wbjohnston

I set up my 50 a month ago and as an experienced ham I’ve learned, like many of us, the art of interpreting Chinese produced manuals. I’ll play devils advocate here: They have come along way with providing manuals at some point that are more concise and clear. I guess they get tired of emails and telephone inquiries for clarification and decided to invest time and money and producing a manual that is more in line with what the customers need. As in the case of the RPT50 I guessing that it hasn’t generated enough sales/profit to invest in cleanup their operating manual. It is an art and there are people that make a living producing product manuals here in United States. It is expensive but well worth the investment and have been evolved with a big project that cost us thousands of dollars but in the end it was a manual written by native English speakers for native English consumers. The company that produces this repeater have apparently numerous variations planned. All pretty much are the same function (repeater), but different modes, i.e. VHF version, business, digital, etc. The build quality is excellent. Given that frequently repeaters are set up and operating in some harsh environments dealing with dust and heat the engineers took that into. consideration and made a good box. My concern is how well the internal duplexes will fair in time. This is new cutting edge technology, and has not been adopted by any other repeater builders that I know of so uncharted waters. Fortunately, their system is taken that into consideration and allowed for potential external duplicator implementation; smart. This system is basically a turn key, but even so there are many options with poor or no explanation in the present manual. For example, the ID/morse code option (every 15 mins if running an open system here in the US) has options that if set wrong would conflict and it’s poorly explained in the manual and it is not intuitive. That’s the only problem I’ve had with the system to date. I set it for 15 minutes and it’ll do that for several hours and then stop sending the ID. Many repeater owners just ignore that rule and I haven’t heard of anyone getting a letter from the FCC, but there is a potential. It’s a rule and not a law. In my case, I have to make it so that it abide by the rules given that the system is mainly provided for CERT teams (FEMA trained) but the system remains in a open configuration unless our Emergency Operation Center is activated. Given time I’m sure that if not the RPT50 team someone will produces a much needed clear precise manual. Present / temporary setup of RPT50 is in my ham shack. I’m getting 42 W output through a dummy load with a 2.1 SWR. Within the next few weeks, I’ll update after I move the system to the opposite end of the house to reduce potential of deceasing, adding much improved high gain omni directional antenna fed through a shorter coax run with LMR400. I will be gaining an additional 20 feet height off the roof from present system. Right now I’m able to pretty well saturate an area of 5 mile radius in a very densely populated urban area that a 5 W HT can hit with little problems. Amazingly, I live in a unique place that has a narrow geographical conduit going from the Valley floor (I5 / 167) that shoots northward into downtown Seattle that is 40 miles away. Same 5 W HT can work my repeater clear as a bell. Goes to show you that it’s all about line of site. One can hit the ISS with a 5 W HT and that’s 250 miles away but there’s no terrain. Regards, WRBQ468 / KD7GXN