WRKC935

Thank you sir. I have been working on this on and off for a while now. It's starting to get cold, and it's a sit at the computer project. Once I get it done I am gonna go back to building CM108 interfaces for R-Pi's. Once I figure all this out (running the software on a PC in a VM, I am planning to move my node to a desktop that will have a 48 volt power supply running it. I have a large (600 Amp Hour) battery plant at the tower and am trying to get things moved to it that are 'critical'. I have a few small form factor PC's that are 12 volt that I can run a 6 amp buck converter on and source the 12 volts that way. These are fan-less industrial computers with SSD drives. I ma hoping I can get ESXI running on them so I can run the software in a VM instance and be able to reboot it remotely via remoting into the ESXI console from my phone. I am mostly there at this point. I am fighting the 'extnodes' file getting copied in and updated. I am probably fighting some other things but that I know isn't working yet.

For simplex it would extend the talk distance a bit, outside that it's not going to be much different. C4FM is better in my opinion in all cases. But I am biased. For the cheap DMR radios, yes they would communicate without the additional configuration like TG's and such. The Motorola radios 100% require that stuff to be configured or they will not even transmit

So, I am working on this currently. The software requires a VERY SLOW PC by today's standards. I am getting ready to try dosbox since the other app I tried had zero serial port support. But the software would run on it. Once I get this worked out, if that happens I will post here what I did.

I work for a Motorola service shop. So I work with TRBO/DMR a TON. I will say this. It works on ham because early on someone created a management system and database for it. They assign ID's and GroupCall (talkgroup) numbers and keep the thing going with some measure of organization. If it wasn't for those folks, it would have failed miserably. D-Star uses ham calls as the ID, so there is nothing to 'assign'. While GMRS users also have call signs, DMR uses a decimal number for the radio ID and someone would need to create a database for that. Coupled with the fact that Motorola radio's at least only allow ONE ID for the radio, if you tried to operate on say the Midwest link. If New York is doing their own thing, we couldn't link them with DMR since there could be duplicate ID's. "expermenting' on GMRS with DMR is NOT going to tell the whole story. Having a single repeater running two talk paths and otherwise disconnected isn't going to pose much of a issue for experimenting with it. The problems show up when folks travel, or link multiple repeaters.

I got assigned node number 23906 and assigned it to a phantom repeater since it's going to be strictly used as a HUB for the state of Ohio. I started getting numerous requests for access to the 'repeater' because it showed up as a repeater in the map. I was fighting with getting the hub running so I deleted the repeater off the map while I was working out the Linux stuff on the hub. Now I have all that done and I don't have any ability to go back and assign the node ID to the OHIO-HUB 'repeater' I created so it will show up on the map. I also am not completely sure I have it working right since I can't see it and it's not showing up on the map anywhere. I am gonna guess this is a @rdunajewski fix. So I am hoping he see's this and does his magic or tells me I am screwed, it's all automated and I am out of luck.

Well, I am going to invite you to go back through my posts on the topic and consider my thoughts. I certainly ain't typing all that again, other than say be careful what you wish for. People that don't understand how TDMA / MOTOTRBO / DMR works are all wanting that technology so they can have twice the channels. They don't know, don't understand or don't care about the interference issue it will create.

