Ferrell Brown wrote: > Excellent point Alan. We have not had any problems yet but it is > possible. Not sure if the dstar equip is heavy duty enough to handle > constant use.
Sound bite from Nate: "If the Icom modules can't handle 100% duty-cycle at full rated power, they're not repeaters." With that said... There are at least a few groups who've been on the air for more than 3 years now. Some are running off-board PA's so they're not "taxing" the internal ones, but others are running the Icom PA's. I would THINK that if the PA design was "too soft" for the job -- there would have been more reports by now of folks having to ship off their modules for PA repair. Warranties are a wonderful thing. :-) So... I don't feel too worried about running the modules at their highest settings. The modules seem to be designed from the mobile rigs, which are rated for much higher power overall, but non-continuous-duty... So it would *appear* that Icom just de-rated them by a large margin, added a fan (but no alarm to tell you the fan has quit and you're about to smoke your repeater, like other modern repeaters have), and called it good. There is a keying line in the RJ45 that goes to the back of the repeater, from other reports I've read. Someone could take a module, stick it on a workbench, note the ambient temp and humidity, and then key it and measure with one of those infrared/laser temperature sensors all over the inner guts of the TX radio inside the "repeater" box, and see how high it goes into a dummy-load... if they trust the Icom warranty (GRIN). I do this as a matter of course on our analog MASTR II repeaters... especially if we've done some PA repair work, the repeater gets hooked to a 500W Bird load, moved to the basement (RF will still leak), and keyed continuously for a week before it ever goes anywhere near one of our far-away mountain-top repeater sites... something learned from mentors running all sorts of machines around here. "If it can't be keyed for a week without dying, you'll be up there on the mountain fixing it later." But I'm not gutsy enough to try it with "someone else's" D-STAR repeater... and I certainly wouldn't try it on my own (if I owned one outright) without monitoring it closely for hot spots and how hot they get inside the case). Generally though, I'd bet there's probably "enough" cooling unless you're installing the thing in an awfully harsh environment. Nate WY0X
