What's the easiest, cheapest way to set up a repeater on a trip to a mountainous terrain?I'm thinking something with helium balloons and some HT's.

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Anonymous 04/15/15 (Wed) 03:12:25 No.250

What's the easiest, cheapest way to set up a repeater on a trip to a mountainous terrain?

I'm thinking something with helium balloons and some HT's.

Anonymous 04/15/15 (Wed) 18:31:45 No.251

For VHF.
In the United States and Canada radio channels must be narrow band.
You can find tons of used non-compliant radios that work well on the ham band.
Don't use those < 70$ handhelds or Icom. You can get better radios used. Even if they are commercial.

Hook up the radios back to back.

To keep it legal and have it announce you can hook in an raspberry pi to key it up and talk. Make sure to throw a blocking dc cap for the audio in.

Using a separate RX antenna you will NEED a can filter. Or you will have a load of desentivity.

The absolute cheapest would be to use one radio and have it record and play back what was said.

Anonymous 04/17/15 (Fri) 01:00:07 No.257

>>251
>Hook up the radios back to back.

Wouldn't this be a one-way repeater?

>use one radio and have it record and play back what was said
Simplex repeater?

Anonymous 04/17/15 (Fri) 21:36:49 No.259

Cheapest would be a HT that does crossband repeat. Then add a better dualband antenna, 12V batteryeliminator and some larger battery, and the radio at LOW power and with tone squelch on the input.
It might still fry from the high dutycycle from repeater use.
Or use a mobile radio (like the yaseu or wouxun) that does crossband repeat on low power.

For USA band 70cm the 5MHZ split duplexers are reasonably small so you could make a 70cm repeater fairly cheaply with one of the chinese repeater controllers a chinese/retuned surplus duplexer and two HT's with external batteries.

Anonymous 04/19/15 (Sun) 23:17:23 No.261

>>257

Back to back.

Have one radio tx what ever is rx by the rx radio.

Yup, simplex!

Anonymous 04/22/15 (Wed) 12:32:01 No.268

>>261

If I can't get my hands on a cross-band mobile, that'll be my second option.

Thanks.

Anonymous 04/27/15 (Mon) 04:04:04 No.277

Why do you need a repeater?

To do the same band your going to need a duplexer. Thats $200-300 right off the rip.

Motorola made a "repeater in a box" that is popular with hams. Its the GR1225. They are on ebay alot but you will need someone to program it and tune the duplexer.

Would it be better if you just worked on a really good simplex setup and just had people relay messages?

Anonymous 04/27/15 (Mon) 18:12:49 No.279

>>277

UNder 25W you cna use cheap notch duplexers on 70c, as the USA split is 5MHz, unlike the 2MHz used here.

And 5MHz split is perfectly doable with 80usd duplexers.