Nate Duehr wrote: > On Jul 27, 2008, at 3:05 PM, Dave Gomberg wrote: > >> At 12:10 7/27/2008, Alexandre Souza wrote: >>> "How to build a small group repeater in a very tight budget?" >> Listening to all your restrictions, Alexandre, I would try to get >> access to two towers at least a couple of kilometers (5-10km would be >> even better) apart and put in a 1.2m or 70cm link between them. > > Go with 70cm. More hams in a financially troubled place are likely to > have "test gear" for 70cm in the form of dual-band radios. If you > suspect a problem with a 1.2 GHz link, you're going to have to find > the "techies" with 1.2 GHz radios... if they even have them. On 70cm, > more people will be able to help troubleshoot. > > From a "maintainability" standpoint, a 2m transmitter/70cm receiver > at one side, and a 2m receiver/70cm transmitter at another is very > easy to maintain. A 70cm link between two sites is the way to go. > > We ran our 6m repeater that way here for years, and people even found > the link frequencies and would talk on them if all they had was 70cm > gear, so they could reach their buddies on 6m. The people doing this > understood that the link was on yagis, ran only exciter power from a > MASTR II on transmit, and not optimized for "user" access, and we > never had any complaints that the "70cm repeater" wasn't working well > enough for anyone.
Something a few people have done (to add to this) was to make the 6M receive end a full 70cm repeater, and the 6M tx end just listens to the output of the UHF repeater.
