On Nov 19, 2007, at 11:32 PM, Eric Lemmon wrote: > All good info, Nate, but your comment about turning down the power > may lead > Joe down the wrong path.
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. It's true. [snipped good info about a radio that got hotter when run at low power levels...] > > My point is that some radios may exhibit symptoms more serious than > spurious > operation when set to power levels below the recommended level. > Excessive > heat generation within the PA at low output levels is seldom > mentioned as an > issue to watch. This is understandable, since "conventional wisdom" > suggests that the PA should get hotter only when driven harder. Totally agreed. Thus my comment about buying something rated for continuous-duty at the required power level. Especially if used for Public Safety purposes. No one should ever have a cheap mobile rig not rated for continous- duty handling life-or-death traffic without a backup system in place that's instantly accessible by the folks who need to communicate. Heck, some of the mobiles out there for sale shouldn't be anywhere near a public safety vehicle, if you ask me... but that's just my opinion. The more weak/light plastic and the cheaper the quality of the connectors, just think about what's inside... will it hit the repeater system when the fur starts to fly? There's a reason we all find a lot of the older rigs that were designed to be either repeaters rated for continuous-duty, or with a change of a few jumpers, a remote-base and/or console/dispatch end- user radio... and a lot of them on the used market have 2-wire/4-wire interfaces still on the back, and their jumpers/settings are in "base" mode. Mobile rigs are great on desks when everyone in the building also has an HT on their belt as a backup and there's no dispatcher sitting there, and it's only used occasionally. Add a full-time dispatcher or a site which has no other radios, I'd personally want to see a radio designed to be a continous-duty repeater quality radio sitting in a corner handling they traffic, with a hardwired console on the desk, or whatever. "Remote base" to me says something more like the latter application. But again, hey -- I'm just a dumb Amateur. The pros often disagree with me. I like it when radios get installed and ignored that work perfectly for years at a time. Some folks don't mind building a department full of techs (bigger the department, bigger the budget, the more "successful" you are, right? That's the current mentality of most middle-management these days, isn't it? Always has been, really...) to fix broken stuff... or signing service contracts worth millions so radios can be swapped and shipped back to the manufacturer constantly. Many just don't know that rigs exist that meet rigorous standards for duty-cycle. Or they just don't have the budget... but should be fighting harder to get it... 'cause it's cheaper/safer/better in the long-run to use the heavy iron whenever the transmitter's duty-cycle hits something above, oh say... 50%. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [EMAIL PROTECTED]
