We have 30ish radios on our farm from handhelds to mobiles. Running a 25w to 40w uhf band with. Our farm stretches out over 20 miles. I was wandering if we can use the radios in our pickups as arepeater for our hand held to get back to dispatch and when we don’t are in the trucks use it as a normal radio. Our hand helds are 3w. And during the summer we want to see if we can use our pickups as a repeater without having 2 extra radios under the back seat and another antenna. Yes we use cell phones but they are spotty. We have 2 repeaters for the farm already. The main farm is on the grain tower i think its 55w I think don’t hold me to it but it’s a self contained unit and it’s big and bulky. The second is on a barn 10 miles away. Still not enough for the hand helds. Is their something we can add to the radios internally or a small part externally without extra antennas or radios?
We have 2 repeaters for the farm already. The main farm is on the grain tower i think its 55w I think don’t hold me to it but it’s a self contained unit and it’s big and bulky. The second is on a barn 60 miles away.
You won’t find the usual commercial radios offering repeater capability. If the vehicle radios can access the system, then I tend to agree that using them would be the simple solution - BUT - in band repeat depends on your kit. In band is going to mean licence compliance - separation to prevent desense means filters and one more workable solution would be cross-band operation, but then the portable radios would be a problem as most business radios are not dual band. This means the addition of another radio to the vehicle with mobile duplexers to separate the frequencies would be the only practical solution. Transmit what the radio hears on another frequency, and transmit anything heard on that frequency back to the main system. You’d then just have too reprogram the extra channel into all your handhelds. So a dual frequency cavity filter on the main radio, and a single simplex one on the new vehicle radio.