[CTSARA] New Repeater Practices

[Jon Perelstein]

We are implementing some new courtesy tone and identification practices on
our repeaters of which you should be aware.  We've rolled them out on the
Hospital repeaters and will roll them out on the Sterling Farms repeaters in
the near future.  The practices are as follows:

1.  Hang time has been standardized at 3 seconds.  That means that the
repeater will continue transmitting for 3 seconds after you release your
PTT.  The courtesy tone is included in that 3 seconds.

2.  The Hospital repeaters will each have a courtesy tone consisting of one
segment.  The SF repeaters will each have a courtesy tone of two segments.

3.  The 2 meter repeater courtesy tones will be lower in tone than the 440
repeater tones.

4.  After a reset (e.g., a power failure), the repeater courtesy tones will
be three segments for the Hospital and four segments for Sterling Farms.
 That will serve as a warning so that we can reset the clocks (which lose
their settings during a reset).  If you hear those courtesy tones, please
contact me, Ernest, Fred, John Sabini, Jon Solomon, or Andy Siegel so that
one of us can do the reset.  Part of the reset will be to set the courtesy
tones back to the standard one or two segment tones.

5.  We have created two DTMF macros that can be used by anyone.  If you
enter A111 on your mic keypad while transmitting, the repeater will tell you
the time.  If you enter A110 on your mic keypad while transmitting, the
repeater will tell you which location you're on ("Repeater H" for Hospital,
"Repeater SF" for Sterling Farms).

One thing we have determined is that the timeout timers reset as soon as the
courtesy tone has been sent.  Thus, after the courtesy tone has been heard,
it is okay to key up and transmit even though the repeater transmitter is
still transmitting (the repeater is still "hanging").  If you've waited
until you hear the courtesy tone, you won't get caught by the previous
transmission's timeout timer.  HOWEVER, the whole concept is that you wait
until the end of the the hang time so as to give people a chance to break
in.  You don't have to wait until the repeater transmitter drops, but you
can wait 1-or 1-1/2 seconds before starting your transmission to give
someone else time to break in.

Please remember that these standards have NOT yet been implemented at
Sterling Farms, but we hope to correct that in the near future.

Jon
KB1QBZ