Batboard

Has anyone done any work with the XTL5000 (or even the xtl2500), to make a portable /emergency repeater?

I was just involved in an incident (minor thought it was) with multi agencies, and the primary agency had to resort to handing out portables, even though most of the involved agencies had the 7/800 interop channels available.

Are there any people, or companies that make cables, or repeater controllers that would allow the XTL2500/5000, or possibly the XTS2500/5000 to be set up as a temp/emergency repeater on the 7/800 interop channels?

DFC2

Trying to use just a simple cable from one radio to the other is like asking your wife to solder 2 wires together and have it come out looking neat and stay together.

There is no way to control audio levels. There is no time out timer and you would probably end up with receivers that have been swamped out or overloaded by the transmitter from the other radio. Not a good way to make it work, or well at all if it even worked.

Portables being used as repeaters don't work well due to their poor selectivity in their front ends and the receivers not having enough shielding unless your going cross band. Trying to use two mobiles is even worse with the higher transmit power, again unless your going cross band.

Your better off doing it in a controlled location where you can have antenna separation and use a gateway where the audio has gain controls and time out timers included. You know that there are still many radio shops that don't program the time out timers in the radios they install for agencies. Nothing like having a transmitter locked up in transmit on a frequency and you have no idea where it is.

I have been there and had to fight these problems when I worked 10 years for a radio interoperability gateway company a number of years back. They made a good gateway. The gateway had real good software control in the gateway. It was easy to use. It even had audio delay so you would not loose the first syllable being passed through the gateway. But good gateways don't do a thing if the radios your being told to connect up to are not properly installed for this application.

Jim

Those radios cannot receive on the input channels of the interop frequencies, so no, they will not work.

However, those radios CAN be programmed for analog simplex on the interop channels in addition to repeater access for wide-area comms. You'll even find they have standard channel designators ending in the letter "D"