[SMCARA] To tone or not to tone?

[Martin Gary]

Hey guys. 

I wanted to jump in with a little info about my repeater (may it rest in peace). As you know mine had PL. What you might not know is that you could turn it off (or back on) by keying up with or without PL and pressing  1....2....3 on your keypad. It worked great for us. When we had a net I would turn it off during the net so someone stumbling across it wouldn't have to know the PL. You could either turn it back on when finished or it would turn itself back on after 5 minutes of no activity. Everyone that hung out on the repeater back then loved it. If you happened to have an older radio without PL in your car or something you could still use the repeater.  I think its a good idea as long as you provide a way for someone without PL to turn it off..

That's it. Hope this note finds everyone well. By the way, I haven't been on the air much because I can no longer hit the repeater consistently with my hand held here at the house. Going to have a antenna up soon, I hope....

73, Marty N3HRT 


Oct 9, 2010 09:06:38 PM, sam at teamsupportatlantic.com wrote:

===========================================

Here's an input from a would-be 2 meter DXer.  If you consider working
distant repeaters as "DX"...then hear me out.  I'm trying right now to work
a friend in South Carolina...via a single repeater hop...as conditions
permit.  It's an interesting and challenging experiment.  On one frequency
that we are trying, there is a West Virginia repeater that keeps jumping on
line because it requires no PL, each time I try to reach an easily
accessible North Carolina repeater that might make the trip for us.  There
is no way that I can get the WV repeater out of the way.  

I think that repeater coordination should include PL, so that you could
sneak by two or three repeaters and get to one that you specifically want to
bring up...and repeaters on a common frequency should not share a common PL
for many states in all directions.  

There was once an argument that many radios didn't have PL (I own several
that don't, so I understand the concern)...but I think the value of PL, in a
global coordination sense, is significant.  On the other hand...I don't know
how often our .64 machine gets in the way of someone trying to bring up a
distant .64 machine.  I do know that when the band is open, we could choose
which repeater we were trying to work on .64...and as a result reach distant
ones that we can't right now, because our local machine responds to carrier
only.

We might also want to think about being able to eliminate the PL (for some
set period of time) by using a certain touch tone sequence (that doesn't use
A, B, C or D, because older radios don't have that either))...that way old
radios could still play. Or...we could only enable PL (CTCSS) when the band
is open.  Many of the big repeaters work it that way (147.300, in
Winchester, is an example)

Let me summarize...I don't really have a burning opinion...but these
thoughts seem valid to me.

73

KLC

-----Original Message-----
From: smcara-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:smcara-bounces at mailman.qth.net]
On Behalf Of KG3BOZ
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 8:06 PM
To: SMCARA Reflector (E-mail)
Subject: [SMCARA] To tone or not to tone?

 Gentlemen,

I would like to propose a topic for this month's club meeting.

As you may recall, our previous repeater system would not
allow a CTCSS tone on the input (it caused QRM on the output)

The new repeater system can accommodate a CTCSS tone, eliminating or
reducing the skip interference from distant hams in Virginia, 
Pennsylvania, et al.

It's a quick, simple matter to turn on a tone on the input of the repeater.

The question is:

Do you want the club to require a tone on the input of 146.64, or would 
You prefer to keep it as is (no tone required to activate the repeater?)

73 DE KG3BOZ (Boz)







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