Ol guy here... Question on Repeater tones.

[zilla]

I understand the repeater tone thing.  But I am confused by which setting to use.  Either CTCSS?  Or  digital DCS?  How do I know which setting to use?  Watched a video  and the guy talked CTCSS and then input DCS.  I am confused.  Also is the receive tone optional?

[SteveShannon]

4 minutes ago, zilla said:

I understand the repeater tone thing.  But I am confused by which setting to use.  Either CTCSS?  Or  digital DCS?  How do I know which setting to use?  Watched a video  and the guy talked CTCSS and then input DCS.  I am confused.  Also is the receive tone optional?

CTCSS and DCS do the same thing, just using slightly differently encoded tones.  DCS encodes the tones as digital signals, whereas CTCSS actually generates an analog tone between 62 Hz up to almost 300 Hz. It’s just a choice, but there are more digital tones and they can be inverted as well.  Just use whichever the radio or repeater you with to transmit to requires.

The receive tone can be left off.  If you leave it off you will receive everything transmitted on that frequency.  If you correctly program the receive tone you will only hear signals that are transmitted with the same tone.  That may prevent you from feeling interrupted, but your radio hears everything so there can still be interference.

I tend to leave the receive tone off.  It’s one less thing to go wrong and I live where there’s very little traffic.

[zilla]

12 minutes ago, Sshannon said:

CTCSS and DCS do the same thing, just using slightly differently encoded tones.  DCS encodes the tones as digital signals, whereas CTCSS actually generates an analog tone between 62 Hz up to almost 300 Hz. It’s just a choice, but there are more digital tones and they can be inverted as well.  Just use whichever the radio or repeater you with to transmit to requires.

The receive tone can be left off.  If you leave it off you will receive everything transmitted on that frequency.  If you correctly program the receive tone you will only hear signals that are transmitted with the same tone.  That may prevent you from feeling interrupted, but your radio hears everything so there can still be interference.

I tend to leave the receive tone off.  It’s one less thing to go wrong and I live where there’s very little traffic.

Thanks, but how do you find out which tone  the repeater wants?  Like how do you know if it's DCS   opposed to CTCSS?  Or do you just program both?   I look up a repeater tone on MYGMRS and it says 100Hz.  

EDIT:  OK maybe I see it now.  Are the DCS tones listed as DPL?  In my state [Wyoming]  there are only a few repeaters all list in Hz.   None in DPL.  Looked at California and see the DPL.  

[marcspaz]

If the number is just 3 digits, like 023 or 412, it will be digital (DCS). If it's 4 digits, 3 numbers, a decimal and then a 4th number (141.3 or 146.2), it's analog tone (CTCSS).

[zilla]

4 minutes ago, marcspaz said:

If the number is just 3 digits, like 023 or 412, it will be digital (DCS). If it's 4 digits, 3 numbers, a decimal and then a 4th number (141.3 or 146.2), it's analog tone (CTCSS).

I think I figured it out.  In my small state the repeater are  all CTCSS.  I looked to a more populated state and see a DPL code.   Thanks for the help.

[SteveShannon]

7 hours ago, zilla said:

I think I figured it out.  In my small state the repeater are  all CTCSS.  I looked to a more populated state and see a DPL code.   Thanks for the help.

Motorola called CTCSS PL, for Private Line (their marketing term) even though it doesn’t truly provide “privacy” in the sense of preventing being overheard. Thus, the digital ones were called DPL.  The digital codes can also be inverted.  When entering in Chirp you could see NN or NI or IN or II meaning uplink and downlink codes are “Normal, Normal”, “Normal, Inverted”, “Inverted, Normal”, and finally both inverted.

There are a number of terms for these, but don’t let that fool you. Many manufacturers even provide a simple number to the tone, but they are not standardized. My Garmin says tone #7 is 82.5, which Motorola calls PL #6.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Tone-Coded_Squelch_System

As Marc pointed out, all of the CTCSS tones are expressed in terms of Hz with a single decimal value. DCS are always whole numbers and sometimes people include some letters.