LeoG

Not very far from my experience. At one end of the super store it comes in pretty bad. I'm not running an airband antenna though, just a 771G. I can hear them out in the parking lot pretty clear and at times I've heard them at my house which is about 1.25 miles by way of crow. But that's rare.

I did a scan while I was in WalMart and it showed up as 154.57125. I've programmed it in and everytime we go grocery shopping I have it on. I hear the overhead announcements, manager to employee, the auto button announcement to unlock different items and of course the carriage collector. The wife and I have a blast with it.

7.2dBi and the pattern is just fine. The antenna has an 11º output and my declination is in the 10ths of a degree. I have no issues with the house antenna, just the HT which falls below LOS in lots of places. We shall find out when I raise the antenna and put an even higher gain up there.

So far real world results comparing the wideband tune and the single channel tune aren't vastly different. My neighborhood is a mix of hit or miss when I'm walking around with my Tidradio H3. I have certain "stations" I stand at and do my repeater testing specifically so I can do comparisons. Time of day and day to day make a difference in my area. I am in LOS but have at least 1.6km of heavy treed areas in the way. My repeater antenna is only up 13m at its center radiating point which puts it in the thick of the leaves. That night when I put it in I did notice the transmission from the repeater seemed a bit more smooth, meaning the background hiss was much more mellow and it seemed like better quieting. It is by no means anywhere near full quieting. I have my base station and I use a digital recording app to record my tests. And just like any night it will vary. I have tests that are LOS and testing areas that are not. Most of the tests last night were comparable to the last couple of tests except for my last station in front of my house. That one usually is nice and it cut out this time. I had other tests that are usually not so good come in better than usual. So like I said it varies. Today when my wife called me on the radio from the home base (50 watt, CA712EFC, 13m high) it came in much better than usual. That was one time and only about a minute of conversation. That too can vary from time to time. So far I can say that the single channel tuned is doing at least as good as the wide band tuned. Was hoping for better, but given my circumstances it's understandable that the 5 watt has a tough time getting through the trees. On the original duplexer I couldn't make it at all, I could trip the repeater but almost never get audio through. The wide band replacement usually gave me acceptable audio and the single channel tuned duplexer does about the same. I still need to do some farther out testing which I haven't done in a while. The goal is to reach my family one town down and that's going to take more height.

I'll just say that there are many flavors of the SGQ 450D duplexers out there and this particular one came directly from Btech and who ever they use to manufacture them. The original one that came with the repeater had the same numbers but it definitely wasn't made in the same place. The replacement they sent me and the one I purchased are the same. Thanks again for all your hard work tuning these for me Marc

Does seem odd. And not to quibble but asking people in the testing phase if they can hit it isn't going to be dragging the eff sea seas out to the site to employ hit men. Technically it's against regulation. But I'm sure every single one of us here has done a technicality that went against the regulation.

If it's a private repeater you don't need it.

Either way I was shocked.

I only did it once. So I don't know if it'll still be in the same spot if I went there again. I have to go back there in September... So it's going to be a while before I know.

That's certainly one definition of "business"

Welcome.

Define personal activities.

Just another matrix program, you aren't really even here.

Tropospheric Ducting as another way?

So you are here talking to a bunch of tech radio dorks and you think it's OK to be vague. OK.