You can't draw too many conclusions from experience with one repeater. On the reflectors, you will notice that some repeaters have quite a bit of R2D2 and some have very few signals with R2D2. Fine tuning a repeater to maximize HT performance is more difficult on DV because you can't hear and easily identify the sources of problems. Site noise, intermod, and signals on the input from out of area users combined with the possibility of a bad cable or connector all could result in poor weak signal performance. It takes time to identify and correct these problems.
Your experience with "noisy" DV inside the house on an HT on two meters is not uncommon. You might have better luck on UHF. There seem to be a lot of noise generators in the two meter spectrum in the average home. DV is degraded by interference as well as weak signals. If you are getting into the repeater better than you are hearing it, you may have local QRM. Take a listen in FM mode on the repeater output and see what you hear. It's possible you could turn off an appliance and get rid of the noise. Computers, cable and satellite TV boxes are known suspects. Ernie W6KAP --- In dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com, AB8XA <ab...@...> wrote: > > I've been into D-Star almost a week, so take this for what it's worth. > > From my house (949'ASL), W8BI (957' + ? tower ASL) is 7.7 miles on a > heading of about 344ยบ true. On the line from my house toward W8BI, > the terrain rises steadily to about 1,020' ASL within a mile, then > drops back down. > > With the IC-91AD and rubber ducky, I can get into W8BI with DV > reliably from my front (north) yard. In the living room on the north > side of the house, I am reliably copyable if sitting up to the window, > but if I lean back away from the window, I'm reported to turn into > mostly R2D2. Strange. >