Cross band repeater
Today I wanted to keep an ear on the 147.09 repeater, but I was going to be working at my church. I looked up the manual for my Alinco so I could find out how to setup the cross band repeat. It was not as hard to do as I first thought it would be, but at the same time it was not easy to get going. It also has some very odd ways to configure it. It also seams that Microsoft had a part in programming the way to configure it. You have to turn the radio off and back on (rebooting the radio) to turn on the cross band repeat, and then again to turn off the cross band repeat. But it work and I was able to listen and talk on the 09 repeater via a 440 simplex link to the Alinco and the Alinco would pass my signal on to the 09 repeater and send the back response from the 09 repeater. The only problem I had was that the radio would not accept any new transmission if there was already one coming in. Not that I wanted to talk over top of others, but tonight there were a few people that were not letting the repeater drop before they would key up after the other person would un-key. In fact I had to turn off the TOT of the radio, it was set to 5 minutes, and they tripped the TOT 5 times in a row, I had to turn off the radio and back on (Yes that is 35 minutes of the repeater open, they would some times let the beep [repeater reset] happen but then key up well before the repeater would fully drop, there is about a 5 second period between the reset beep and when the repeater drops.) So I could listen to the stuff I had to turn off the TOT on the radio, since no mater how long I could set it to (max 10 minutes) they would trip it.
It was a fun experiment, and I found that it works and works well, so if I ever need it in the future I have it there to use, and if you have no idea what I was talking about don’t worry, this post was more geared to a ham radio audiance.
Why was I interested in monitoring the 09 repeater? Well the NWS was talking about how it might get bad earlier in the day so I wanted to keep an ear out for any possible skywarn net.