NO I really think you need to explain your outburst here. And I'm sorry, you own which repeaters that the 'non-serious' conversations are being had on and you did what to remedy the situation? What violations of the FCC regulations occurred during these conversations that weren't serious? Do you have recordings of said conversations and are submitting them for review, correct? Need names, call sign's, times and repeaters accessed for these non-serious conversations so that we can check logs and recordings and make an informed decision about the validity of your claims here. The repeater owners take these sorts of things very seriously. And will take action if there were infractions of the FCC regulations. BUT, to be clear, there is ONE individual that has been banned from my repeater. It was due to the user that had a bit to much to drink and was on the radio talking while intoxicated. Sure, he was having fun with his conversation, and says some things that weren't necessarily appropriate. But HE wasn't the one that got banned. The clown that got on my repeater and DEMANDED I deal with it, and when I refused, got heated with ME about the actions of the individual in question, he did get banned. I told him that since he had such an issue with the situation it was probably best that he not use my repeater any more. He sort of missed the meaning until I told him point blank that he was banned and I was taking the repeater off the air due to his nonsense and I then shut the repeater down for a week. I then told anyone that ask why it was down that the individual that was offended by the other guys actions took offense to me refusing to chastise the guy for being drunk on the air and saying dumb stuff. He don't use my repeater any more. So, don't get on here and DEMAND that the repeater owners enforce your 'acceptable operating topics and procedures'. If someone is abusing MY repeaters, I will deal with it. You get to choose what's said on YOUR repeater, and that's as far as it goes. If you are operating on someone else's repeater, shut up and deal with it. It's NOT your concern. If you don't like that answer, my best advice I can give is load up in your car, go buy yarn and needles and take up Knitting. Then you can park yourself in front of your TV set and scream at it when something is on there since you don't seem to grasp the concept of changing the channel when something is being discussed that offends your personal belief structure. This was the most polite way I could come up with of telling you to build a bridge and get the hell over it. BOTH services you mentioned are HOBBY RADIO. We are not going to turn hobby radio we have casual conversations on into public safety dispatch level communications because you think we need to.

Yeah, I really didn't see too much of it either. There are always going to be disagreements with everything. Radios, antenna's, radio services, etc etc etc. Some people are going to be polite when they disagree and be cordial about it and say police things about that disagreement. Others will make wild comparisons bringing up wack jobs like Jim Jones. But the underlying point to this is still the same. Ham radio membership is in a slump. And it's cyclic in reality. GMRS right now is on a significant upswing, and I am seeing discussions of GMRS in the ham magazines even. People have a number of different reasons to get a radio license. Be it ham, GMRS or both. I will have been a ham for 30 years next April. Got licensed in 94. I have had a GMRS license for just a few years at this point. But I am active with both services for different reasons. The biggest part of my involvement is building out infrastructure. I currently have 5 different repeaters locally at this point and support a number of others. The 5 are my equipment. I talk from the house on a microwave link to the tower via an IP based radio console that currently is connected to 10 different radios and I will be adding more this weekend. This stuff ranges from HF radios to 900Mhz radios and everything in between. I don't currently have any 220 radios (ham band). And I don't have any gear operating in ham bands above 900, but that is subject to change as well. Radio is what I do though. And while I never thought one way or another about the no code licenses, I did have issue with the ARRL pushing ARES really hard and getting people in the hobby that just wanted their 15 minutes. One thing with some hams is they have some misguided idea that in times of an emergency that they alone will be humanity's last best hope of survival. I did have issue with that. And still do in truth. But that didn't 'destroy' ham radio either and the cyclic rise of membership over that has waned. Then it was the prepper community. We still see that push on YouTube, but that fell off too. GMRS is actually a better option for those folks in my opinion, as one license covers their entire family, and if a real SHTF situation arises, I don't know that the FCC is going to be running around giving people hell for operating on the ham bands since they are preparing for situations where the government is non-operational. The EMCOMM (emergency communications) guys in ham radio have boxes and stuff they refer to as a 'go kit' which is nothing more than a radio mounted in a Pelican case they can drag out in the field and operate from. Prepper's have something similar called a 'go away kit' which consists of several semi-automatic firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition to make undesirables 'go away' by whatever means necessary. But adding to the ranks of either radio service is going to be cyclic. Even if we did some 'crying Indian' public service commercial and pushed the virtues of either service, it's only going to be so effective. Ultimately, it will show some level of increased membership for a time, but in the end that will wane as well.

