Ramsayworks

    Every year, our small-town amateur radio club volunteers for the local Fourth of July parade. We coordinate floats, manage logistics, and keep everyone connected using 2-meter radios. At the heart of that communication is something most people never see: a repeater , a system that listens for weak radio signals and rebroadcasts them so they can travel much farther than a handheld radio ever could.     In 2025, that system almost let us down. Cloud cover rolled in and lingered over the mountain where our repeater lives, slowly starving its solar panels of power. As battery voltage dipped, the repeater began cutting out at the worst possible time. Unfortunately, “just go check it” isn’t an option when the equipment sits on a mountaintop hours away. By the time we realized what was happening, we were already reacting instead of planning. That moment planted a simple but important question: what if we could monitor the repeater remotely, before it fails? Because th...