ROAN Mountain Report, N4AZR 2016
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Roan Mountain was covered this year by me (N4AZR) and my friend Gino (KI4YXO) 
and his son Nathan.

We arrived on-site at about 11am and I had my D700 digi deployed soon after 
in the Cloudland  Hotel parking lot area.

We quickly established voice contact with Comers Rock via UHF. The link from 
Roan to Comers is very good. I was able to turn the power on the UHF side 
down to low and still reach them with no issues. I could have probably turned 
the power down on the VHF side too, but didn't bother since I had plenty of 
battery. Interesting enough...I kept hearing a repeater ID on 445.925.  
As far as I know, all repeaters in the SERA management area use the low side 
of the split for the repeater output, so whatever I was hearing was probably 
pretty far away. I didn't think to copy down the morse code ID. Oh well.

Soon after establishing contact we heard from Comers that Clingmans Dome was 
having issues. Hearing that, we added all of our remaining mast sections to my 
antenna pole and got it up close to 30 ft. I was hoping that we could reach 
Springer direct by some miracle, but that didn't happen. We also heard that 
Comers was having digipeater issues which essentially left us cut off from the event.

At about that same time, we heard from KG4AKV who was operating a special event 
station for NPOTA at Craggy Gardens on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He was able to 
reach us on the UHF site to site frequency after hearing about the event from 
Bob WB4APR a few days earlier. Since we were pretty much isolated for the event, 
I had him punch the path settings into his Kenwood D72. We were able to 
exchange packets fine. I had him try to call Springer via UHF, again hoping for 
a miracle, but no luck.

As the day progressed, I started to notice strange things happening with my 
digipeater too. The first thing I noticed was that KG4AKV's packets were being 
decoded with no issues (was showing his call on the main screen as packets 
were decoded in real time), but he was not being added to my station list. 
It took several tries of him sending beacons and me cycling through the 
station list menu before he finally appeared. The next thing I noticed was that his 
beacons, beacons from Comers, as well as test beacons from my own D72 on-site 
were not being digipeated by me. All of this traffic should have appeared at 
Todd AL0I's iGate in Boone thanks to my digipeater, but it did not. I verified 
all of my settings were correct but did not spend too much time troubleshooting 
on-site as we knew that Comers digipeater was not repairable anyway.

While passing the time on top of the mountain, Gino's son Nathan (soon to be 
licensed) was playing with his scanner listening to 146.52. He heard some 
traffic including another station on Roan Mountain. After the GP event was over 
we met up with KD2GSW who is spending the summer in TN on an internship and 
just happened to be visiting the area. We also ran into some hams with the N4ARR 
Dixie Radio Pirates group who were working the VHF contest on top of 
Roan. We all stopped to chat for a bit before heading home at about 4 pm.

A few interested hikers stopped to ask what we were doing with the giant antenna 
mast. Once we explained they were very interested.

After arriving home, I set up my GP gear again and verified that indeed my D700
was not digipeating. I double checked all of the settings including the serial 
port settings and they all seemed correct. I could not determine the root cause 
so I reset the D700 and programmed it from scratch a 2nd time. This time around 
it worked fine. It was working fine before I packed up on Friday. Can't explain 
that one...Murphy's Law, bugs in the D700, who knows. Maybe it is time to retire 
the D700 in favor of a new D710 :)

Anyway, a fun time was had by all. We will try to be back to try again next year! 
Thanks to all who made the trip out on Saturday for a fun event that I look 
forward to every year!

73,

Glenn N4AZR