On Oct 18, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Jed Barton wrote: > Hey guys, > > I'm working with a group and have given them several suggestions for > repeaters on 220 including hipro, ge, moto, etc. > One thing i don't know much about is the kendecom, and thought i > would ask > since they want to know. > As far as relyability, good, bad?
Reliability: Looking inside ours, at the quality of the components, I would have given it only a few years before it fried. Surprisingly it's been up for way over 10 years now. Maybe 20? Originally installed when novices were given 220 MHz voice priveleges, hard linked to 2m, so they could talk to the higher license classes. We keep "meaning to" replace it with a converted MASTR II, but it hasn't forced us to make it a priority, if you catch my drift. Complaints match Kevin and other's comments: Squelch action, crappy. Seriously crappy. Way too much hysteresis means you have to crank it way up to get any kind of decent squelch action. RX is relatively deaf, but workable with a pre-amp. (220 is so darn QUIET, it's hard NOT to hear signals... so "it works", but it could work a LOT better.) Like almost everyone else, the club's main techs at the time, ripped out/bypassed the internal controller. It was so long ago, I wasn't even a Ham back then (prior to 1991 for sure!) and did a custom interface to an S-Com controller. Sounds like they'll do it for you at the factory these days. The really annoying one for us has been this: TX frequency stability is very poor. We have to put it back on TX frequency on a regular basis (annually at least). The potentiometer quality used for this adjustment is abysmal and gets worse to fiddle with every year it gets older. Another one of those dilemmas... "mess with it and put in a multi-turn pot, or just replace the whole thing with a GE?"... (We just had our first "neighbor" pair on 220 utilized in the area, and the owner is someone I know. He noted that we're off frequency in his direction (this time) a little bit, and I promised him I'd go tweak the thing again at first opportunity.) Oh... almost forgot about this one: Getting the cover off and working on the thing in a rack-mount environment is a complete PITA. Put a rack shelf under it for when you need to get at the guts. Have a place to put all the little screws (or ditch half of them and never put them back) and make your cabling long enough to turn the thing upside down on the shelf if you have to troubleshoot the underside of any of the circuit boards. Ours took a lightning hit -- again, more than ten years ago -- which toasted some of the metering circuitry, making the pretty little meters on the front, somewhat useless in some modes of the switches. Unbelievable that it survived, it has ball lightning marks at the screw holes in the front in the blue paint, to this day. Oh, by the way... lesson learned... scrape the pretty blue paint off around those holes and get down to bare metal before shooting your rack screws into it. Waste of pretty blue paint, since you want your rack rails properly grounded to the repeater's case anyway. Four or five years ago, we found a dried out capacitor in the audio chain that caused it to sound horrible. (Perhaps that's why Bob can always tell them, and other people rave about their audio... again, low quality components...) It was a chore to follow the audio chain through the thing (upside down) with a scope to find the stage that was dead. Once found, and replaced, it popped back to the usual good quality audio we were used to hearing out of it.) My plan has always just been to replace it... everything else in the network other than the 1.2 GHz analog machine, is GE MASTR II's... no reason not to continue the "standardization process" eventually, when other more pressing issues are completed. Working on the MASTR II's is just easier. It'd make a good "basement/backyard" repeater. On a mountain, in tight working quarters in a rack, it's a pain, and the build quality just isn't what we like to use. The MASTR II shelves are MADE to drop them open and work on them on- site... etc. Why fight with it? It ever dies, it's not getting repaired to go back to the hill. That's probably enough. I won't "bash" them completely, but I wouldn't put another into service. Especially not at their "very proud of this blue box" NEW pricing. Ouch. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [email protected] http://facebook.com/denverpilot http://twitter.com/denverpilot
