WSHE710

The last correspondence I sent them was Thanksgiving morning, So maybe they have taken a 4 day weekend and I won't hear from them until Monday. I'll let you all know what they have to say, if they respond.

They would not take a credit card, only Paypal. And evidently they had a good reason for wanting to. do it that way.

Update: BTECH hit me for $187.50 as a restocking fee. I am in the process of arguing with them about it because I did not return the unit because I changed my mind. I returned the unit because it would not work properly. And despite my best efforts and their technicians’ best efforts we could not get it to function properly. I do not understand why they’re charging me a restocking when I had to return a defective unit. In fact, I had two defective units because they sent me another one to replace the first one at one point in time. I also remember reading somewhere, I think it was on this thread that Amazon had a flag on the ad for this item That said “frequently returned item”. When I went to Amazon to view the add I discovered that this item is no longer for sale on Amazon. I do not know whether it was Amazon that pulled the add or the Online retailer because they got tired of sending money back. Bottom line is that the Btech RPT-50 is not a “quality product”, and Btech does not have the moral rectitude to do the right thing for its customers.

I connected the Retevis MA1 50-Watt Mobile to my car, did the proper programming and it's working really well. There is a slight delay on transmit so when pressing the button I need to give a short pause before speaking. I have not as yet been able to get far enough away from the car that it does not continue to operate the mobile repeater. I have it connected to my auxiliary battery not my main cranking battery, so it Will stay working even when the car is shut off. It is a sealed lead acid 20-amp hour battery So I should get at least a couple of hours out of it, depending upon usage before the battery gets too low.

I had really high hopes for this BTECH RPT-50, but I’m afraid it has fallen short of my requirements. I am unable to get more than about 38 watts out of this repeater, and when I transmit it starts out at 38 watts but then starts dropping fairly quickly, so within 2 seconds of a transmission it is down to at least 35 to 34 watts and still dropping. If this was a dual band repeater with both VHF and UHF in it, I could understand how you could call it a 50-Watt repeater. Because on the VHF side it probably would be. And it is generally accepted that the UHF side would have been slightly less than 50 watts. But this is a UHF only repeater, so when 50 watts is advertised one must expect that you’re going to get 50 Watts, or something close to it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The sensitivity of the receiver also proved to be a problem. Even with the squelch level at 1, this receiver required a very strong signal for it to pass the incoming audio through to the transmitter. Customer Service at Btech has been excellent and one of the technicians spent a lot of time trying to help me get this repeater to work properly. They even sent me a second RPT-50 Repeater In the hopes that that would solve the problem. So, I have no complaints about the company. I am just not satisfied with the performance of the RPT-50. I have asked for an RA so I can return the unit sent me. I was told to read the return policy Information and it turns out there’s a 15% restocking charge which I may get stuck for. Customer Service has been very helpful throughout this entire process and I thank them for that. It doesn’t really matter much at this point but just for giggles I thought you all might like to know the following. I connected my Icom 2730 radio to the 35 feet of LMR 400 that attaches to my Comet CA712 GMRS antenna. I programed in the transmit channel for the GMRS. At 43 watts my SWR reading was 1.03. So, it’s probably not the antenna or the cable causing the high SWR with the RPT-50 connected. There must be something in the repeater that was causing the 2.8 SWR problem.

Steve I was thinking the very same thing, in fact yesterday I ordered a Retevis M1, 50-Watt Mobile. It’ll do cross band repeat which should work out just perfect for me. I have a VHF frequency that I can use and It is a UHF frequency which I want to use for the 50 watt transmissions. I did try this once before on an Icom 2730 and I ran into a problem. When using it as a repeater it would not transmit the PL code, I had assigned to it. I checked several reviews of the M1 radio and a couple of them mentioned Retevis did do an upgrade to get it to transmit the PL code. Thank you all for your input.

Thanks for all the feedback guys I appreciate it. The original question was, has it been done or whether or not is it Mechanically feasible to do it this way. I had not actually considered the legality end of it, just the mechanics. Well, I did go ahead and double check on the FCC rules and you guys are right, not Legal according to FCC rules. It is a shame that there’s not something like a Super Bluetooth which could get that kind of range. I do know that Motorola makes a wireless microphone for one of their radios that does have, I believe up to a 100 yards range. I don’t know what frequency they’re using or how they’re doing it. it may be some kind of digital thing for all I know. Oh well another brilliant idea flushed down the toilet. LOL Thanks Again for the feedback.

I was wondering if anyone makes wireless speaker/mic that Utilizes a 2-watt FRS channel? The idea being you could hook it up to your mobile radio in your car. Take this microphone a good 100 yards away from your mobile to do something on foot but still utilize the 50-Watt transmitter in your car instead of a 5-watt HT. If there is not already one commercially available, I thought that it might be possible to take a couple FRS radios with VOX in them. Cannibalize one of them to make a receive and transmit unit and hook it up through the microphone port on your mobile radio. All the pin-outs would have to be figured out but I think it could be done. Has anyone ever tried building one of these and if so, how did it work out?

Thank you all for the advice. I think you are correct the comet would be a much better choice. You know what they say "Buy once, cry once". For some reason which I do not understand it was cheaper on gigabytes than it was on Amazon. I had already purchased that retevis antenna and it did not work very well. I got it on Amazon so I can send it back and use that money towards the comet. Thanks for the advice and the help. When I finally put this whole thing together I'll get back here and let you know how it worked.

