Came past here on a walk up to Cairn Gorm mountain and Ben Macdui. On the way I got chatting to a guy who was saying they'd recently re-dug the cables around the ski centre for fear of people catching them with walking poles etc.
Since James's photos in 2015, the vertical dipole and vertical UHF yagi have been removed, leaving just the FM antenna on the ski chairlift.
I got in touch with Malcolm Lee, engineer at MFR to give us the lowdown on the arrangements at Cairn Gorm. He writes: Your photo of the ski tow return wheel structure must be less than 5 years old as the link antenna that we used for Speysound has been removed. We used to demod, use local processing and change the RDS for when Speysound were opted in. Once they turned on their link Tx, the Rx’s squelch at the transmitter site was lifted and made to drive a SBS Guardian unit to do the switching, as well as driving the RDS encoder to change the PS Identifier. Crude, but effective. Speysound, now on their own frequency, use a Ubiquity 5G link, 8 mile path length.
Your photo of a Yagi attached to the building was to do with Cairngorm Mountain’s Comms.
MFR RBRs Mounteagle and the signal is good enough to use MPX direct from the receiver to transmitter input. The receive is a 3 element yagi in a roof void above the kitchen. Keeping antennas in one piece outside up there is a losing battle. 50MHz Collinears used on the link for Speysound would to snap off regularly. So we gave up and used UHF on one of our mobile frequencies. Naughty! |
