On Saturday morning, 11/15/2025, an intrepid group of six volunteers from our repeater committee made the trek to the Peaceful Valley Scout Ranch: Mark Alsop (KT0AM), Walt Burns (AB0VZ), Bill Wooton (KF0CWS), Brad Tombaugh (W0BDT), Chuck Baumgarten (KF0KTG) and Joe Moll (K0DNS).
We operate a repeater that covers central Elbert County and is used by people visiting the Scout Ranch and also utilized during Elbert County events like the Mad Gravel bike race. Our partners at the Scout Ranch have acquired a more spacious enclosure, an old “traffic control box,” to augment the existing “job box” that houses the repeater currently. The plan was to relocate the repeater into the traffic box, and deploy a LoRa (low power, long range, spread spectrum) digipeter that can relay LoRa APRS packets to other LoRa iGates to extend our LoRa APRS coverage.
Once we arrived and gained access to the two enclosures, we discovered that while the traffic box has been mounted to a concrete slab, it is not yet wired for power. We contemplated some options to at least temporarily provide power, but none seemed workable. While we could not proceed with relocating the repeater just yet, we did go ahead with installing the LoRa digipeter.
The LoRa device is quite small, and only needed minimal 12v power, but we did need to install another UHF antenna on the tower. We brought an antenna, a stand-off arm, stainless steel hose clamps, and a length of coaxial cable. Mark also came equipped with a climbing harness and safety lines to climb the tower and mount the new UHF antenna. The coax cable was routed along the inside of one of the tower legs and secured with nylon cable ties.
Until the electric power is installed into the traffic box, we temporarily installed the LoRa Digipeter inside the job box with the repeater. We drilled a hole for the antenna cable, and identified an open port for 12v power. Once plugged in, it booted up and began to relay APRS packets. We packed up our gear and buttoned up the enclosures to head back to Elizabeth for lunch.
We will continue to coordinate with our partners at the scout ranch to get electric power installed into the traffic box so that we can get both the repeater and LoRa digipeter installed into the larger traffic box. But for now, please let us know your experiences with the LoRa APRS digipeter in Elbert County. Learn more about LoRa APRS.