Batboard

I apologize if this has been addressed already. Reading through all these threads, and my mind is fried. Please be gentle as my group is new with this technology.

First I’ll give you some background. I’m an advisor for a police/fire explorer program. For a long time we’ve been running HT1000’s, Sabers, and some other radios given to us from the police agency we work with. These were in the 450 spectrum. With the narrowbanding issues coming up and with Motorola not supporting the XTS3000 anymore, the department gave us 50 XTS3000 in the 800 spectrum, HOWEVER, as in the past, once they give it to us it’s all hands off from them. Pretty much “It’s yours now, you deal with it.”

With that being said, my colleagues and I were quite capable working with our older units, one have many years in the radio industry working with that equipment. But as all things do, with the technology changes, he fell behind when it came to the P25 technology.

Here are my questions:

Wanting to stay with Digital, is the Quantar the only (reasonable) repeater for us to get (we do have a frequency assigned to us, but again, we have to deal with it ourselves)?

Next, do we have any other options for a repeater?

Last, is there a way, add-on options, etc., to add to the repeater to get two channels to work on the repeater? I.e., we have an explorer channel and an advisor channel?

Thank you in advance for any information.

Hi there, nice username, coincidentally it is that time of year isn't it:)

First, with regard to Motorola, you can also consider the Quantro for P25, however it's a much larger and heavier beast to deal with due its separate and external power amplifiers. Sounds like you have plenty of brawn, but space at the site may be an issue, you're going to be looking at a little more than half a standard rack for just the station. There are other manufacturers of 800MHz equipment but they are not as plentiful as UHF/VHF and coming across them secondhand may be a bit more difficult. I've seen 25 watt 800MHz Quantars for around $1000, for what they do, that's a hell of a price.

You may consider running a community repeater if you need additional "channels" however only one of the PL assignments can be active at a given time. If you want two conversations at the same time then you'll need another repeater.

P25 Conventional Talkgroup would also do what you want to do as far as having separate "channels" on one repeater pair, but still suffers from the same one-at-a-time limitation as an analog community repeater.

If P25 wasn't a requirement you could find MSF5000 repeaters all over the place for close to scrap prices.

Yes escomm, it is that time of year. Leaving tomorrow night. ;o)

Thank you for the replies. At my work, we use mototrbo, which I'm gaining more knowledge about everyday and getting pretty comfortable with. The XTS3000 and P25, I'm lost!

Thanks again!