On Jun 2, 8:23*am, 'Captain' Kirk DeHaan
wrote:
Sal M. Onella said the following on 6/1/2011 10:37 PM:

snip

How much power are you putting out?

How well do you hear the repeater; are there times when it fades below
squelch while you're listening to other people?



My TM-721A is putting out 35 watts. *At least that is the spec. *The
repeater is always scratchy and barely readable. *I've only had one time
when it even showed up on the S meter. *That was low clouds so I assume
it was cloud bounce.

--
'Captain' Kirk DeHaan


You indicated that you're working other repeaters with ease. Blaming
the trees sounds right.

I think a 2m beam is the way to go. I've used one at Field Day for
ten or so years from south of San Diego and easily worked 100 miles
into Los Angeles, simplex, obviously. The improvement in performance
is dramatic with 15 dBi gain, compared to approx 2 dBi gain of an end-
fed dipole, your j-pole. My two beams were less than 50 dollars
apiece at ham swap meets. Mount with elements vertical.

I just did an experiment and, as I expected, a 10 dB increase in
signal strength took me from unreadable to Q5 copy with tolerable
background hiss. (I used switchable attenuators to set up the signal
test conditions and a distant repeater as the test signal.)

If the repeater is no worse than "barely readable," 10 dB should fix
you up.

By the way, the gain effect is not so great that you'd lose the other
repeaters, unless one just happened to hit a deep null by bad luck.

"Sal"