[CALV-AUXCOMM] Dealing with Unlinked Repeaters

[Shawn Donley]

All,
 
Here's a summary of the ideas for regaining county-wide coverage when our 2M and 70cm repeaters are unlinked.
 
1.  Set up a one-way (i.e. not duplex) crossband repeater at a QTH that can hit both the south 70cm repeater and the north 2M repeater.  South stations would use the 70cm repeater.  The crossband would repeat the output of the 70cm repeater (444.950) to the input frequency of the 2M repeater (146.385).  Stations in the south would need to listen to the 2M output (146.985), which should be possible even though they might not be able to hit the 2M input with a good signal. Note(1):  Most radios have provisions for unusual splits, like transmitting on 70cm and listening on 2M.   Note(2):  If you set up a cross band repeater to link to inband repeaters (one on VHF and the other on UHF), AND both repeaters had repeater 'tails' long enough that the cross band repeater could hear, then you would get a continuous cycle, bouncing between the repeaters, that would render the repeaters useless.  We proved this on our net last night.
 
2. Have separate nets in the north and south using their respective repeaters and/or simplex.  Both NCS stations capable of hitting both repeaters and act as relays.  This approach could also employ 3# below.
 
3. South stations use Echolink into the 2M repeater.
 
4. Use our RACES crossband repeater located on the Barstow tower.  It's there to serve as a backup if the LAN between the EOC's and the county towers fail (EOC's use RemoteRigs and that LAN to tie to the radio RF decks at the Barstow tower.  But coverage of the crossband to the south needs to be checked.  
 
5. Transmit audio from one repeater over a service like Discord.  But Echolink probably easier if the internet is up.
 
6. Unless the county has dropped it due to lack of use, we should still have a LAN connection between the Sunderland and Lusby repeaters.  With the appropriate VOIP equipment, we could use this LAN link to add redundancy to the current RF link.  But that doesn't help us in our current situation where the 2M Yaesu DR-1X has failed and replaced by an Icom operating stand-alone (not tied to the Arcom controller and link radios).
 
N3AE