After many, many months of planning and hard work we are very excited to announce that the newest addition to the Southwest Missouri Regional Skywarn Repeater Network is now on the air. The former Buffalo Repeater at 147.180 MHz is now operating from its new home 400 feet atop the Fox 5 KRBK Television tower in Polk, Missouri! The new Polk, Missouri repeater is currently operating in stand-alone mode meaning it’s not currently linked into the network. While it’s in this mode, we would greatly appreciate signal reports from all stations in all locations.
So far, signal reports have been really good with stations as far away as Lebanon and Sedalia being able to get in with modest amounts of power. Please give the new Polk, MO repeater a try. It continues to operate on the same frequency pair of 147.180 MHz with a standard plus offset of 600 kHz and a PL tone of 136.5 Hz.
As you test out the repeater keep in mind that at this time it is only transmitting 25 watts, and that’s before the duplexer – the device which allows for the simultaneous transmit and receive of two close frequencies using the same antenna. Most likely, 15 watts are all that are reaching the antenna. So, if you are transmitting 50 or more watts from your transceiver, the repeater is going to hear you much better than you are going to hear it coming back to you. Once all testing is complete at this new site, the 147.180 MHz. repeater’s power will first be doubled to around 50 watts. Eventually, the 147.180 repeater will transmit about 100 watts of power – or around 6 dB higher than it currently does at the present time.
Our 4-bay dipole antenna is seen in this photo mounted on the left side of the KRBK tower. 
On Wednesday, July 25th at 7:30 p.m. Central an informal net was held on the new 147.180 Polk Repeater as a way to encourage folks to gather on the air and test out its coverage. Results are very encouraging, and we thank everyone who participated!
Please keep the signal reporting coming in. You can email signal reports to our system trustee Michael, N0NQW, via the form at this link.