"Gary Smith" wrote in
:

Yes, i am in rural Southwest Victoria. I am currently running a
discone on 2 Metres which is about 5 Metres above ground.
The closest 2 Metre repeater is approx 100Km line of site and has big
problems with RX, as such i cannot access it with my current antenna.

Gary, 100km is a long path to a repeater, so you have to make sure you
are doing some things right.

I don't want to be negative about your discone, but they, being very
broadband, accentuate IMD problems (so called pager interference) with
receivers. If you are in the sticks, that won't be as noticeable as in
the city, and it will affect ham gear more than commercial LMR which tend
to have better front end selectivity. The other thing about the discone,
is it is relatively low gain on tx.

I note that your main problem with the 2m repeater is it hearing you, so
you should be trying initially to boost your transmit signal. Perhaps you
should look around at one of the commerical high gain 2m or dual band
antennas that will give you 3 - 6dB lift depending on the model (in other
words to double to quadruple your effective radiated power). Review your
feedline situation to see you are not chucking signal away there as well.
Another alternative is to build or buy a small yagi, 4 to 6 elements,
vertically polarised and fixed on the repeater, but of course it is a bit
restrictive for other contacts.

I have a 20 element yagi on UHF CB with a repeater to the Southeast
and us locals use that repeater to communicate as we have for years,
and its our local link, still, at this stage. So, we're not all
surrounded by repeaters in our back yards in this corner of this state

Repeaters aren't everything, I think there are 9 or so here for a
relatively low ham population, I don't use them, and they aren't very
busy except for drive time when they sound a bit like CB.

and the terrain isn't all flat either, our town is built on the
Glenelg river and fortunantly i live a little higher than the centre
of town. We still have non amateur friends on UHF CB and like to keep
in touch with them. I pitty those that use UHF CB repeaters in or near
cities, usually it's a waste of time talking on them but there are
SOME good operators there as well. "in the sticks" we use them for
proper conversations instead of kids trying to overpower each other.
Maybe thats why you are wondering why i still want UHF CB

Have fun, try experimenting with some different antennas, reserve your
discone for a radiating dummy load.

Re the Commodore, when I was younger, the deal was that the car owner
purchased a slab, invited some competent mates around and after a certain
anaesthetic threshold was reached, the holesaw came out and the antenna
was installed... just watch that the guy with the holesaw isn't as
anaesthetised as a newt!

Owen