At 8/30/2009 09:57, you wrote: > > >When "area plans" show something like "repeaters in this area all use > > >CTCSS tone X" I always cringe a little. > > > > Sure makes it a lot easier for travelers to find all the local > > repeaters. > > > > Bob NO6B > >Who's so dumb that they SCAN with CTCSS Decode turned on?
Because many repeaters don't repeat CTCSS. Also some older radios don't scan CTCSS decode very well. >I think the "one CTCSS in an area" is just a leftover from the time >when we all had single-tone boards in our rigs. No one needs this >"feature" in area repeaters anymore. No, SoCal (TASMA) just adopted a regional CTCSS plan. In some way/places it was simply a formal acknowledgement of what some regions had already implemented, but in others we had a mishmash of different open tone "standards" that had nothing to do with trying to avoid other system tone freqs. On 440, many repeaters in this area use the same CTCSS freq. At one site I know of about a dozen repeaters all use the same tone; AFAIK none of them bother each other. If they did, I'm sure they would quickly find the source (since it would be another ham's system) & fix the actual problem, rather than mask it with CTCSS as others have pointed out. >(No one has trouble finding repeaters out here, and we've had a system >where every large club and small backyard repeater is on different >tones for decades. We never went with the popular, silly idea that >different tones are somehow "difficult" for someone who knows how to >operate their rig.) Perhaps that's one reason why I didn't try out many systems last time I passed through the Denver area. IMO, if different CTCSS freqs. are required to keep co-located amateur systems from talking to each other, there is an engineering deficiency somewhere. Bob NO6B
