User:AB1JU/Foothills Amateur Radio Club

The Foothills Amateur Radio Club

The Foothills ARC was first organized in 1977 with a small group of about 20 local hams. A group of hams from Raleigh, North Carolina, headed by Danny Hampton approached the club to sponsor a repeater on top of the Blue Ridge mountain off to the east side of highway 18. On October 7, 1977 the 145.37 repeater was put on the air with the call sign of N4AGN.

The Foothills Amateur Radio club meets on the first Saturday of each month*, starting at 8:00 A.M. at Cagney's Kitchen Restaurant in Wilkesboro. The meeting (with breakfast!) usually lasts about 1 to 2 hours. Feel free to join us!
Cagney's Kitchen
1200 Central Street
Wilkesboro, NC 28697
(336) 667-6008
(*)There are 3 exceptions to the meeting times. One is in July, the event of field day serves as the July meeting. The second one is in December, which is our holiday dinner meeting; the third one is in September - the Shelby Hamfest is usually the same weekend as our meeting so our meeting would usually be held on the 2nd Saturday of the month instead.

The W4FAR Repeater

The W4FAR repeater serves Wilkesboro and the surrounding towns in Wilkes County. It is on 145.37 MHz, a minus (-) offset, and a CTCSS of 94.8 Hz. The Foothills Amateur Radio Club net is on this repeater every Sunday evening at 8:30 P.M.

History

The original repeater hardware was a GE Master Pro feeding a Hustler G7 antenna. Also included was a 220 link to the Asheboro, North Carolina repeater which then linked to Raleigh. The antenna duplexers were purchased from a military surplus dealer in Hickory and were tuned by Danny Hampton and his crew. The first contact was between N4AGN and W4YSB (now a silent key). Later on, the Foothills Amateur Radio Club was in need of a telephone autopatch on the repeater and since the location was out of the county, long distance calls would be required and the decision was made to move to the present location on Pores Knob on the Brushy Mountain Range, just south of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

After the move, the old GE Master Pro was replaced with an excellent GE Master II which had been used for a short time in military activity. The Hustler G7 antenna was replaced by a 21 foot 4 dipole Phelps Dodge commercial grade antenna which was mounted on a 50 foot Rohn-25 tower. A new ACC85 controller and telephone autopatch system was incorporated into the repeater system.

About 10 years ago the repeater was moved into a common building and the antenna was placed at 80 feet on a 150 foot commercial tower. Two years ago the antenna was moved again to the top of a 90 foot tower standing beside the commercial tower.

Except for a few days when the devastating hurricane Hugo slammed our county, the 145.37 machine has been doing its repeating business!