At 11/3/2009 11:05, you wrote: >I love the notion of the courtesy beep as a diagnostic tool, provided it >doesn't distract from the content of the traffic. When I was working on >repeaters for the Blue Ridge Amateur Radio Society in the Carolinas in the >'80s, we were transitioning to CTCSS, but ran the Paris Mountain repeater >in carrier-squelch mode except during periods of interference. Because >users were trying everything from actual PL reeds to 555 chips as >encoders, I programed the SCOM 6K to reverse the high-to-low courtesy beep >on transmissions with correctly decoded tones, so users would know if >their tones were good even during periods of carrier access.
One of the first open CTCSS repeaters here in SoCal (WR6AQD Santiago Peak 145.22) used CTCSS to key the repeater, but the actual receiver squelch was still carrier. Since the hang time was ~3.5 seconds, you didn't need much CTCSS or exactly the right frequency to get through. It was easy to tell who's CTCSS encoders were off frequency, injected into the mic input, etc. by all the courtesy tones going off during the users' transmissions. Bob NO6B
