Forum Chat

[Thunderbird]

Chopper copy!!!

How hard would it be to join two 8030's into a two aerial repeater config?

I have the radios. I'm brain storming in case Grevis leaves town.

Not hard to wire 2 of the 8030s back to back to make a repeater, in fact I have 2 wired back to back in the shed, but they are on ham bands.

Those radios seem to have an accessory port on the back with the needed signals right on it, a couple of extra bits and its done, that's the easy part.

There are 2 common ways of setting up such a thing, the cheap and easy way is to mount 1 antenna above the other on the same mast using verticals, the further apart the better, the idea is to try and keep the transmitter from making the receiver deaf.

Even though they are on different frequencies the frequencies are close enough together to cause desensing of the receiver.

I've seen people have the 2 antennas on 2 masts spaced as far as practical apart physically as well.

The other and expensive way is to use a diplexer usually with cavity filters. Ive seen them around on ebay and at hamfests, but unless they are already on your frequencies, they can be a bugger to tune. You really need some good test gear like a decent spectrum analyser and calibrated RF sig gen etc.

The hard part is getting such a thing licenced as well, and also finding a good spot to place it.

Also what power supply are you going to use is a consideration.

Id have to check the regulations, but I'm pretty sure you have to be able to remotely, assuming you are not right near the repeater, shut it down if it goes berko as well. And I think you need a timeout feature. As I say, its been awhile since I've looked at the regs..

Happy to help where I can though, sounds like a fun project.



Damn, forgot, it has to identify via voice or morse code at least every 10 minutes as well, not hard to make up an Arduino to do that though...