IDS
Photo from IDS window 30 stories below rooftop.
Several years ago when the first Wide Area coverage 442.925 repeater was put on the air it was located at the Norwest building, at that time it was managed by Motorola who was extremely happy to have a maximum performance repeater in the twincity area. They paid for installation, provided a field service technician they sent from Kansas for two days to oversee and trouble shoot a interference problem. As time went on in the business world changes happen and management at Norwest changed management companies several times and what started out as a good rental rate soon went out of sight. At that time the repeater was shut off until a new site was located.
Talking to people in the business soon brought me to the IDS, the building is and has been managed by a company in Indiana. The local representative is the same person who I dealt with when I first put 146.76 on the air at Shelard and also the 444.100 repeater which was put on after the first 442.925 was turned on at Shelard 3 years earlier. Rental at IDS is almost half of what it was at Norwest.
To simplify the installation I had hoped to use a Decibel Products DB-420 antenna, this is a exposed dipole antenna which is shipped in two pieces. It is similar to the DB-413 antenna that I put up on Shelard/Interchange for the 444.100 antenna. During the time period between Shelard and IDS the DB-420 antenna is no longer manufactured in the 440-450 range so a DB-408S antenna was used for the installation it is 1/2 the size of the DB-420 antenna, 6db of gain versus 10db gain.
It was soon discovered that IDS did not have the coverage of the repeater when it was on Norwest. In the summer of 2004 the antenna was changed to a Celwave 455 super stationmaster fiberglass antenna, back to ultrawide area coverage again. The antenna is fed with 1 5/8 inch feedline, it you look at the picture of the top of the repeater cabinet you can see the jumper coming out of the cabinet to the huge adapter of the 1 5/8 heliax.
Steve, KØFHC