Batboard

I recently assumed maintenance of a couple of fleets of low band (46mhz simplex) radios. These are a mix of mitrek, maratracs, and a few maxtracs.
I keep finding most of the radios have been wired to be in carrier squelch all of the time. Is it possible this was done in an effort to obtain greater receive range? I have listened to their traffic and hear many units with marginal signals which might not send a complete dpl word. I understand that some newer radios allow a programmable error for dpl and these old radios don't.
Thanks in advance to all.
Kens

Well, yes, you may lose range going to DPL, even if the radios are fully decoding the DPL with error correction - the human ear/brain is a wonderful signal processing system that can really pull a signal out of the mud, and you may very well have situations where the radio would squelch due to an inability to decode the signal where the operator may still be able to get the message out of the static.

The first question I would ask, though, is - if it ain't broke, why are you messing with it? In other words, why are you considering going to DCS? Are your people complaining about the squelch settings? Are you having people closing their squelch down too much and missing signals? Are you getting other stations in the system and need to filter them out?

Could be a mixed setting of "AND" "OR" squelch adjustments on the newer programmable units. Mitrek DPL boards also use jumpers for code polarity of the received signal. JU1 in for UHF and VHF applications and JU2 in for low band.