I would have to wonder how many of them tried to eat 'Tide Pods'. But at 162000 followers, I do suppose you are doing better than Jim Jones. I don't think he had quite that many suckers.... sorry... followers

I knew better than to scroll up. But I did it anyway. So here we go. This is NOT up to the American government. The ITU sets the standard. If the Tech class had zero HF privilege, then it MIGHT be possible. But since they do, they are able to communicate outside the US on HF. And since that's the case, there has to be a test that can attempt to show some level of competence while operating in the HF portion of the RF spectrum. This is not gonna be possible until those guys leave the hobby completely or die off. I have been hearing that stupidity for 30 years now. I got a no code tech license and listened to the curmudgeon old farts complain that it was gonna be the undoing of Ham radio... it continued to exist. When they completely removed the code requirement, it went on again. And here we are. No one cares that you aren't a ham. Hell I am thankful that you aren't a ham. Your personality on here and in your videos put you right in the same mentality as the clowns that complain about how this or that change is gonna ruin ham radio. NO one cares what you have to say. And I KNOW you care about that. If not you wouldn't continue to play halfwit youtube star with your GMRS videos.

Truth is, your NOT gonna draw people in mass to any forum of RF communications outside having the newest iPhone or Android device connected to it. There are those of us that are radio people. We enjoy the ability to communicate to a large group of people, share idea's and the like. And NOT do it over TicToc or any other app on the phone. The bigger thing is drawing the current license holders back to the radio. Because there may be 50K GMRS users and 758K of hams. But it's a SMALL portion of them that are active. And activity is what draws people in. The ham repeaters are silent for the most part outside a bit of chatter here and there. The Midwest Link has WAY more activity than all the ham repeaters in the Columbus Ohio area.... And I would bet that's the case other places where the system has a linked repeater.

So a 500 foot spool of 7/8 isn't gonna be just loaded up in a truck and taken away. Not even by two guys. The spool, no cable is probably 50 pounds. I have a number of 200 ish foot hand rolls of 7/8 and they are all well over 100 pounds. To the point it takes me everything I have to stand them up from the ground. And even laying them across my shoulders, I can't lift them and carry them. They get rolled. So a 500 foot roll would reasonably be over 200 pounds plus the 50 pound spool. If you are man enough to pick that up knee high and set in it the back of a pickup truck. Well, if it was mine and I saw you do it. I would just let it go cuz I ain't gonna screw with you. That being said. 7/8 cable retail price meaning the price they will use to determine if it's grand theft or not, is about 9 bucks a foot. So your 'free' 500 foot of cable will get you 10 years for grand theft. ANd if it happens to be for an EMA install. Well then it starts to get a bit more serious. EMA's all fall under the Homeland Security blanket. Screwing with their communications sites just happens to be a federal offense. So now when the county gets down with you, the feds pick up where they left off and toss some more charges your way. It's not worth it

Sounds like you must have experience with such things.

Well, gonna have to call you on that. Once you bring photon energy into the discussion. You are pretty much talking about those. But I am all for a go fund me to get a dozer, track hoe and portable concrete plant gathered up. And rebar, lots and lots of rebar. ANd if you started doing the math, you could start with a low spot and dig enough out to back fill overtop since the dirt will be replaced with bunker. If you look at the pictures of the big AT&T bunkers being built, they just cut the earth away with dozers for the most part and then built the buildings. Other than the actual missle silos themselves, the underground launch facilities were built the same way. Pull out the dirt, build the structures and then back fill the site.

Well, if it's DC to daylight and beyond, then a Faraday Cage isn't what you are looking for. It's one thing to block RF signals. If we are talking about trying to attenuate Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation then it's a whole different ball game. ANd the truth is ONLY plate steel, and LOTS of earth are going to work. So let's quit screwing around and get a go fund me together for a dozer and a BIG track hoe and most likely a portable concrete plant and start building AT&T style bunkers and skip the discussions of ammo and trash can's with aluminum tape around the seams and lids. I mean if we are going to be ridiculous, lets just get to it and skip the silliness all together. Here's the problem. If you are looking to block stuff that will kill you anyway, what's the point unless you have other means of protecting yourself for event's like you are referring to. And if you DO have those means, they will certainly protect radios that are around you went it happens.

