History
GB3DE started life as a BT 'schools project', intended to increase the number of school children taking the novice license.
Of course, this was when novice licensees didn't have access to 2m and was well before the foundation license was introduced.
This was organised by Bill, G0VDE, who works at BT and had close links with the local high schools.
In the early years, the logic was quite unstable and required frequent hard resets (meaning a site visit), and Bill lives about 15 miles away from site, so it became difficult to maintain.
After a while, a new keeper was sought and up stepped Stef, G1NRL.
After several power-cycle visits, Stef came up with the idea of putting the repeater on a timer to power cycle it every night such that when it fails it should be OK again the next morning!
Unfortunately, the logic also had a habit of corrupting it's settings, so still required regular site visits.
The logic fault was compounded by water ingress into the antenna, causing all sorts of problems... which were weather dependant so always went wrong at the worst possible times!!
Stef managed to raise enough funds to replace the original HB9CV mini-beam with two separate collinear antennas, which also improved the sensitivity by reducing desense from the transmitter.
Of course, the requirement to reset the logic so frequently was a symptom of something much worse, but we never had the time to diagnose the fault (although we suspect it was RF getting where it shouldn't) and eventually, the logic failed completely!
At this time, Stef performed some emergency fundraising and scraped together enough cash to buy a complete commercial grade repeater. This was fine tuned by Jake, G1YFF, who also devised a PIC based morse generator to fit the NoV requirements.
Over time we have then added more features to this PIC and it is now effectively a full repeater controller.
That's the story so far, but there are plans to add to this repeater in due course, so keep listening!