Help with Repeater

Digital Radios
1

Hi all, I hate grilling others for things and try hard to research and solve myself before asking others for help but Im stuck this time.

I am trying to listen to a non amateur repeater, I listened for years when it was analogue but when they went digital I wrongly assumed they had gone Tetra but having recently found out that they were just using regular DMR, I have dipped my toes into the digital realm.

I know the input and output frequency’s, the time slot and the colour code and I hear traffic on the repeater but not all.

Often there is traffic on the repeater but nothing comes through the radio, other times it will come through half way through the transmission and with two radios listening I often have it were one will randomly hear when the other does not but which one does or does not is random, its not a signal strength issue.

I have a Baofeng DM-1701 and a Retevis RT3S, there does not appear to be much difference in how reliably they pass transmissions on either the stock firmware or using OpenGD77, Stock possibly being slightly better.

Having them in promiscuous mode does not appear to make any difference either.

The radios on the repeater use 4 digit numerical ID’s either 10xx or 40xx and both are display the same behaviour but the controller using 9999 is strangely more reliable and comes through most of the time but not quite 100%

Am I missing something, do I need to program more than frequency’s, CC and TS?

Steve.

2

I have figured out what the problem was and is not fixable with the radios mentioned.

I invested in a Radioddity GD88 which has two independent VFO’s, I programmed one on one timeslot and the other on the other time slot and now its picking up eveything.

The times when the other radios are late to pick up a Tx, the repeater has temp switched time slots, the times when the radios were showing traffic on the frequency but not outputting anything at all are being caused by two people keying up at the same time and its populating both time slots but this radio can output both simultaneously and now hear both conversations instead of nothing at all.

Wonder how that works at their end, I suspect the controller can hear both at the same time but pretty sure the on the ground units cant.