JeepCrawler98

Tones are not required; but unless you want to completely make a channel useless to any other repeaters on the same pair and potentially cause all kinds of interference you really should have one. If you're running a machine CSQ it'll pick up ALL traffic and any background noise above your squelch level on the repeater input channel, regardless of if it's intended for your repeater or not.

List it now; I list repeaters months before they even go online just so there's a chance for someone to let me know if I'm sitting it on an occupied frequency.

So to help others in the future; what was the issue?

Do you have port 4569 forwarded (UDP) on your router?

That alludes to a power output problem; I'd expect to see 5W-10W depending on what they actually have the GMRS PA set to. Usual checks: power supply, program settings (the RT97 looks like it has a low power setting in the software). Just curious; if you hook the lead coming out of the PA to a dummy load, does the repeater hear better?

Your output power is much lower than it should be; my understanding is that the RT97 has a 10w PA, but since you have fairly high losses when you put those Jesai duplexers at a 5mhz split they rate them to 5w out (they advertise the amateur one at 10watts… with a 10mhz split) if you’re seeing 700mw forward, and if that Surecom is halfway accurate (they’re usually at least in the ballpark) I’m wondering if your duplexer is poorly tuned, hooked up backwards, or otherwise defective. It’d be worth putting that meter between the low port and transmitter port in the repeater and seeing what your output is there. Is there a high/low power setting in the software that might be messing with things?

Where did you measure this? Right at the RT97 or at the antenna end of the feedline?

The notches on most duplexers are about 200-300Khz wide if not wider for the +/- 3dB measurement from peak loss (ie. if your max is -88db, the range from where you'd have -85 to -88 to -85). So within GMRS, you're absolutely frequency agile with your repeater. It's a misnomer that your duplexer is only good for one pair given how small the band is, on other services though you may not be so lucky. On the full Pass/Reject duplexers the pass band is usually about a Mhz wide, unless you add additional pass cavities (always a good idea). Duplexers aren't as pointy as people think; so long as Retevis aimed for somewhere in the GMRS band and hooked the leads up correctly it should be usable.

PL-259 has decent loss at UHF frequencies; Type N is much better to use and is all you'll find on commercial repeater setups (sometimes even DIN 7/16 or flange connectors). On end-user equipment manufacturers tend to stick to the PL-259's since it's what people are more used to working with and they're robust. You should get an SWR meter to check that antenna, it also looks like it has a few exposed joints in it; joints can raise the noise floor under power as well so it's yet another thing to watch out for. If you do end up switching it out for another model go for one with Type N connectors and crimp on a fitting on that LMR400. The Diamond X50C2 works decent for a home-use repeater and has some gain for the price, if you go above that start looking at used DB404/408/411's Be mindful that when it comes to full duplex repeater setups; all the small unexciting details become a lot more important than the repeater itself - filtering, feedline and antennas are everything.

If that's RG58 that could be your culprit; suggest rolling up to at least good quality LMR400 to get it to work OK. By the book you should be running hardline, but that's overkill for this application IMO. Cheap coax makes noise under power of which a primary symptom is heavy receiver desense. Also if you purchased an RT97 for the wrong band the notches on the internal duplexer will be way out of wack; meaning your receive is basically not protected from the repeater's transmitter at all (again, you'd get some major desense here). You can 'kinda' tune them with a nanoVNA (not well I should add, but you can get in the ballpark), but if you're not familiar with the process I'd have either a local comms shop do it for you or exchange it with Retevis.

WAV files work fine, so long as you resample to a 8Khz sampling rate with a single channel (mono) in an audio editing program (such as Audacity); the industry standard 44/48Khz sampling rates don't work. I usually run the WAV route as I fire up audacity anyways to normalize the audio levels with normal radio traffic and apply an aggressive 300Hz HPF and 3Khz LPF to keep things inside of the audible passband of 300-3000Hz (which keeps the PL sub audible band and harmonics clean, since Asterisk can generate audio well below and above the audio band we care about). Exporting an 8Khz mono WAV file from there just saves a conversion step since you're already editing everything.

Clean work; nicely done! how's the insertion loss on this guy - close to (I assume) the theoretical 3db per port? Do you have a link for the design formulas? Those things are kind of pricey in the commercial market!

You need to scroll to where you see the map dialog and drag the myGMRS icon to where it belongs.

