I don’t know how many people here play around with these sorts of devices, but I recently decided to purchase the Argent Data ADS-SR1. Previous to that I owned the Surecom SR-112 simplex repeater box.
They’re pretty useful things if for no other reason than to test your own equipment. They can serve as your helping hand on your remote station to key you back and let you know when you’re still hitting the home station. And to play back a recording of how you sound coming in.
The problem that I always had with the Surecom version is that it just didn’t work sometimes . It seemed like it made a bad connection in the audio jack, and it could be solved temporarily by just unplugging it and plugging it back in, twisting it, or just otherwise agitating the connection in some way to re-gain electrical contact. Then it would work again, for a while.. Additionally it had a tendency to chop the first couple of seconds off of the transmission, so I had to be in the habit of keying up dead air for the first second of every transmission. It just wasn’t reliable. Cheaply made, and you could feel it by holding by the box. It was just kind of junky. But, it was $60 and the Argent one was $90 and you had to purchase the connection cable separately ($10 more).
So about a week ago I had a use for the simplex repeater that I had for a test that I wanted to do, and found that the Surecom box was dead. No longer held a charge on the internal battery and the way I needed to use it required it be on battery power. At that point I just trashed it since it never did work well in the first place. So that’s the end of that thing…
I placed an order for the Argent Data version of this device as well as the appropriate cable.
Firstly, the best part about this one is that it just simply works. It uses an RJ45 connection at both ends which isn’t really susceptible to a “bad” contact like an audio jack type connection could be. No chop off in the recording.
Basically this product is the version of the thing that I think all people are trying to get when they buy these things, that actually just WORKS as intended.
Buy once, cry once. Get the Argent Data simplex repeater. It’ll actually do the thing you’re trying to accomplish with it..