Date: January 2024
Amount: €14,000

Vereniging van Radio Zendamateurs (VZRA) is a Dutch association for Radio Amateurs. Their mission is maintaining and promoting contacts at national and international levels with organizations and institutions involved in radio amateurism.

The Scoop Hobbyfonds Foundation (Hobbyscoop) facilitates innovative experiments at high installation points throughout the Netherlands to meet the experimental needs of Dutch radio amateurs. Hobbyscoop operates two FM repeater systems with national coverage that are known on a global scale due to their innovative design and technology. The VHF repeater PI3UTR and UHF repeater PI2NOS are both repeaters that consist of a series of transmitters that operate in a single frequency/co-channel configuration. The complicated synchronization technique applied has been a joint development effort between Dutch Radio Amateurs and consists of a sophisticated software suite that continuously manages timing systems to cancel out undesired delays and radio wave traveling periods. The transmitters coverage plots are chosen such that they overlap and thus provide national coverage, even for portable users.

This grant supports both hardware and software updates to increase the usability of the network. The current system is analog FM, and VRZA wishes to add digital C4FM capability as well.

Learn more at https://hobbyscoop.nl/status/pi2nos/.