Hi Eric, >I make no secret of my disdain for "bells and whistles" like clever courtesy tones, autopatch, and voice announcements. I work primarily in commercial and public-safety radio systems where such "features" have no place.
That's certainly an understandable take, but keep in mind most of that stuff can be turned off. Frankly, in newer designs (like our 7330), you aren't paying much for the bells and whistles because those kinds of features are implemented either in a chip that has to be there anyway (the FPGA) or in firmware. The "personality" of the repeater is pretty much up to the control op/owner. Without an external controller, it's fairly difficult to be able to link and unlink a group of co-sited repeaters and transfer commands among them, for example. Granted, that kind of activity may be more ham-oriented than commercial. >In my limited experience (40+ years) the majority of equipment failures have been in the add-ons, not in the commercial equipment. Add-on equipment often uses very low voltages (especially in the logic section) and is perhaps more susceptible to lightning than RF equipment that runs on nothing lower than 13.8 V or 24 V. But today's repeaters have internal CPUs and other logic, so perhaps they are no longer more bulletproof than the external controllers. My own 22+ years in the biz leads me to think that controllers have two natural enemies, lightning and customers with screwdrivers. And the lightning issue decreases hugely when you delete the autopatch. A lot of controller failures can be traced to weaknesses in the design, both hardware and software. Maybe mostly software. I don't see the inherent problem with using an external controller other than a small loss of reliability from the extra components. 73, Bob Bob Schmid, WA9FBO, Member S-COM, LLC PO Box 1546 LaPorte CO 80535-1546 970-416-6505 voice 970-419-3222 fax www.scomcontrollers.com **************************************Check out AOL's list of 2007's hottest products. (http://money.aol.com/special/hot-products-2007?NCID=aoltop00030000000001)
