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Another thought on the subject, duplexers are rather finicky and even though they have been tuned, unless they are tested on the repeater afterwords, may still not be tuned properly. I went through this earlier this year where a new duplexer was tuned, re-tuned, and made me think it wasn't the issue. I went to my local shop with no idea why I was only able to TX @40w no more than a block when a handheld tx'ed nearly a mile. Even the radio shop tuned and tuned and found several spots where the equipment said it was tuned only to find it wasn't really tuned. After three days, they had the duplexer spot on and the repeater now tx's across town.

Dennis - make sure that your transmit radio is going to the LOW side (462.xxx) of the duplexer. Also check your cables between the radios & the duplexer. If you're getting decent range when you eliminate the repeater from the scenario - you know your cable & antenna are most likely good. Now try doing what Rich recommends & just use a regular mobile palm mic on the transmit radio to key up the base frequency & transmit - going as a repeater normally would, through the duplexer & out through the antenna. If you start to see a problem there, you know it's something with the transmit radio (off frequency most likely) or possibly the duplexer and/or cables. If the transmit radio being keyed by itself gives you the 5 mile range, but going back to a repeater function gives you problems, you can just about guarantee that it's de-sense or a terrible setup on the receive radio. Using a portable 1225 "board" as the receiver doesn't sound like a sure fire path to success. The 1225 radios would easily suffer from de-sense in a heavy RF environment. I'd want to get the repeater into a shielded box & separate the receiver from the transmit radio as much as possible (A few inches and a little shielding could make all the difference).