Lake County Illinois - Amateur Radio

Website        Is assigned unit # 5605 in series, by the Sheriff's Office.
Lake County RACES/ARES VHF repeater is used when weather is in the area, and is active every time a watch/warning is issued, with frequent updates. Very helpful to listen to during weather as reports are given for almost each town in the county.

The coverage of this system is primarily northern Cook and southern Lake counties. All are welcome to use this system, but you must either be a member of our club or another club with a D-Star system in order to be able to register for use of the gateway.

UHF repeater also used for SKYWARN: 442.725+ MHz located on the far north side of Chicago. DMR (digital) users will need to use color code 1.  Digital mode supports 2 simultaneous, yet unique “time slots” or channels. Slot 1 users will use Call ID 1, slot 2 users will use Call ID 2.  If an analog signal is received by the repeater, an analog will be transmitted out.  If a digital signal is received by the repeater, a digital signal will be transmitted.  If you are strictly an analog user and do not wish to hear the digital hums and squeals of a digital transmission, set your analog radio to use tone squelch frequency 114.8 Hz.

The repeater consists of a Motorola MotoTRBO repeater operating in mixed analog and digtal mode and uses an S-Com 7330 controller. It operates with about 80 watts ERP from an offset pattern antenna at 513 feet. It primarily covers Cook and Lake counties and has become one of the most active repeaters in the Chicago area.  The 442.725+ repeater is also connected to Echolink courtesy of AA9VI.  The node # is 7641.