I made a couple of trips to the repeater site this weekend. The club’s repeater committee has been working on the VHF repeater, trying to get the new controller interfaced with the ancient Motorola repeater. We got the repeater and controller to the site and in setting it up found that the CTCSS decoder was not working. Further investigation revealed a wire to the PL board had come loose during the truck ride. An attempt at attaching the wire to its proper place produced a BIG spark and a blown 500ma fuse. (NOTE: turn off power before connecting wires!) The fuse was replaced, but still no PL action. Had a good input to the board, but no output. Looks like the board didn’t survive the ZAP!
Luckily, we had a spare. The next day we went back to the site and replaced the board, and that fixed the problem! The W4MT VHF repeater is back in full operation, and the backup repeater was switched off, just waiting for the next failure :-).
73 de Dick N4BC