One of the things here that needs to be addressed is gaps and holes. Remember folks that you are trying to keep out RF and not water. If it happens to be water tight, so be it, but it's NOT needed. As mentioned before, hole size in the mesh is directly related to the frequency that can pass. For those of you that are familiar with the DUGA over the horizon radar system that is in the former USSR. That antenna design had a reflector behind the active elements of the antenna. If you go look at some pictures of the site you will notice behind the horizontal cage elements there are vertical wires that are running top to bottom of the structure. Those are the reflector for the 13Mhz signal that was used for the system. Being that it's 13Mhz the wire spacing needed to be less than 1/4 wavelength apart from each other to be effective. But those wires in their spacing were completely effective for that design frequency. On the other end of the spectrum look at the large home satellite dishes that were a mesh. Those operated at 4 to 8 Ghz and KU band was 12 to 18Ghz. Now those mesh dishes were an effective reflector for both C and Ku bands and if the dish was physically large enough it would have worked at any frequency below the max useable frequency of 20Ghz typically. This again had to do with the hole size in the mesh. So small holes or perforations in the container (Faraday Cage) isn't going to have a drastic effect on the attenuation performance of the cage. Getting all crazy and trying to seal up the smallest pin holes with aluminum tape is pointless. Yes, all the sides need to be electrically connected but small holes are NOT going to destroy the ability of the cage to attenuate an EMP or other rouge signal source. Something else to consider is rise and decay time of a pulse. Although the pulse is only going to have one polarity, it can still be treated as an AC source. This is the reason that the inner and outer shields are required for a proper Faraday Cage and the EXTERIOR is the only part that gets grounded. This creates a capacitor of sorts that is single ended with one end floating (the inner shield) and the other grounded.

If you can afford the 50 bucks a square foot for the fine copper mesh cloth for a faraday cage large enough to stand in, you need to buy better radios than Baofengs and use sheet metal or aluminum window screen which would work almost as well.

Yeah, I was down there recently myself. Had my first intercontinental chat on Echo Link. Talked to a guy in Ireland. Was very surprised with that since I didn't know the repeater was an Echo Link machine. GMRS however was flat. Nothing heard. Hope that changes some before my next trip down.

Since this was last discussed I have moved forward on getting equipment moved over to the battery plant. I am now running 3 repeaters and 5 base stations (repeaters programmed for base station operation) on the battery plant. The plant is 48 volt and has 4 strings of 75 AH batteries connected to it. I need to get out the welder and build another battery tray and increase the string count to 6 or 8, but that's a different discussion. The system is grid tie only at this point. No solar or wind equipment has been setup for it. A project for a later date. Looking at running 4 wind generators based on the plastic 55 gallon drum design. Will be building one and seeing how that works before building the other three. System as it sets is a commercial rectifier (charger / power supply) that is a modular setup with 8 40 amp switch mode supplies. These feed into the attached power distribution panel that has connections for both battery strings and loads. There are five 48 volt to 24 volt switch mode buck converters with a current capacity of 40 amps per unit connected to the plant that are paralleled output. These feed a separate power distribution panel to feed the 24 volt loads. One feed is running over to a 'sub panel' that is rated 70 amp in and has 5 15 amp breakers that are feeding the base radios and repeaters. This is their only power source and have been running in this configuration for about a month now. I am working on getting some additional cable tray in place and will then be running additional feeds to other equipment. Another project is to convert the 12 volt plant that is separate from the 48 volt plant over to that plant. This will be 48 volt to 12 volt conversion. most likely will be two 60 amp buck converters in parallel feeding another distribution panel for the 12 volt loads. I am researching the fact that Cisco had a backup power setup for some of their switches that i already have. I may be able to directly feed these switches with 12 and 48 volt power and take them off 110 all together. They are running on UPS currently but if I can move stuff over to the battery plant, then I will have less equipment to maintenance.

