Ok, lots of progress and trouble shooting years later.
So first repeater, vx7000 worked great with Commspec 408 20+miles in south Texas flat land on 50' tower.
The same setup worked not nearly as well in Fredericksburg Va. Maybe 2.5 miles, turns out if antenna is in tree level forget it. While researching this I discovered a research project by a federal agency essentially stating that bio matter such as trees for 400 mhz and up are power sponges and pine trees are the worst.
I built several other repeaters since then using various radios such as Vertex 2100/2200, TY9000 or the Retevis models with a Id o matic repeater controller by hamgadgets.
With perfectly tuned antennas, jumpers and various name brand and Chinese type duplexers a noticeable desense issue existed in these systems making the systems virtually unuseable further than a mile out.
Fast forward to today. I invested in a real repeater, a BCR 40u from Bridgecom systems with the same antenna and duplexer as the previous radio repeaters the BCR repeater now covers spotty up to 12 miles and no more desense, with the antenna still at tree level.
So now its just a matter of getting the antenna as high as possible.
With the dual radio repeater setup everything was tried to fix the desense issue with no luck, as a last resort I thought about calling in a shaman.
Once again while trying to fix the desense issue I found several articles relating to the sensitivity and selectivity of a repeater, these are NOT the same thing. Radios like the Vertex 2100/2200 have adjustments that can mitigate some of this but the Chinese radios do not and just dont have the selectivity to eliminate desense like an actual real repeater.
Its been a long road, but now I can expertly tune duplexers and starting to grow hair back I pulled out during this process.
I hope this helps someone and thank you to everyone that chimed in and tried to help.
Coming soon, a node to link my repeater and I look forward to hopefully talking to some of you.
73
Frank