Hi Bob,
90% of the weight of our PRU is the battery alone. We think around 10 Kg is
pretty good for a complete repeater, incl duplexer, battery and radios. We
wanted to have the battery inclusive as then anyone can deploy the repeater and
not have to worry about batteries or anything that could be mucked up in the
heat of the moment. We use the VX-820 commercial range of radios with special
firmware.
Regards
Gareth Bennett
At 8/5/2009 15:40, you wrote:
>Gareth,
>
>I like your portable repeater! Is it Yeasu/Vertex based? I agree that an
>RSSI controlled repeater could be problematic for outlying areas, so if it
>was implemented, we would want to take careful steps to make sure it was
>appropriate. My thinking was that the relatively small footprint served by
>a portable repeater with marginal antennas and low power output might
>militate towards limiting the power. Of course, any low power units trying
>to hit the repeater would tend to make it vote towards higher power
>output, so maybe the wisest course would be to just set a fixed power, or
>offer the repeater owner remote power level control. I am trying to make a
>unit significantly smaller and lighter than your 22 pound machine, so
>power savings is going to be an issue!
I just weighed my MVP portapeater: 11.5 pounds, battery not included. You
could try a pair of commercial HTs, but the duplex ability of this unit
depends on the filtering of the helical resonators in the RX. I tried
swapping out a pair of amateur-grade HTs (Icom IC-32AT & Alico G5T) for the
MVP, & got severe desense.
Bob NO6B
