We've had a couple issues with W0CFI lately that seem to involve (or would at least be explained by) folks using the crossband feature of their radio. While there's certainly nothing wrong with leveraging your mobile rig to give a little boost to HT ops, please keep in mind these important points - especially when uplinking to a repeater:
- Always, always, always run a CTCSS tone or DCS code on your input frequency! This is not optional! If you don't protect your input frequency with tone, unwanted traffic could be passed to the repeater; even static if the input squelch is too loose. This seems to be what we've been hearing on W0CFI lately.
- Run the input with lowest possible power. Because you're typically not very far from the mobile/crossband base, there's no need to blast the rebroadcast signal from the repeater at 50W. 1W will easily cover your neighborhood, 5W will do the entire town.
- Pick your input frequency wisely. Unfortunately, there's only 26 channels in the Colorado 2M band plan and we've all got to share them. Using 146.520 for your input would be a terrible idea. 146.460 is also a poor choice as a lot of people seem to use it in Colorado. Bottom line, monitor your chosen channel for a few minutes before firing up the crossband.
Jeff - perfectly stated!! Great summary and thanks for posting this. EXCELLENT reminder for us seasoned hams and a great insight for new hams. Thanks for posting this.
73,
Dan-N2SRK
I'm thinking forward to Pedaling for Parkinsons, do we, or should we have a club standard for cross band? I'm thinking we might do individual CTCSS or DCS tones, but a standard frequency our club would use for such events.
I greatly appreciate the info. Though I have yet to use the feature, other than cost, the reason I bought the radio I did was for the crossband feature. A class on crossbanding "etiquette" I feel would go a long way in resolving the issues with W0CFI. I myself am still clueless on how to use crossband correctly so I don't create issue like that described above.
In addition, last year at P4P, we found that our ht's couldn't hit W0CFI. After it was over, a couple of guys tried crossbanding with someone's Yaesu FT-400 and it worked like a charm. The next time the club does P4P it would be extremely useful. A couple of times last year someone had to leave the station to check on a cyclist and we had trouble communicating because we were trying to go through the repeater and the others at our station couldn't hear us sometimes.
Just my 2cents on the subject.
73,
John
W0JNY
I just came across Ed's (KE0TSD) post in vhf/uhf section from last year's P4P. Sorry Ed, didn't recognize your user name in the above post. It was Ed's radio, him & I believe, Chuck crossband with. So it sounds like you already have worked out something for future events.
I still believe a class for general purpose crossband etiquette with repeaters would be very useful.
I've thought about joining the repeater committee but have absolutely no experience with repeaters other than talking on them a few times but would like to learn how they really work and how they are set up.
73,
John
W0JNY
