VXR-1000 Wiring

I have a couple of VXR-1000 radios. A couple UHF and a couple VHF. I am new to this unit. At this point I am just trying to power on the radio and see if I can read or write the radio. It appears I only need three wires to power up the radio. I have connected them like the manual says and the LED lights come on. A few of them flash until the dial is changed from one channel to another. Any suggestions or direction? Is this unit more user friendly than the Pyramid counterpart? This is going to need to be fairly easy and reliable to field program.

I have several, and they have been very simple and reliable. I have also had the same flashing issue and it was something simple/stupid/self-inflicted in the programming. Bear with me and I'll go back and try to remember what caused it.

All my installs have been cross band. What are you connecting them to? I have posted the connection references in other threads.

I finally was able to program the VXR-1000 radios.

I am working on a little radio project for my area fire agencies. With the Wildland fire season being as active as it has been finding good communications equipment has been difficult. I have been operating as a Communications Tech for several area fires. We have been using the Bendix King RDPR to setup on the fire grounds where communications are poor. We have the ability to set up several of these repeaters. I would like to link these repeaters together using the VXR-1000.

They will do a nice job for that.

I use a similar setup (one-way for my application) in my 'Company Car' go-box for improving difficult location scene comms where C&C portable uplink into my county voting system is iffy. (We always use simplex for ops!)

My regional system is a 7RX, 4TX JPS SNV on VHF running automatic STARS TX selection, plus I have a centrally located UHF repeater permanently attached to VHF group 1. Going into the TX group 1 system on either band transmits on both bands. Dispatch can manually over-ride STARS if the automatic TX site group is not optimum for the incident location.

I capture VHF 159MHz portable TX on scene, then use a UHF transmitter on 450 to send scene audio one-way to the voter's UHF input. Cross-band mean tons of isolation. The voter chassis operates normally, so if the audio coming in over the VHF>UHF link sounds better the voter chassis will re-transmit it on VHF (and UHF, which I ignore). I have plenty of overlapping downlink VHF TX from the repeaters, so portables can hear at least one VHF TX tower site everywhere.

It's portable and self contained, so I can locate it somewhere with good coverage for both bands. Effectively, it gives me a portable RX voting node.

A single pair of VXR's should work for connecting two repeaters, but VXR's are simplex. VHF hang time will be an issue and unless the end users are patient they may miss or talk over traffic on the 'other' VHF repeater. You will find the VXR's are very fast, but you may need to play with the Courtesy Blip and other timers to see what works best. Communications patience is a virtue many ground ponders often lack. Two VXR pairs running full duplex between VHF repeaters looks like a feedback-loop nightmare unless you can get audio and COR directly from the VHF receiver and emulate multiple receivers to the remote transmitter...

Wiring is a piece of cake. COR IN kicks the VXR into transmit and sends whatever appears on the AUDIO IN, either DISC or gated. PTT OUT on the other end keys the VHF repeater and sends AUDIO OUT. Both I/O are low active logic by default, but can be changed. Audio alignment is best done with a service monitor. You can tweak levels with the pot, or shift level ranges.

ARTS can run you in circles, as can the Priority Timer. Master/Slave should be off.

I can see a lot of trial and error testing to get it right. If you can get the backhaul IP linking might be less of a headache. VE-PG3's are magic.

Wow sounds like you really have things dialed in. I am no where near that far into thing, yet. We deal with A LOT of terrain and use simplex for tactical use. On larger fires we break out into divisions and then have at least one Command repeater or network of repeaters. Sometime we can use pre-existing repeaters but sometime we have to make out own system for the duration of the incident.

As far as the VXR they seems like a great little radio. I don't have much to go off of as far as the pin outs go for the cable that I am connecting to on the Bendix King RDPR. The other difficulty is that the repeater interface uses VOX to connect the radios. I have successfully connected the VXR to transmit the radio traffic going through the repeater. What I am still having troubles with is getting the repeater to recognize and the incoming carrier and/or audio coming from the VXR and transmit that through the TX Radio. May have to give support a call.

