SBARC Members,

If you have skills with amateur radio direction finding, the Digital SIG and Telecommunications Services Committee have a challenge for you!

SBARC has just put a newly coordinated multimode digital repeater on the air at 445.200/440.200 MHz.  This club digital repeater sits atop the Mesa at the same site as the 2m FM club repeater.  However, there is a potential squatter on our new input frequency 440.200 MHz.  This rogue station beacons with a short (250 ms) digital burst every 11 seconds 24/7.  We have analyzed and decoded the signal and believe that it is a beacon from the output of a DMR or multimode digital repeater.  The beacon, however, contains no ID and no location information.  Since this is an input frequency according to the SoCal band plan, this is not the appropriate frequency for such transmissions.

If you have DF equipment, we could use your help to locate station transmitting the beacon as that is most likely to be the source of the interference that we are experiencing on our club system.  Occasionally there are longer sustained transmissions but those could be from local users of our repeater and not the source of interference.  So if you plan on helping to locate the interference, focus on the 250 ms beacon bursts that occurs at regular 11-second intervals on 440.200 MHz.

Reception reports so far indicate that the station can be heard throughout Santa Barbara and Goleta.  We do not have any reception reports yet from Ventura County.

Reports and information can be passed along to me, K6LCM.

Thanks so much for your help.