Our club recently added a remote receiver and RF link to our club repeater. We are using an ACC RC-850 controller at the repeater site. We added an LDG RVS-8 voter so we would not have to use PL and to make life easier for mobile users.
Now we have a problem. When I set up the voter, the POTs that I must adjust seem to have step functions, i.e. I can adjust to, say, 500 mV, then the next slightest adjustment will immediately take me to, say, 3 V. I put the two receivers on channels 1 and 2 and found the step occurred in both channels. This was perplexing. I called LDG tech support and was told that maybe a POT was just dirty even though the voter is brand new. So I tried again with the same result. Then I switched the two receivers to channels 3 and 4. These POTs had the same characteristic. There are two POTs per channel, so the problem is there for eight POTs! At first blush, this looks as though LDG has a large supply of defective POTs. So my question is, "Is there any way something external to the voter could cause the voter POTs to behave this way?" I don't want to charge LDG with using bad components if there is any chance that the problem is caused by our receivers or controller. I don't see any way the receivers or controller could cause the problem. What do you all think? John AF4PD PS: The repeater receiver is in a Midland BaseTech II and the link receiver is an Icom IC-F221S. PPS: A further problem is that the maximum audio output of the RVS-8 is not adequate to modulate the BaseTech II transmitter (through the RC-850) to any deviation above 1.7 kHz. I can solve this with an audio amplifier or a change to the RC-850, but I would rather that the voter did the job. This problem, too, could be caused by a bad POT. I am sorry to say I did not measure the audio voltage out of the voter.