Generic pinouts for the VXR and other data links are on http://forums.radioreference.com/vertex-standard/317376-vertex-vxr1000-kenwood-tk-7360h.html

VOX is a wonderful thing ... when it works. Never played with the BK high end stuff (although the wildland guys swear by them), but I would think that signal is signal and as long as the VOX circuit sees it the system should go into TX. The VXR will output audio no matter what, so it may be a level or connection point issue. Call Tech Support. I'm all for making tracks in virgin snow, but someone has probably marked that particular path.


AFG was good to us. The county is 850 sq miles, with 300' elevation changes over a few miles. Wonderful deer hunting. In THEORY, our county follows NFPA:

All initial notification on a dedicated, common one way channel; first TX from a local site then with auto replay from the big bad central site after 15 seconds. Tertiary notification via I am Responding.

Two Identically performing voted repeated infrastructure C&C channels (only one with the aforementioned UHF) with 99% mobile and 95% portable 2-way coverage. Confirmation, response coordination and wide area comms start here and Dispatch, IC, and off-scene coordination stays here. Stupid plain old analog for the Great Eight.

Ops/Tactical/Life&safety use an analog simplex channel once they get on scene (Illinois has six MABAS common statewide simplex tactical channels, bless 'em). I also have a couple simplex licensed channels in my hip pocket for 'other' uses.

My three biggest problems are user self-inflicted: not moving ops/tactical off the repeated C&C channel, the persistence of one dept using their grand-dad's proprietary 'secret squirrel' channel for ops (with a major metro area 40 miles away banging non-stop high powered paging), and 'Indians' trying to scan every channel and ignoring the one they're supposed to be on so the 'Chiefs' can find them.

I can be an unpopular SOB when it hits the fan, but I'm old (and experienced) enough I don't care and stand my ground. There was a regional incident (not close to me) and in the after action report two things stood out. None of the command structure actually followed the COML's accepted plan, and Command complained that comms sucked. I ain't that smart, but I suspect I know why this is so common a situation: Using the right tools was not in their automatic playbook.

Afterthought: Someone has hooked RDPR's up to a JPS ACU on VOX. Same thing only different.

I have the Bendix King RDPR linked into the VXR-1000 to the point when I talk through the BK RDPR it is also being broadcast with good clean audio on the VXR-1000. My problem now comes with transmitting through the VXR-1000 back through the RDPR. At this point all I have been able to produce is a brief click on the transmitting radio. It recognizes the COR/VOX just long enough to trip the transmitter. Not sure what I need to adjust now. Not sure if it is a RDPR adjustment or a VXR-1000 adjustment.

For plain vox the low level output through the DB9 should be adjustable through a combination of solder jumpers and pots. If you have maxed out the level you might try a direct connection to the 3.5mm speaker output.

If the RDPR is using COR output from the VX, it may be something in the circuit that isn't pulling up/down hard enough. A pull up/down COR resistor may be necessary, and the up/down logic needs to be in agreement both in the hardware and the software. Once the RDPR stays keyed you are back to setting audio levels.

I am trying to use just plan VOX to activate the RDPR to transmit. There is a jumper on the RDPR that will adjust the receive audio from 8ohms to 27ohms. I have tried adjusting that both ways. I haven't got any positive results. I am using pin 2 on the VXR DB9 connector as my audio out wire. I did plug a speaker into the 3.5mm speaker jack just to confirm it was receiving and processing the audio. Now I am not sure if my problem is the VXR internal settings (jumpers and pots) or programming adjustments or whether it is the RDPR that I need to focus on. According to BK the RDPR is suppose to have a fairly sensitive receiver for the link radio so it shouldn't take much to get it to recognize the audio coming in. More trial and error testing in my future. Maybe a phone call to vertex. I haven't talked to their support about this. They may know exactly what I need to do if someone else has done this before.

You didn't say if you were using them in band or cross band. In band is a ***** to work with because of the separation required for the antennas. Cross band is a peach.

I sold both the Vertex and the Pyramid products and found the Pyramid products superior, but you paid for the quality. Pyramid also offers a great selection of filters if needed for specific applications.

I am going to be using the VXR-1000V for in band and the VXR-1000U for out of band. Don't need anything fancy. I just need to get them working well.