Batboard

I'm in charge of communications for my geographical area for a National Search and Rescue organization and I recently held a meeting where someone asked why we don't have our repeaters linked together to be able to talk over a geographically larger area than one repeaters footprint. Now I'm a big fan of it however our policy from national requires that "Systems used to interconnect repeaters and remote base stations must support encryption at all time and that it must automatically retransmit original encrypted signals without unsecure intermediate de-crypting and re-encrypting." So with that in mind, how can I go about linking Quantar Repeater A with Quantar Repeater B over an RF Link. I can likely get a UHF or other frequency, however Microwave is FAR out of budget. Also, it is possible to be in the coverage area of both these repeaters in certain circumstances and they're on the same frequency however different PL Tone. Is this still something that can be done?

Mark

The correct way to do it would be over Fiber or Microwave using simulcast. You can use an RF link (Not recommended by me) but to have full encryption, you'd need to use encrypted radios for that as well.

The encrypted stuff aside for a moment, linking two repeaters that are on the same freq - even if they are on different PL's - and have coverage overlap - will turn into disaster. You want the repeaters on different pairs. And if they are close enough to link together, then they are close enough to hear each other. You just need to add a receiver with a voting interlock that only passes one rcvr at a time.