SteveShannon's Content - Page 131 (2024)

2 hours ago, WRKC935 said:

Obviously you missed this since we are still discussing it.

It's NORMAL. That's the way the Vertex works. And Vertex isn't the only repeater that does this.

Some others strip the PL.

MTR's and Quantars have a programmable REST frequency they revert to when they are receiving so this doesn't happen in situations were the repeater is located close to where portable radios are going to be. But again. This is normal and expected.

Look in the programming and see if there is a setting for a REST frequency. If there is it's probably set to the TX frequency of the repeater. Change it to something else but DO NOT set it for the receive frequency or it will interfere with the receiver of the repeater. Once the issue goes away, program a radio up for to receive the rest frequency and you will find that it will hear the repeater generating a signal on the rest frequency. And when you key the repeater, the signal will go away.

Or you can continue to connect and disconnect your antenna's, walk around the house and see where you can hear the signal. Ask more questions and get told more nonsense about what is NOT causing it and continue to wonder what it is. Even though I have told you. And since I believe I am the only one on here that does this sh*t for a living. I just might know what the hell I am talking about. Maybe... But at this point, it's anybodies guess.

Actually nobody but you is still discussing it. You’re the only one who has posted since Friday. Maybe you have the responses sorted in order of votes rather than order of date and time. I’ve done that before.

If you’re having a true emergency you don’t wait for a net; you declare an emergency and break in.

The fact that a Net is being conducted actually helps ensure that someone will hear your transmission!

Nets are held to allow people to learn about and practice radio etiquette. Every person who uses a two way radio should take it upon themselves to learn radio etiquette. I know some people don’t want GMRS to resemble amateur radio, but basic radio etiquette should still be learned and practiced.

Here’s one of several sources of information that may help you to know how to break in with an emergency transmission:https://quality2wayradios.com/store/two-way-radio-etiquette

From this page:

https://www.miklor.com/UV82/UV82-MenuDef.php

On 10/11/2022 at 10:02 PM, HrXkb3UjmgFvBe said:

Do I have wonky hardware at this point since I had issues with linking my RT97s (using the RT97 image) and my id o matic? What's weird is that existing sound card registers the RT97 audio in per the LED but not on the moto.

18 minutes ago, WRKV653 said:

Are you using the image for the RT97, or did you re-configure the Raspberry Pi image?. Not that I am much help with either, but I know there is a image just for that repeater.Here is the link

It looks like they used the RT97 image.

Are there any lights that light up to indicate power? I assume you checked the fuses in the power cable and that the power cable is connected correctly polarity wise. Also, there is an internal fuse (page 19 of the service manual), password protection, and there’s an “ignition sense” option that turns on the radio when it senses that your car is started. Good luck.

Here’s the operator manual:

Here’s the service manual (you’ll have to do the whole Captcha thing):

Nice. Yes, you probably could run it once a day as a cron. If the pi is never restarted and if rc.updatenodelist just runs and sleeps then eventually you’ll have the same problem, but it may take nearly two years!

The real question I have is if rc.updatenoelist runs to completion and breaks out of its loop or if it continues running. If it exits eventually then it shouldn’t be gobbling up memory and you could run it as a cron more frequently. It was only because you had like 544 instances running and sleeping that you had problems (that’s what I think anyway).

5 hours ago, chasedog1 said:

A Vertex tech sold me the repeater after he serviced and did an alignment. everything seems to be back correctly. The HT only receives on the frequency the repeater is on, I go a few mhz up or down and its gone. it does stop when I remove the HT's antenna

I don’t think anything is wrong. You shouldn’t expect a handheld radio not to have its receiver circuitry overwhelmed by a high power transmitter nearby.

2 hours ago, fpcaptain said:

That seems like the best or at least only thing to do to keep from chewing through memory.

Do any instances of rc.updatenodelist run at all? Are there any sleeping? I think I read somewhere that a module called “dial” might call it once.

