On 4/13/07, Bob & Linda Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Chuck and everyone else who gave valuable suggestions, It looks like I, and the club, need to rethink this question. I am very impressed with some of the new equipment out there and was thinking our radio is a bit outdated. Also, I was thinking of the space we occupy in our shared building. Thinking a smaller foot print could be hung on the wall easily. We are also talking about remote access to IRLP via a club members QTH, just like the one he is running on UHF now.
Bob, there are good and bad reasons to replace a machine -- and if the club has a goal of "newer hardware" that's okay... there's nothing inherently wrong with that particular goal, but there's also something to be said for the resulting chaos that installing a new system will cause. No project is ever as simple as it seems at first, you know? Another really good option is simply hunting around for great deals on spare parts for the Micor, and becoming a bit of a pack-rat of them. As various agencies and commercial ventures upgrade, they almost throw away some of this older stuff, and you can get it for very little money. Nothing's "cheap" in repeaters, but the Kenwood will be 2x to 10x the cost of a good solid Micor, depending on discounts and anything else you might have to buy/build/upgrade to get 'er working properly. There's no harm in wanting to use something newer, and nothing wrong with wanting to have that nice Kenwood (or whoever's new repeater) warranty to lean on if something dies. And the Kenwood, you just hook a laptop up and program it, so there's a different kind of simplicity there versus buying channel elements and sending off for compensated crystal elements, etc. If it's a time-vs-money thing and you have more money than time, factor that into your final decision. If you go with the "get more Micor parts" plan, you (or someone) probably has to put some work into it... testing out the old parts when they arrive, bagging and tagging the components for storage after testing them, putting them all in your basement where your wife can complain about how much space they take up... heh... you get the idea. A couple of clubs around here have bought Kenwoods to replace Micor and/or MASTR II repeaters... at least in this area, there's been a couple of clubs that have done it in the last 2-4 years. One club also had to install quite a bit more front-end filtering to keep crud out of the Kenwood they installed, so it wasn't as painless a replacement as they believed it would be. The person that mentioned their club's plan to pull a couple of older repeaters, hold them as spares since their other sites used that type of repeater, and install newer Kenwood repeaters has merit too. Not a bad plan if you have a "fleet" of repeaters to maintain, and can budget for a slow transition. For the one club here locally I know for sure went to a Kenwood, their machine still sounds like their machine after the change, nothing new there, and whoever set the transmitted CTCSS level set it too low for half of my radios to decode it... but whatever... they're on their new machine and they're happy. We all do this for fun, after all. Our club on the other hand, since we already had a massive investment in GE MASTR II's -- we chose to add another MASTR II to the "fleet" when we added another UHF repeater. I won't claim it hasn't had teething problems either, we need to go back up there and reset the levels on the S-Com 5K and/or see why the levels are a little whacked on it, but it's minor... and people use it every day. The benefit with sticking to the MASTR II for us, is that we have a small collection of spare parts already in basements down off the mountain from previous MASTR II projects, and basically every repeater *could* be cannibalized for parts for another if a huge disaster (lightning strike!) ever hit the hub/most important sites. (They're all important... but... well, in trying times, at least we have options.) Remember, I am from the age of replacing a car at 100,000 miles. Our
machine is over 25 years old and I thought it needed it 100,000 mile change. We do have a Moto tech in town and I will make an appointment to visit him next week for some Micor schooling.
Heh... Micors and MASTR II's are more like Toyota Pickups... 300,000 miles if their oil is changed regularly. (GRIN!) Thank you all. Not a problem. Holler if you need help with the IRLP. The challenge there for you guys will be in keeping the transmitter tails and ID's out of it if you're going to link on-channel. You can do it if you teach the repeater to turn it's CTCSS tone on and off following user receive input and not the transmitter, so your link radio will only "hear" when people are talking. It kinda sounds "nifty" also, once you get used to having to turn off your CTCSS decode to hear the transmitter tail if you need to get a feel for how the repeater sounds to you in an unfamiliar location. It's far cleaner if you can swing it, to add a link radio and 2nd port to the controller if you can... and that might factor into your decisions up there also... if you need the space to put a 2nd link radio up there... well, you get the idea... and there's things to consider on that link radio also, like the same CTCSS trick when the tranmitter toward your off-site link is being ID'ed... etc. It's a small engineering challenge to get it right, but nothing insurmountable. Bob Smith WB6ODR, Prescott, AZ
http://www.w7yrc.org
Decisions, decisions... always fun. By the way, the stuff that does NOT last as long as the radio... the antenna and feedline... those are always worth taking a careful look at and or sending a pre-emptive strike against.... especially if they're 10 years or more old and/or you don't trust them. The antenna system is always a good investment to put real money into, if you're at all concerned about it. The reality is that most of us don't even realize there's a problem until we start popping PA's and/or finding lots of heat on our isolator port dummy load coming back in from the outside, unless it seriously degrades the repeater's performance quickly. Slow degradation is hard to spot unless you have some known baseline test points of some sort. One local repeater builder here puts his service monitor on a known vertical antenna and checks sensitivity remotely -- it's a "relative" measurement due to all the various factors involved, but he eliminates as many variables as he can, and he can see large changes, at least... Anyway, just some more thoughts... have fun with it.... Nate WY0X
