DR04
Member
A mystery I need help with...
Details & background: I'm a volunteer firefighter/EMT and wear a pager (receiver) on my hip tuned to a VHF frequency (150MHz). In my basement I'm getting terrible reception on that pager, so I threw up a 4 foot tall Diamond VHF omnidirectional antenna (Diamond BC103) on the side of my house connected to a 2m ICOM IC-2300H listening on the paging frequency over an LMR-600 cable. It's pretty robust, I can pick up simplex 5w fireground traffic from 20 miles away consistently and have been known to pick up radio traffic (inadvertently) from 100 miles away or more all in that 150MHz frequency range. For Illinois I'm pretty high up, near 1100 feet. So the setup seems solid. But...
Kind of a strange thing happening to me sometimes. I've got one repeater 8 miles WNW from me pushing out emergency "paging" traffic at 155.820 MHz and a second repeater transmitting on that same frequency 9 miles SE from me. Despite being in a hilly area I have relatively good line of sight to both repeaters.
Sometimes when an emergency page is transmitted over those repeaters I get terrible distortion and noise, usually for the first 2 to 4 seconds of the transmission. Over the ICOM it sounds terrible (happens 1/4 of the time) and if my pager is connected to that antenna via an amplifier it sounds the same, sometimes preventing the pager from deciphering the tones and activating. The ICOM can't even sort it out sometimes and my squelch setting will turn off the reception. But if it's on my hip and I'm upstairs it usually doesn't happen on my pager.
I should point out, that with the exception of this strange distortion, and after it resolves, the reception is crystal clear again.
***Could the 2 repeaters be causing some type of distortion or interference since I'm darn near right inbetween the two? Like a slight latency on one is distorting the other's traffic?***
If so, I was thinking of throwing up a Yagi towards one of the repeaters and hoping it would help. But would appreciate any thoughts on this before I go crazy.
Details & background: I'm a volunteer firefighter/EMT and wear a pager (receiver) on my hip tuned to a VHF frequency (150MHz). In my basement I'm getting terrible reception on that pager, so I threw up a 4 foot tall Diamond VHF omnidirectional antenna (Diamond BC103) on the side of my house connected to a 2m ICOM IC-2300H listening on the paging frequency over an LMR-600 cable. It's pretty robust, I can pick up simplex 5w fireground traffic from 20 miles away consistently and have been known to pick up radio traffic (inadvertently) from 100 miles away or more all in that 150MHz frequency range. For Illinois I'm pretty high up, near 1100 feet. So the setup seems solid. But...
Kind of a strange thing happening to me sometimes. I've got one repeater 8 miles WNW from me pushing out emergency "paging" traffic at 155.820 MHz and a second repeater transmitting on that same frequency 9 miles SE from me. Despite being in a hilly area I have relatively good line of sight to both repeaters.
Sometimes when an emergency page is transmitted over those repeaters I get terrible distortion and noise, usually for the first 2 to 4 seconds of the transmission. Over the ICOM it sounds terrible (happens 1/4 of the time) and if my pager is connected to that antenna via an amplifier it sounds the same, sometimes preventing the pager from deciphering the tones and activating. The ICOM can't even sort it out sometimes and my squelch setting will turn off the reception. But if it's on my hip and I'm upstairs it usually doesn't happen on my pager.
I should point out, that with the exception of this strange distortion, and after it resolves, the reception is crystal clear again.
***Could the 2 repeaters be causing some type of distortion or interference since I'm darn near right inbetween the two? Like a slight latency on one is distorting the other's traffic?***
If so, I was thinking of throwing up a Yagi towards one of the repeaters and hoping it would help. But would appreciate any thoughts on this before I go crazy.
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