I've seen two cases in which club boards, over the advice of the tech people, insisted on ordering new ham-grade repeaters so they'd be covered by a manufacturers warranty. Apparently, the directors didn't consider how ticked-off the users would be when the new repeater had to be out of service for 3 or 4 weeks to be fixed.
Old Moto or GE stuff is both better quality and way cheaper than new ham-grade stuff, meaning you can keep a stack of spares around. Buying an expensive, poorly-shielded box of low-quality surface-mount chips "so anybody can work on it" is actually pretty funny. Obviously they've never worked on older commercial stuff, which usually has manuals so detailed any chimpanzee with patience could get it fixed. 73, Paul, AE4KR ----- Original Message ----- From: Chuck Kelsey To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 10:25 AM Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Re: Ham installation quality/non-quality Yep. "Get that GE junk out of here." A few guys around here have been through that one :-( Chuck WB2EDV ----- Original Message ----- > How about putting money into a project for a club repeater (including > buying crystals), installing it, and then after it's running, being told > to 'take it out we don't want to use that, we want something anyone can > work on', which turns out to be some made-for-ham junk? > > Jim > WD8CHL
