Hey All,
I'm a Firefighter/EMT and hold position as Department Engineer for my fire department. Now you would expect for local departments to use the same frequency band because that would make sense right, well apparently not around here. My department goes on a lot of mutual aid runs to a neighboring department which uses the VHF band, we are using UHFr2. So I was looking into building a UHFxVHF bi-directional repeater so that we could communicate with them and visa-versa. Both with portables and mobiles. We don't have the budget to buy a fancy new piece of hardware so I was given a very limited budget to get this working. The theory is that if I can get a limited budget build to work with mobile radios (I considered using 2 Baofeng UV-5R radios but I also needed to get the range, hence the mobile radios), that maybe the rest of the departments in the battalion would pitch in to get a better system since practically the entire battalion goes to the one department, especially for working fires. And it could be opened up to the rest of the county but first step is getting it working.
I currently have 2 Motorola MCS2000 mobile radios, both UHF just to get the theory of a bi-directional repeater to work and then if it works in UHF, then I will be permitted to purchase a VHF version. I do have a Motorola RICK at my disposal but I'm not sure how I'd use it but I have it. I have the programming capabilities for the radio so thats not a question, and if I have to, I can build cables.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I'm a Firefighter/EMT and hold position as Department Engineer for my fire department. Now you would expect for local departments to use the same frequency band because that would make sense right, well apparently not around here. My department goes on a lot of mutual aid runs to a neighboring department which uses the VHF band, we are using UHFr2. So I was looking into building a UHFxVHF bi-directional repeater so that we could communicate with them and visa-versa. Both with portables and mobiles. We don't have the budget to buy a fancy new piece of hardware so I was given a very limited budget to get this working. The theory is that if I can get a limited budget build to work with mobile radios (I considered using 2 Baofeng UV-5R radios but I also needed to get the range, hence the mobile radios), that maybe the rest of the departments in the battalion would pitch in to get a better system since practically the entire battalion goes to the one department, especially for working fires. And it could be opened up to the rest of the county but first step is getting it working.
I currently have 2 Motorola MCS2000 mobile radios, both UHF just to get the theory of a bi-directional repeater to work and then if it works in UHF, then I will be permitted to purchase a VHF version. I do have a Motorola RICK at my disposal but I'm not sure how I'd use it but I have it. I have the programming capabilities for the radio so thats not a question, and if I have to, I can build cables.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
