Our ham club has a FR5000 with the 6000 module for UHF repeater. The problem we are having right now is getting it out of narrowband to wideband. Anyone have the info on how to do this. Icom is being rediculous about it.
This isn't a hard process to address... ICOM has a utility, that should be available to dealers, but for certain is available for ICOM Technical Support which corrects the NFM locked repeaters to open them back up for traditional 20.0/25.0 kHz operation.
In order for this to be addressed, the repeater must be physically connected to the computer with this application installed; this may mean shipping the repeater module to ICOM in Kirkland, WA if you have an unfriendly dealer locally.
Also, it should be noted that almost ALL NFM locked FR5000/FR6000 repeaters MUST have a complete calibration done on them as noted in the service manual; all current shipping product from ICOM is locked to NFM and therefore is only aligned to that specification. Taking service monitor and completing this process is not only good engineering practice when putting a repeater on the air, but it's 100% necessary for ANY unlocked narrowband device, including Motorola products such as the XPR repeaters.
Contact ICOM's technical support team, explain to them that you purchased a FR5000/FR6000 repeater module for amateur radio use and that you would like to have the cloning data unlocked for 20.0/25.0 kHz FM operation. They have the tools to help you; unfortunately that may mean a trip to Washington State via UPS.
Good luck and let me know if I can help; I have an FR5000 unit setup as a 2-Meter Remote base inside the same 2U rack as my IC-FR6000 UHF repeater, linked together with an S-COM 7330 along with AllStar, IRLP, and EchoLink. They really are great repeater modules and very flexible in what you can do with them; my link radio is also an UR6000 with a small flat-pack duplexer; cool setup and all network programmable with the installed UC-FR5000 IP cards.
Regards,
Jerry, W2GLD