Is it possible there’s a problem in the extnodefile itself?

Remove the antenna on your handheld. Does it still happen?

Is the case correctly assembled to the repeater? What about the duplexer? Cables?

I suspect your handheld is just not very good at rejecting interference from the repeater. Typically you’d never use a handheld in the same room as a repeater.

6 minutes ago, chasedog1 said:

I go farther away from the repeater and the signal drops off to nothing unless I ask someone to key it. This happens on all channels no matter what. It happens in repeat or base mode as if there is a leak powering the xmitter with very low power. I am going to try to obtain a signal field strength meter and take more readings.

Is there a transmit LED or display on the repeater (or even a wattmeter on the output) that indicates when the transmitter is transmitting?

Does it stop if you power down the repeater? (I know that probably sounds like a dumb question and maybe it is. )

15 hours ago, chasedog1 said:

I have the repeater setup and when I turn on a HT the repeater seems to be dead keying or transmitting but I am not doing anything. It does it on all channels all the time. I can key the HT and hear myself then key the mic on the repeater and hear my self with the HT.. any ideas ?

Help me understand the proximities involved and the exact nature of your concern. When you’re in the same room as the repeater with one of your handhelds, no matter what channel you tune the handheld to you hear whatever the repeater transmits.

Also, using an identical handheld, when you go farther away from the repeater the handheld only hears the repeater on the correct channel.

Is that a correct description?

5 minutes ago, gortex2 said:

AUXCOMM is a sit in class. As said alot of the basic ICS can be done online for free. They take about an hour each max. Less time if you have been in public safety. The AUXCOMM course is a good bridge between Public Safety and Amateur Radio but is only as good as you take out of it. The last 3 I have been part of only about 2 guys actually took anything out of the class and are active in other parts of public safety also. If your in public safety and a ham its an ideal course.

Thanks!

Are you sure you haven’t changed anything in the code?

In particular look at the post immediately above your first post where WRLJ719 talks about thecall to rc.updatenodelist. Also, his post appears to have a misspelling “rc.updatenodeist” rather than “rc.updatenodelist”. Nothing makes a person more aware of spelling than programming.

It looks like cron is spawning new instances of “rc.updatenodelist” which runs and then goes to sleep, over and over and over, each time eating up valuable resources until there are none left. I suspect eitherrc.updatenodelist needs to exit gracefully, rather than sleeping, or something needs to be fixed in crontab. I doubt it needs to run very frequently anyway, but it should exit each time.

That link to the stackoverflow question that I pasted above has other suggestions for diagnosis.

You probably do have the 3b+ but that shouldn’t matter.

So, look at where you were when you followed this instruction:

”Changeyour crontab -e to run rc.updatenodelist”

and make sure you did it correctly and that you included the asterisk as pointed out by WRLJ719.

My rule on metal roofs is to get on them as seldom as possible and to rope off if the pitch is uncomfortable.

At that height, and running the cable the way you have to you’re possibly going to lose a lot of signal just in the coax. Be sure to use the best coax you can. Here’s a website that has several charts showing coax losses. Be sure to look at the 450 MHz values:https://www.w4rp.com/ref/coax.html

Second, I’m not sure that either of those antennas will get you the performance you might hope. Try putting that mag mount with either Nagoya onto a metal pie plate on a painters pole out in your yard first, or even on the roof of your car. Does it work well enough? If so, then maybe get on the roof. If it doesn’t work then you’ve saved yourself a trip.

I was wrong to focus on problems like shorts or opens. KAF6045 is correct. With RG58 you lose half of your power every thirty feet. Sometimes you can up for that by placing a decent quality antenna up in the air, but with a bad antenna, a bad cable, or a weak signal lack of quality will really bite you.

Borrowing a VNA from someone can tell you if you have the kind of problem I was overly fixated on before (opens and shorts), but won’t tell you if your antenna has lousy performance.

