History of TCARA

• The 146.97 repeater was first put up on Connecticut Hill in around 1972. The frequency was chosen by the ham who spearheaded the effort – unfortunately, I can only remember his first name (Rick?) and not his call (WB2T-something?). He was a student at Cornell at the time, as I recall. He was active in the 146.97 repeater group at Mount Beacon, NY, and he didn’t want to have to buy extra crystals for his mobile rig (this was before synthesized-frequency radios were common – or available at all). When the FCC decided to formally license and regulate repeaters in 1978 (or thereabouts), we got one of the first repeater callsigns in the second call district – WR2AAC, I think it was. It was much later, after the FCC gave up on separately licensing repeaters, that the Club started using Ray Reyonolds’ AF2A call. He was still very much alive at the time.

• I was president of the Cornell Radio Club at the time, and didn’t join the TCARC until I graduated in 1974. We had a 146.94 repeater on campus, the first in the area – the transmitter was at Bradfield Hall and the receiver at Barton Hall (or maybe the other way around). It was some years later that the Cornell repeater moved to 146.61.

• The TCARC used to operate Field Day each year, often from the site of an abandoned fire-watch tower in Caroline. I’ve attached a couple of photos from 1976’s Field Day operation. That’s me in the black-and-white photo with the Standard HT on my belt, and Bob Goodsell K2OOD using a fishing pole to fling a line up in a tree to pull up an antenna. I don’t remember any of the others. The scanned slide shows Doug Wood WA2EOW on the fire tower. Some years we ran Field Day from Connecticut Hill, near the repeater.

• Bob K2OOD was a mainstay of the early TCARC, and quite a character. I remember when he came into the first TCARC meeting after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 and announced that he was the only member of the club who had once decked Reagan in a fair fight. Apparently, they were in the same photo unit in the South Pacific during WWII.

• The TCARC used to work with the Tompkins County Sherriff to do a Hallowe’en Spook Watch in the early days. Before the 146.97 repeater was operational we’d send a ham (usually me) up to the broadcasting building on Connecticut Hill (part of the Ivy Network in those days). We’d rig an antenna on an unused tower next to the building and operate simplex, which was both a good spot for net control and an operational test of the site for the repeater-to-come. The Sherriff’s department used to have a low-band remote base in the same room we operated from – they operated on 46MHz at the time – and I’d open the cabinet and turn on the local speaker so I could hear what they were doing. One year the sunspots were just right and the Los Angeles PD was as strong as the local cars.

• We also used to do hidden-transmitter “bunny hunts” around the county. One of us would hide somewhere and transmit periodically on simplex while the others tried to find him. There was one time that K2OOD was the “bunny”, and he hid somewhere in a hollow in Newfield. The RF reflections were such that nearly everyone triangulated his position to somewhere on East Hill, near Collegetown – but when we got there, we lost the signal. We’d go further away, re-acquire Bob’s signal, and it would point right back to Collegetown.

• Dave Flinn W2CFP did the Hilltopper newsletter in those days. I took over in the mid-80’s at some point. There was a large collection of the old magazines which I passed along to someone in the late 80’s or early 90’s - I moved to Harford in Cortland County in 1992, where I live today, and after that I became more active in the Cortland (Skyline) Radio Club. I don’t remember who got them, but maybe they still exist.

• I’m sure there are other slides from the early TCARC somewhere around here which I could scan, if I can find them – if there’s interest, I can dig through the boxes at some point.

• I just got off the phone with Jerry Friedman WA2FQA. Jerry maintained the 146.97 repeater for many years in the late 1970’s-early 1990’s. I remember that he used to use me as a calibrated signal source when he was tuning up the duplexer on the repeater – if I was sitting in my recliner in the DeWitt building in downtown Ithaca and had my HT on low power I could give him just the right signal strength for tuning.

Some side notes:  the fire tower in Caroline (on fire Tower Road, of course) is no longer there.  I was told it was moved to the NYS Fairgrounds in Syracuse, but have not confirmed that.  In its place a home was built, a home in which I lived from 2004 to 2019.  It was a great location for ham radio, VHF and SW.  Great low angle radiation because the hill sloped away in all directions, and, of course, it’s the second highest hill in Tompkins County.  

Using a simple 2-meter vertical mounted on a fence post next to the house, and 65 watts, I was able to open and use over 100 repeaters all over NY, PA and occasionally into CT. NJ.and MD, a number of them with the same frequency and code (or “open”).  For example, our 146.94 shares a frequency with K3CSG (open) in Scranton (which was a problem for me); 146.97 shares the frequency with KC2DAA in Beacon Hill, NY and with W3HZU in Rocky Ridge County Park in York County (different codes).  

The 2-meter vertical was mounted on a fencepost near the ground because (1) I didn’t have a tower, (2) being on the hill I was already on a roughly 1000’ tower, and (3) the hill was a lightening magnet - power line, phone line surges were common.  Never was struck directly but there were a few close ones and I didn’t want to invite trouble.

A number of years ago when I still lived there I offered, casually and through Hugh Bahar, the use of my property for a club field day.  Nothing came of it.  I didn’t know of the club’s previous use of that land.