WRTH852

Did you ever get this to work correctly? I am asking because I am getting ready to try hooking the ID-O-Matic up to my repeater, and would rather not have to play a guessing game to get to where it will work.

Just some food for thought.... You might want to put an antenna that is closer to your transmitting freq up on the tower. An SWR of 1.6:1 thru 150 ft of line (you don't say what kind of cable or how old/good of shape its in) is a bit concerning. Depending on the loss of the cable (you can look it up), you will loose a part of your transmitted power going up the tower, and that lower power at the top will see the mismatch at your antenna (SWR), and a part of that reduced Tx power will be reflected back due to the mismatched impendences . That reflected power will also see the same amount of loss going back down the cable to the repeater. This causes the SWR to look better than it really is up there at the antenna due to loss's in the 300 ft round trip. I would suggest getting an antenna that is tuned for your transmit frequency and put it up there if you can get someone able to climb for you, so you can make best use of the power that does get up there. Also while they are doing that, a check to see that the cable is not damaged might prove helpful. A dummy load at the top and a SWR reading or TDR test while you have a climber could be informative. Depending on where the tower is located falling ice , hail, or lightning strikes on the tower could have done something nasty to your cable. Just some ideas for your consideration... I hope its helpful to you..

When you went from Wide channel to Narrow, that changes how many KHz the radio is expecting for full channel signal deviation that it receives and, it also changes how wide the signal is that you transmit (more on tx later). So, if the radio is set to operate wide, and then it is switched to narrow, the freq. swing (deviation) of the signal will give a larger audio output for a given deviation because now the radio is set so that the full channel deviation is less freq. shift than it was before when the channel width was larger. If both the radio and the received signal are using narrow modulation then it will sound "correct" for volume. If you radio is on wide, but the other radio is transmitting with narrow deviation, the audio will be low, because full modulation of the narrow transmitted signal is only about 1/2 of what the radio is set for to generate full loudness audio. If the your radio is on Narrow and is receiving a Wide signal then the deviation can swing outside the receive bandwidth your radio is set for. This will cause loud signals to distort as they swing outside of the Rx pass band. On transmit when you are set to narrow channels your audio is only deviating your signal at full audio for a narrow channel which is about 1/2 what it would be if you were transmitting the same audio using a wide channel setting. I hope that helps explain it, I don't know that this is a very clear way of saying what I am trying to get across.