I’m trying to find an inexpensive way to bridge the Motorola DLR1020’s amd Retevis RT27’s. I’ve seen SureCom SR-628. Would that work? Are there any other options?
Thanks in advance.
Can’t be done. Sorry. They work on entirely different technologies.
The DLR radios work on a frequency-hopping technology in the 900MHz band. They are high-quality, military-grade radios, and the only radios that can be programmed to work with them is the Motorola DTR and DLR series. The RT27 is an inexpensive consumer-grade FRS radio that works in the 400MHz FRS band, and there is no way to get these two technologies to talk together.
I’m not talking about having each radio simultaneously communicating on different bands, I’m talking about using their analog outputs/inputs and a “two-radio bridge”. That is, there are two radios, one DLR and one RT27 linked, for example, by a Surecom, where tx out of the DLR is forwarded to the RT27 and then tx’d to RT27’s. Why wouldn’t that work?
Sounds easy, but it just won’t work. Those cheap “repeater” bridges use audio from one to open the transmit circuit of the other. For them to work, both radios need VOX capability. Because the DLR has no VOX capability, the best it can work is one direction only. And this is assuming you can find a proper adapter cable for the Motorola. (Although it looks similar to the two-pin Kenwood cable, it is not the same. The two pins are much closer together on the Motorola and can’t be interchanged.)
So the chances of this working in one direction only is slim, and assuming you can find a cable and tweak the VOX circuitry of the transmitting radio. The chances of it working in two directions is nil.