On Sunday March 10, 2013 The Philipsburg Amateur Radio Association (PARA) placed into service a new home-brewed D-STAR
compatible repeater in Kylertown, Clearfield County. The repeater was built around a GE Mastr II transceiver and a MoenComm
GMSK node adaptor board. The system is connected to a computer which provides gateway access to other D-STAR repeaters (Icom
factory produced or home-brewed) on the IRCddb D-STAR network. The entire system is operated by the Free-Star software
package which runs on the CentOS Linux operating system. Free-Star is a vendor natural approach to digital communications
for amateur radio.
Supported modes include digital voice, slow-speed data and DPRS (the digital version of APRS). The repeater is on
147.255+ MHz and uses the call sign W3PHB _ _ C. The gateway can be accessed by placing the call sign W3PHB _ _ G in the
RPT2 field.
This is the first of several D-STAR compatible repeaters PARA intends to deploy at different locations in the Central
Pennsylvania region. The second repeater will be a 70 cm band version and is already on the workbench.