If an HT with a Nagoya has good performance but an antenna up in the air doesn’t you have every right to be suspicious of both the antenna and the cable. I’ll include a link to a website with performance charts for various cables. Be sure to look at the frequency you’re using. The closest frequency will probably be 450 MHz. Because GMRS is slightly higher, the losses through cable at GMRS frequencies will be even worse, but not a lot. Every 3dB loss means half of the remaining power, so 10.6 dB loss costs about 90% of the power. That’s for 100 feet. At 35 feet you lose over 3.7 dB so you probably lose 55% of the signal each direction. That’s substantial and enough to make it difficult to know if the antenna works or not. Of course everything adds up. It helps to start with something you know works and then try one thing at a time to see where you can get some improvements.

Coax losses site I mentioned:https://www.w4rp.com/ref/coax.html

8 minutes ago, WRUU925 said:

I'm happy but I got my GMRS license Friday night and finally was able to log in here tonight and just wanted to say hi.

Welcome!!

6 minutes ago, WRED210 said:

I'll try a different cable and a shorter run of the same kind and see if that makes a difference. Thanks for your input.

You really can rule out almost everything by swapping things out. It’s a quick and easy way to troubleshoot.

2 minutes ago, WRED210 said:

Could it be the 35 ft of cheap rg58 coax? Would that cause enough loss to lose reception?

If there’s actually something wrong with it, such as a short between the center conductor and the shield, yes. Or if the center conductor is broken or disconnected from the radio or antenna.
Those kinds of problems can be present in the antenna as well.
Try a different cable.

7 minutes ago, WRED210 said:

Well.... I mounted the fiberglass 1/2 wave on a mast about 23 high (about 10 ft above garage roof), and not near that steel covered patio... and get zero reception. It tries to break squelch, but I hear nothing. The nagoya whip on the same HT gets some reception. Could it be that this cheap amazon antenna is just junk?

4 minutes ago, Cpch64 said:

Reporting Back:

Thumbs up on the "Comet GP-6NC GMRS/FRS Commercial Dual-Band VHF/UHF Base Vertical Antennas GP-6NC"!!

It bridged the gap on the TX side and better RX. I'm now able to talk with both repeaters 45-58 miles away during daytime hours in which i could not do before.

Many thanks for all the information!!

That’s great news!

Thanks for the update.
Steve

1 hour ago, wayoverthere said:

https://web.psrg.org/psrg-voting-system/

Here is something I stumbled across on the ham side of the table, that seems to provide a good description of what's going on behind the scenes and the gear they're using..don't know if it's any help

I have a friend who is on that system and who has good results.

50 minutes ago, JohnE said:

GPS would be for simulcasting to sync the transmitters timing. Also said transmitters would have to have a high stability XO to lock it on frequency.
You are need a comparator or something that works like one. seeing as you are using IP everything should come back to one "computer" and select the site w/best RSSI and as it moves it goes to the next. IIRC there was a HAM that had some you tubes on it. I think it was in relation to a simulcast set up.
hope this was some help

Gps could also be used at each receiver to time tag signals as received, which could then be used to ensure the comparator is comparing synchronized portions.

Marc,

I’m sure you have already seen this but maybe it will help provide background. This is from repeater-builder:

“A good voting system is completely transparent when it's working properly - you can't tell it's there except by the superior coverage. Obviously the voter has to be voting identical simultaneous signals, which is why using VOIP (voice over IP, a.k.a. the Internet) as a link to bring in the audio from one or more outlying receive sites usually does not work - there is too much delay and jitter, causing the voter at one instant to be voting the noise between two words on channel one and voting the middle of the previous word on channel two. Manually adding a fixed delay to the one receiver in an IP network does not work either, as the per-path internet packet switching delay is not consistent, even within one transmission, and definitely not from one transmission to the next. Note that there is a lot of incentive to "fix" this characteristic, and a revision of this paragraph may be needed at some point as the technology advances.”