Cheap repeaters

[torquetube]

Has anybody experimented with the Radio-Tone repeater controllers from http://www.radio-tone.com ?

I have read a few reports on them, they use two portable radios as the Tx and Rx of the repeater which seem great in theory for use as a cheap onsite repeater but just wondered if anybody has experimented with them??

[RadioPixie]

Hi

This is my experience of the radio tone simplex repeater: http://radiopixie.blogspot.co.uk/2012/1 ... eater.html

The biggest draw back is some people can't handle the idea of repeated message delay.

But are you proposing a duplex system since you mention two radios for rx and tx??

[torquetube]

Morning,

Yes I forgot to state I was looking at the Duplex version of the repeater controller. From what I've read they work very well, but, the radios can suffer from desensing after a distance of around 100 metres so the audio isn't very good so a duplexer might be needed, I was just wondering if anyone has one working? I will probably only use mine at 0.5w as an experiment so I'm hoping this will be less of an issue. I've also found these http://www.ics-ctrl.com/basic.html which seem to have good reviews but might be a bit more tricky to setup.

[kr0ne]

What's the application? If you can go cross band then you can avoid a lot of the difficulties. ..

[Mitch]

If you want to use the same band duplex on different frequencies then a tuned cavity filter is pretty much essential or you will get serious desensing problems, they can be bought cheapish these days though. The easiest to set up is a crossband repeater, you can buy radios that already do that built in, it just means you'll need dual band radios for the users. It depends on your budget tbh and how much messing around you're willing to do.