[K3CAL] update. This is what's going on with the repeaters right now

[David Weaver]

Hello all, here some information on what's going on with the Yaesu
repeaters. There is progress as you can see from the info that Chuck is sent
out

for us all to read. He's asking for help if anybody knows how the
controllers are currently programmed that would be helpful. Also, if you
have any information on the configuration of equipment that was purchased.
That would be helpful. Chuck has all the manuals and books that were
provided to me.

Glad to see the Motorola repeater is holding up and working. We need to do a
little work on the duplexer's. Remember, they are very old and they keep on
working. Just a thought. Someday Cara should think about replacing them with
new ones. You probably sell the old ones to help recruit some of the offset
$.

73s

David W3PQS

 

Do we have any documentation that shows how the controllers are currently
configured? That would be helpful.

 

A quick update. I’ve had a chance to take a quick look at both repeaters,
with and without the controllers. I’ve done a very rough sensitivity
measurement using the old standby of 20dB FM quieting as the usable receiver
sensitivity since I don’t have a SINAD meter and 20dB quieting is roughly
equivalent to 12dB SINAD in practical use. Yaesu specifies the DR-1X
sensitivity at 0.2 µV (approx -121 dBm) with 12 dB SINAD in analog mode. My
quick measurement indicates that they are both at or near the -121 dBm level
with 20dB quieting. I will do a better measurement but just haven’t had a
chance yet. I also plan to test both repeaters for usable signal sensitivity
as well - modulated signal, looking at distortion with an audio spectrum
analyzer to see when we get about 10dB of usable single tone and two-tone
signal above the noise floor.

 

The controllers seem to be working and properly decode the 156.7 tone -
although I was really faking it - and trigger the transmitter in FM mode. I
do have a good low frequency generator that I can use to generate a summed
signal with both a test tone and the 156.7 for signal measurements, as well
as just the 156.7 tone for quieting measurements with PL. Now that I have
the digital HT, I can also run the same tests in digital mode.

 

I haven’t tried to get the Arcom software, I’ve had too many other things
going on, and I have to figure out where I’m going to run it since I’ll have
to crank up a Windows VM on whatever machine I decide to use. From what I
can tell, I could manually do the programming, but that would be tedious at
best.

 

 

Chuck

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“There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and
those who don't.” -- Unknown

 

 

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