Radio repeaters and why they are a must have

[justanothergunnut]

A good amount of us in the survival community have hand held radios because,, well,, communications is a good thing. However, when you take your comms out into the field and start to train with them you learn real quick about the limitations of comms gear and that starts you on a journey to fix the short commings of your gear. For example, the radios we use be they hand helds or portables are most efficient hen they have a clean line of sight with each other. This causes problems with reliable comms in built up areas or heavily wooded /hilly terrain. Try to talk to your buddy who is in ravine a mile away and you will quickly understand the limitations of the comms we generally have available to us. ENTER the repeater. A simple device that takes a incoming transmission and retransmits it. Imagine how much more reliable your comms in a given area would be if you could deploy a stand alone portable repeater system high up on a ridge in a tree. Now providing line of sight to both users. Below is a youtube video showing one design for such a setup and because they are cheap to build $200 approx. you could deploy a few of them extending your communications circle out to 15-20 plus miles even in bad terrain and forested areas. Another really exciting application is using it to repeat the signal from Dakota Alert sensors. Imagine you have a retreat area and you need to deploy some sensors farther out or in the next valley over. Maybe you want to place a driveway sensor 5 miles away on a dirt road that leads into the back of your property. The transmitter on the Dakota simply wont transmit that far through trees and around that big mountain your property butts up to. Simple, setup one of these portable self contained repeaters on the top of that hill and bounce the signal from the dakota alert off of it back to your retreat. OOH before I forget, im sure a ham somewhere is going to educate me on the legalities of this system. To be brutally honest, I DONT CARE!! its intended for the PAW and some FCC twirp citing regs will be the least of my problems. Besides with a few repeaters deployed ill know he is coming before he leaves the pavement....

This video on you tube shows a pretty decent design.

[justanothergunnut]

if you want to go super cheap buy a set of Baofeng uv5r's and place them into a waterproof plastic plano container you could probably get the cost below $200.. It would be wise though to design in a battery supply to boost run time. Also be sure to set a DCS code on the receiving radio so it will only transmit signals from radios with a correct corresponding code programmed in. OR if you are a total penny pincher :cool: you c ould just run a cable from the earphone jack of one radio to the mic jack of a second radio and use the VOX function on the transmitting radio. It will work but you will be lacking some advanced features such as being able to remotely turn on and off the repeater functionality. Which personally I can see tactical reasons for doing just such a thing....