Hi folks,
I'm new, so bear with my stupid newb questions, but I'm having trouble getting my head around repeaters!
So I understand the basic idea: If two radios are in range of a repeater, but not each other, the repeater allows them to talk. My major questions center around range, though. I get that a repeater can be relatively high-powered, compared to say a handset, so they can reach out significantly farther, but since the handset can only manage it's own meager range, how does the repeater hear *them*?
I guess what I'm asking is, does a repeater ever get you more than at most the sum of the effective ranges of the communicating radios? It seems an awfully expensive move to set one up if all it does is extend a transmitter's range by maybe a factor of 2, if you're lucky, so I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle.
Thanks!