The 145.36 wI0OK__C DStar digital voice repeater has been on the air from near Glen Arbor and Empire Michigan since June of 2007.

The repeater is set to provide about 25 watts of RF into the antenna system.  Sadly, that antenna system is far from optimum for the repeater, but it does appear to radiate fairly well when you consider what it is.

The repeater is sharing the antenna system with the 52.92 repeater.  A ham-grade 'triplexer' (just two ports used in this application) is used to join the two repeaters into the single 350' length of 1/2 inch heliax that ties the two repeaters to the single Decibel Products folded dipole antenna that's southward facing at the 330' level on the radio tower.

In previous experiments with feeding a two meter signal into this antenna (for potential packet uses) it was discovered that the six meter antenna, even with a high swr on 2m, actually radiated/received noticeably better than a resonant two meter antenna at the 100' level on the tower.

Since the only present alternatives for the DStar repeater is to use either the non-resonant six meter antenna at 330' and 'eat the swr', or to use the resonant antenna at 100' (which would put the 145.07 packet node on that six meter antenna), I decided it was better to use the higher antenna for the DStar repeater. So far, all seems to be working well. Coverage on 2mtr DStar is comparable to that attained by the 444.725 and 52.92 repeaters at the site.