I receive a Reply from BTECH this morning. They also believe the antenna and the cable are the problem not the wattage. The antenna I have up now is a comet GP9 and hase a gain on UHF or 7.6. Here is a link from Amazon where I got it. https://www.amazon.com/GP-9N-Comet-Dual-Band-Vertical-Antennas/dp/B0DJ1NMS22/ref=sr_1_26?crid=2R8VLCBZWAKKX&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.VOnahz-sNdbnzvhd5gIcCtvyuFlHzuLjfCsnqzgoC21MoLRGQ-KbkCjowdOqkl-hcCcNjQ44bI15AF2YtfdG1ejDPucXUbL58QkmPHNEIrX_NR5dYzfhR96qrwXTT55v3waz7y_F7LyQ7x_LcsF3n2amYiB933Bu0djd89HSNIJLY3wmnbQ3kfi2ZatOtOsbX_WVnIeXrhmO5_-FBLqs_av0YrGcAJSWaxMXlKO1LQLPDPV65MFrV9oJF0FDrDMJprpoiLwsT18eJSz8ES2ooafhw1KEyLmaKIHwywmSEHo.vrET_jh9bH8u1_Yn2op2izXsr6WVzMbZKwMK1vS3kLI&dib_tag=se&keywords=comet+duel+band+antenna&qid=1761838638&s=electronics&sprefix=comet+duel+band+antenna%2Celectronics%2C159&sr=1-26&xpid=UDO5SwRP2u6EG It is a dual band antenna which means it does equally well on UHF as it does on VHF. By the same token it does equally poor on UHF as it does on VHF. So, for the convenience you suffer a little performance. Normally I do not talk long range simplex with my ham station, I only talk to repeaters and I can reach them with a mag-mount on top of my filing cabinet. So doing away with this antenna doesn’t grieve me at all. I might even be able to sell it to somebody. The antenna I want to replace it with is a GMRS antenna I also got on Amazon. Here is the link to that antenna https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRTRQYKY?ref=fed_asin_title&th=1 My present antenna is approximately 45 feet from the ground to the very tip using RG8 cable that is about 25 to 30 feet long. BTECH suggest that I change the antenna and the cable to the GMRS antenna that I have and also, that I use some LMR 400 cable in place of the RG8. The mast that is on there now is about 5 feet and then the Antenna is 17 feet. I have two sections of 10-foot-long old antenna steel mast that the outside diameter is 1 ¼ inch. I am planning on cutting it down to 15 feet because I think 20 is just too long for my tripod. The tripod mounted on my roof is a Skywalker - 5' Heavy Duty Antenna Tripod. The tripod Will swallow about 3 feet of the mast that I’ll be using. This will leave me roughly 12 feet of mass left to attach the GMRS Antenna too. That should give me a total height to the top of the antenna of somewhere around 44 feet, give or take. I can live with this height and antenna; the big problem is finding someone around here willing to go up on my roof and swap them out. I am 75 and don’t do ladders anymore. One other problem I have is that about 30 yards away from where the antenna is are a couple very old reasonably tall trees. They probably have some influence on my coverage area in the north and northwest sections. If I can get this antenna situation straightened out, I’ll come back here and let you know how it worked out. Thanks for all the help guys 73’s

My BTECh repeater came in this afternoon. Programming was pretty straightforward. After programming I hooked it To my antenna and my Watt meter and got a whopping 31 1/2 watts out of it. I gave it a test run anyway and I could only get about a mile and a half with an HT. But only if I stuck the radio out the window. I sent an Email BTECH seeing if they could help me with this problem. I'll let you know what they say and if whatever solution they come up with works or doesn't work. I do remember seeing in one of the reviews I think it was from the Queen that there's a knob or a screw on the power supply that you can kick up to get a little more power to the thing but I'll wait until they tell me to do that before I start putting my hands inside there and void the warranty.

I have some limited access to a program called chat GPT. It is an AI program that is really amazing and can solve so many different problems quickly. It told me that if I uploaded it a picture of my house with the antenna and gave him a reference of measurement. It could estimate the height. I had a measurement from another project which is 14 feet from the cement driveway to the lower sill of the second story window. (see attached picture). it then calculated that my antenna height was somewhere between 45 and 46 feet from the ground to the very tip. If I do have to replace the antenna with the GMRS antenna I will lose some height. But I have been working on an idea to keep the height a little more in line with what I have now. I did notice something else though some of the guys on the squad were complaining that they didn’t always hear people, even when they knew they were within range. I was unable to find the original post. But somebody on here commented that they had a problem with one HT that could not reach the repeater. Upon examination they discovered that the repeater squelch was set to six is what I believe he said. He moved the squelch to one, and now that HT can hit the repeater. This got me to Thinking that maybe some of our HT’s that we’ve got out there are also set too high. And in my testing the Retevis repeater that’s why once I got far enough away from the repeater, I couldn’t hear the audio anymore out of another HT I had 10 feet away. So, I looked at the two that I had here and sure enough they were set at 5. I moved them down to one and I’m going to Experiment with those HT’s tomorrow. Then when the repeater gets here on Wednesday, I will check the setting on it and see what the setting is, And, if needed bring it down to one or two before I test it. Unless the repeater gets here sooner than Wednesday I’ll report back Thursday or Friday and let you all know how it all worked out.

LeoG, so far so good but what are the black marks on ether side and do you know how I can get rid of them?

LeoG, i cannot find anything in my account labled account console. I there another name for it?

Sorry I did read the rule wrong It's 60 meters not feet. BTW Can you tell me where I have to go to change my avatar like you did?