I wouldn't expect the Shari's to cause you any problems; but since you're probably familiar with AllStar - using that package as a repeater controller is perfectly feasible as well; it's the same back end that the myGMRS network uses should you be interested in linking at some point (or not)

So far so good, recommend running the 40 watt radio at 25w and blowing some cold air on it if you're going to turn the keys over to the public or use it for a good rag-chewing session; if you need a simple repeater controller to handle time-out and ID consider the ID-O-Matic IV - it has a built in fan controller too. If you have other transmitters with decent power output at your house in the 70cm or other UHF bands that will key up while the repeater is in use, you need to be aware of and understand mixing products, how they work, and how they can be mitigated. Mixing products can and regularly do wreak havoc throughout the radio spectrum and cause all kinds of problems not just with your own gear, but other licensed uses as well. I can elaborate if this will be your setup, they're one of the reasons why commercial sites are more complicated to install at properly. What feedline are you planning on running? Good grade cable is tantamount to having a good set of ears as the cheaper stuff will cause noise to the point where it deafens your receiver, since your transmitter is sharing the same cable as the receiver. RG-58 or RG8x isn't going to cut it; good quality LMR400 is fine for backyard or other 'short-run' installs, hardline is better but will probably not pay back in your application - save that for a site you don't want to have to yourself drive back to. Don't forget grounding, weatherproofing, and surge arrestors, but that's kind of a given...

Some of us want to keep the riff-raff out while we tend to our caviar and champagne parties, you know...

wrcu527

It's in your profile settings; from the "mygmrs.com" site hit edit profile, there's a toggle switch labeled "repeater access requests." turn it off (grey, to the left) and hit save profile.

Add another column with "dollars per measured unit" ?

There often sort of pattern to it (IE link audio always sounds tinny, but local sounds good, or vice-a-versa) but it's highly dependent on hardware. Keep in mind that emphasis is a bit of a hodgepodge with all the equipment on linked network where there's no set standard; there's lots of repeaters that are audibly over-de-emphasized, so maybe don't use what you hear as a reference without paying attention to what machine is keying up on the network (use the network map) to see if there's a pattern. Then there's the debate on where the right spot is to apply emphasis; on the SWCRS hardware we run de-emphasized audio over the link so it sounds natural to the audio streams and Zello gateway, others prefer to run flat audio across the backbone, so equally important is to be consistent with the repeaters you typically link up with. What equipment are you running and what pin-outs are you using to get audio in/out? Yes the standard *3 connect mode will not attempt to re-connect if there's a network glitch; if you want a persistent connection use the 'permanent' linking which will try to re-establish the link in case of an outage, I'm not sure if these are included in the stock config but try *13175

Consult your repeater's service manual and check your emphasis settings on SimpleUSB; if the audio coming out of the repeater is already emphasized / de-emphasized by the repeater then you want to turn that off in SimpleUSB. If the audio pins on the repeater provide/take flat audio (discriminator and/or data pins), then you'll want to enable de-emphasis / pre-emphasis on SimpleUSB And of course it's possible to have it mixed as well; de-emphasis is applies on the receive side and pre-emphasis applies to the transmit side.

Are you wiring the node to also repeat local audio or are you having the repeater do that internally? If the former; duplex=2 will repeat local audio if it's missing from your setup. duplex=1 injects/pulls link audio, beeps and boops (telemetry), and hang time (if it's longer than the repeater's internal controller). Typically on our gear we set the repeaters to base station or duplex mode and use asterisk as a full repeater controller handling all audio, but if you're splitting roles between the hardware duplex=1 works best there (or if you're using a link radio). duplex=0 only gives link audio and is useful for some external controllers, but it behaves funny on DTMF decoding and not announcing nodes statuses and whatnot

@WRFS422 We had some persistent issues with less than savory folks getting in there and causing trouble; the PL on Lemmon has been changed in the past because of this but with non-split tones of course it’s not difficult to force your way back in. The tone scheme implemented now is permanent; we always try to make it as easy as possible to get on the machines so long as it stays clean - unfortunately we had to implement the scheme we have now to keep the riffraff off.

The current bit of legislation that’s causing a stir in the amateur and GMRS communities is the following: http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-to-oppose-forest-service-administrative-fees-for-amateur-facilities its my understanding that the $1400 is applied to lease holders (site owners) and not the individual equipment owners; although the leaseholders may pass that cost onto us. Let’s just say that if the USFS starts charging $1400 per sublease for every repeater we run on their public land, we’d be taking almost all the repeaters on the SWCRS down; we just couldn’t afford to run that at the price we charge (nothing). Aside from that, they’re proposing to flat rate all sites which is somewhat blunt since some site users are more intensive than others. It’s like the building department charging the same cost for a building permit for a house vs. a shopping mall…. Theres a number of good repeaters around the four corners, including Durango under the San Juan Connection; I used the ones in Durango, Purgatory, and Silverton this past summer, worked fine, can’t confirm it’s current status though: http://www.sjcham.com/gmrs.html

There’s a link in the listing to sign up with the SWCRS; once someone in the admin team reviews your application you’re sent a link with a password that will give you the info to all machines on the network, including the Lemmon 650. We centrally manage access to all machines as opposed to on a per repeater basis, otherwise we’re constantly inundated with requests for each one considering there’s a good number of them we look after.