Leaderboard

I ditto on turning the power down. 20/25 will do as well as 40 in most cases, as the higher the tx power the more chance of drowning your input, even with dupexor (unless you are spending $3,000 on it, and even then I have turned them down to necessary power only. When I worked for M we had a customer that used a 25 watt mobile for 2 way and phone interconnect, and 2 HT600 portables, but her repeater antenna was on a 500 foot tower she owned. We had the repeater all rigged up blowing A/C directly into it, as she liked to use that phone for 20-30 minutes at a time, and it was an R100 repeater! We had it set down to get about 2 watts out the antenna, and it had great coverage, more than she needed. Input path to the repeater will determine the usability in most cases not power out. Too many guys have CB mentality, not what you need.

The single most critical part of any repeater is the antenna system! Keep in mind that a repeater can only "repeat" what it can hear. Additionally, UHF frequencies are mostly limited to line-of-sight (LOS), so an antenna that's very limited in height will not really provide much of an advantage over simplex operations.