I like them, but they are expensive. They used to make a RI-310 which replaced the factory control boards inside a Vertex VXR-5000 repeater entirely, the RI-310 controlled the receive and transmitter oscillators and power which meant you could do some really neat things with macros.
The RI-300 (and 310) have a "smart squelch" circuit which in my experience works quite well. I have two of them running now on UHF GE Mastr II stations. I don't connect a COR line at all from the receiver up to the controller. It's very convenient to be able to remotely adjust the repeater's squelch threshold. I buy the RI-300's with the audio delay board as well, I run 62ms delay and never, ever hear any receiver squelch crash come out the transmitter audio. The Pacific Research macro capability is unbelievably flexible, to the point that it's somewhat daunting to understand as a novice user. Also I would not even try to deal with one of these without buying the computer programming interface. The Windows programming software will save you eons of time if you are trying to do anything fancy with macros. We also use pairs of RI-300's with a VHF+UHF radio make cross-band repeaters. PacRes used to make a circuit board that replaced the motherboard inside Vertex FTL-series mobile rigs, in much the same fashion as the RI-310 controls the Vertex repeater. We have several of these for our local RACES group and they make really neat frequency-agile cross band repeaters. Other big advantage, the CTCSS encode/decode is built in. You can also run multiple tones, and you can switch the tones on/off and change the encode and decode tones remotely with programming commands which is also handy at times. All-in-all the RI-300 is extremely capable and very compact, but if you are just looking for a box that ID's and plays courtesy tones it's probably more than you want to spend. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions that I could answer. 73 Mark Hagler KK7U --- In Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com, "Jed Barton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hey guys, > > Anyone ever run the pacific research ri300 controller? Any thoughts on it, > good, bad? > > Thanks, > Jed >
