☠️Yargggg ☠️
In the past I found a couple abandoned public safety repeaters but never used those much in the off chance it was still piped into a dispatch console somewhere.
In bigger cities one could often just punch in 464.500+ or 464.550+ and eventually end up finding an unused lease repeater or the like that's been left behind if in need of a quick pirate repeater. No luck in my smaller area, tried every few years after moving here.
I had mostly been using the repeater for a local gravel yard that's only open for a few hours around noon on weekdays so evenings and weekends I was able to use it just fine. It was also old and has never updated for narrowband. A local taxi company had their own pirate repeater in similar configuration and I was hoping it would get left behind after they switched to cell phones but with one of the drivers also being a radio hobbyist no luck there.
Eventually when browsing an old local scanner forum post I came across a frequency I saw before but overlooked. I believed it to be simplex when I first saw it since it was for hospital security on a small campus (but with 4 story tall buliding) so passed it off years ago until I came across that old forum post stating that it was actually repeater. After plugging every PL tone into a baofeng by the keypad I had about given up hope until I got near the end and heard the telltale kerchunk. After all these years and numerous building renovations since they switched to DMR in 2012 sat this old box faithfully in the top of the elevator shaft equipment room. Antenna still in good shape when checked with drone flyover and still gives a strong output with a quick pickup.
I always wanted a repeater on that roof since even though it's not as high as the hilltop sight nearby covers my whole neighborhood and surrounding shopping area + library very well so I got really lucky with this one. Has no CWID so I never noticed it in the past when monitoring old frequencies incase they were still in use, very stealthy. They must've just figured everything was meant to be where it was still during construction renovations a few years ago and just carefully left it alone to not damage it. Later on I'll go further out of town to test what the reception is like though if it outputs anything like it's DMR successor I figure it should be good. As it fell out of use before the mandate and confirmed on SDR it still outputs using the superior 25kHz bandwidth so I should get slightly better range or at least less noise than a 12.5 kHz locked repeater were I to try and buy a new one on the market.
The same hospital also had an old license for a VHF on another campus so I'll have to remember to try and find that in the ULS as well and see if I can find anything still there though will be harder since VHF doesn't use a standard offset shift like UHF does, also I prefer UHF.
Topic: I finally found an abandoned commercial repeater to Pirate 🏴☠️ (Read 1412 times)