Cheras APRS Fill-in Digipeater Installation - 9W2SVT-1

This is a short entry on my team's installation of a 9W2SVT-1 digipeater at north of Cheras. Due to the blind spot at north of Cheras that was not covered by 9M2RPN and also the fact that my parent's house is on top of a small hill at around 80m altitude, I have decided to install a APRS digipeater with the help of other APRS Studio members.

Panoramic View from balcony

This is the panoramic view of my balcony looking over the entire Kuala Lumpur ( now blocked by trees ) and Bandar Tun Razak on the left side of the picture. With a clear view of downtown, this makes a good location for a fill-in digipeater location to compliment the coverage of 9M2RPN.

A bit of story about the antenna used here ...

1/4 wave ground plane

The first time I saw such weird looking antenna was at EMCOMM Go-Box event organised by MARTS. It is a 2m quarter wave ground plane antenna with four ground plane legs.

This four-legged quarter wave antenna was donated by 9W2KHN for this fill-in digipeater. The antenna was made by Pak Razif, 9W2JQQ.

1/4 wave ground plane

1/4 wave ground plane

As I'm more of an electronics and hardware programming fellow, doing drilling and physical hardware installation was not something I am familiar with. Luckily, within our group, APRS Studio, we have people with a wide range of skill-sets including antenna installation.

Below are 9W2CEW, 9W2KHN and 9W2WHT helping out with the digipeater installation on a hot and sunny day.

Below are the guts of the APRS digipeater powered with the BH4TDV NET51TNC as the digipeater and a TYT F8 as the radio. Both the radio and NET51TNC are powered by a 12V SMPS.

I plan to power up this digipeater using solar power and 12V battery in the near future.
The completed installation at the front of the roof.

1/4 wave ground plane

1/4 wave GP installed

After almost a week, here are the coverage area of this fill-in digipeater from aprs.fi

9W2SVT-1

Special thanks to APRS Studio team members 9W2CEW, 9W2KHN and 9W2WHT for the antenna installations, tools and donation of this weird looking but good performance antenna to make this fill-in digipeater possible..

If any APRS users driving along south of KL, Loke Yew highway or Sg Besi highway, do drop a few packets to this digipeater ..