us pretty good coverage, about a 15 to 20 mile radius with several longer distances seen.

We have now replaced the repeater with a Yaesu repeater and better duplexers.  We're now seeing about 45 watts ERP and a better foot print (around 35 mile radius).

This has been a good experiment.  I'll be moving on to stage two for my repeater project.