Oh, I certainly agree that lightning can be VERY destructive and not directly hit the equipment that it damages. Part of the R56 installation manual is the grounding and bonding section. Now the standard that this manual is detailed to the point of the minimum distance between a rack and the cable tray above it and the distance from the cable tray to the interior lights. Nothing is missed that you would find inside of a communications site. I have seen where voltages were induced on metallic but non-electrified objects like file cabinets. And yes, they are required to be grounded as well for that reason. One of my favorite lightning stories was a personal experience from back when I was working in the computer field and one of our contract customers was the Ohio department of corrections. One of their facilities had a control room that sort of stuck out off the rest of the building in an atrium sort of area, AKA "The Yard". Of course this structure had 1 inch bars over the windows and it was the most physically secure part of the whole campus. The lightning hit the outside of the building and traveled down the outside of the structure via the bars on it and then arced to the ground, which was evident by looking at the outside of the building. The current was so high in the bar's that it created enough of a magnetic field to put colored bar's in all the computer monitors. I had to go home and get a degaussing coil I had from working on television sets (old school CRT stuff) and take it there to get the screens fixed up. You could tell it was the bars on the windows because the color bars were spaced perfectly with the same spacing as the window bars. But even that HUGE magnetic field that was less than 2 feet from a half dozen computers did no damage to and of the computers in the room that were up and running at the time of the strike. Which further's my personal stance on the protection of electronic gear in a box of some sort to protect it from an EMP. And with that situation, the bars weren't acting as a faraday cage, they actually increased the "EMP" energy getting into the building via the huge magnetic pulse they created.

I realize that. Of course you're not the original poster of the thread

While that might be the case elsewhere, the linked repeater here in Columbus is the only one in the entire state that is on the link. And I provide another nonlinear repeater for those that don't want to talk to everyone else. Is it personal. Yes. The op knows me from way back. So its not like we are strangers or anything. Far as I am concerned since I am the only one doing what he's complaining about in the entire state of Ohio I am gonna guess he means it to be personal as well.

Tell you what. How about I take all my shit off the air and you can sit and listen to static. Maybe some kids once in a while on FRS. Since I am the only one in central Ohio with a linked repeater, I am obviously the one wasting the precious spectrum that no one else seems to want to bother with putting a repeater on. Balls in your court now buddy. You don't like what I provide for free. You put a repeater on the air. I will turn all this gear back into cash and make it someone else's issue. It gets old listening to others complain about what I do with no cost to others because I can. If you don't like it, don't use it. I really don't care at this point.

Well that's much easier said than done. What you are talking about is a simulcast system with multiple repeaters that would need a GPS reference to stay exactly on frequency. All the receivers being connected back to a single voter so the best signal was selected and then channel banks taking care of the audio launch times so that it would actually work as described. It's obviously possible, but silly expensive. And requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep to continue to function correctly. I am considering it as I do have the required hardware. Need to figure out sites beyond the one I have now and proper links between those sites (can't use the Internet as the latency bounces around far too much). But that's still only going to be in the central Ohio area. I guess if you don't like talking on linked repeaters, stay off them. It's really not any harder than that. For those of us that enjoy being able to have someone to talk to most of the time, we enjoy that.

Here's a slightly different take on it. Repeater owners and their desire. Meaning if YOU have a repeater and don't want people getting on it and rag chewing all the time holding in it transmit for hours at a go then tell those folks that are acting in that manner to vacate YOUR repeater. Now of course, if it's NOT your repeater, then you really don't have a dog in the fight. Not your repeater, not your choice. We as repeater owners make the decision on who uses it, how it's linked, if at all. And what sort of discussion can take place on the repeater. After all, it's our equipment and our decision. While I would like to keep all my repeater users happy, it's not a realistic goal. Meaning there are ALWAYS going to be those that want to claim this or that about proper use, linking, IDing of the repeater and the list goes on. I look at it like this. If I don't like the way someone is using MY gear, I will simply get on the air and ASK them to not operate in that manner on my repeater. If that's not sufficient to get them to either act in a manner that's more acceptable, I can ban them from the repeater. And since my repeater is 3 miles from my house, I of course can drive over, and turn the thing off. Same thing with the linked repeater. If I don't like what's coming in from elsewhere, I can open my phone and drop the link. Easy as that. Point is this, if you own a repeater or a system of repeaters, you have the final say within the limits of the FCC regulations or what's said on it and how it's used. If you are a guest on someone else's repeater, then it's their show, and you are only along for the ride. Demanding that a repeater owner deal with some issue that YOU find to be a problem when they don't see it as such is a sure fire way to get banned from their repeater completely.