Site Roaming / Simulcast

[jcefd10]

Recently we have been having a LOT of issues with the power grid in our area. Being as it's really rural, it's not the best but is being upgraded. If it storms you can guarantee we will lose power to one of the repeater sites.
I want to set everything up here with the easiest to use for the end user and have some redundancy at the same time.
I have Internet at both repeater sites, and the LE repeaters are already linked together.
I've tinkered with the site roaming feature on the LE repeaters and it seemed to work pretty well for my testing. Granted the Sheriff was totally against it because he can't scan every channel in existence like he wants and site roam at the same time (well maybe he can with multi zone scan but that's another thing) so I'm not worried about LE this time. We will focus on Fire/EMS.

Fire/EMS uses 2 NXR-710 repeaters. One main, one secondary. Not linked at the moment but waiting on the KTI-3's to get here. We, and 911 has to swap manually to the secondary one when the main one loses power. (The power issue there is almost resolved as a new generator was installed today)

Here's the kicker, they both use the SAME RX/TX frequency but different RAN codes.

Main question - From what I've read, you cannot site roam with 2 repeaters with the same RX/TX. You have to use simulcast, which seems to be a way bigger deal than I'm going for.
Did I read that incorrectly? Would there be an issue with them using the same freq, but diff RAN for site roaming? I want to set up FD/EMS to site roam so in the event that the main site goes down, it will swap to the secondary and the user will not have to manually swap to the other repeater. To me, switching manually is fine. But I feel as if I'm asking some of the other users to do advanced algebra with their eyes closed.
Is there any other ways I might accomplish what I'm wanting?

Forgive me if there is info that I did not include that is needed. This may be a dumb idea, but I really think it will help with some of the the communication issues everyones complains about here. Those complaints are 90% user error so I'm trying to eliminate that.

Thanks guys!

 

[kd4efm]

1, YES YOU CAN HAVE THE SAME FREQ DIFFERENT CODES
* need to have a beacon running though so the radios know which is active.




NOW my question is, do you have a fault switch that will turn the other repeater on, OR do you have a repeater take-over programmed into
the db25 so that when RPTR 1 is active, it prevent RPTR 2 from being used until the circuit goes (high or low) and enables the repeater?

Do the repeaters co-locate?

 

[jcefd10]

They are not co-located, Main site is in heart of the county, the secondary is on the south end, on the highway.
There is no fault switch, or take-over programmed at the moment. Currently they are just 2 standalone repeaters. The secondary just stays powered on, but dormant until needed.

I have not changed anything on them yet, I didn't want to do a lot of changing things until I had the KTI-3s in hand. I've been waiting on them forever. Hopefully it won't be long now.

The 2 repeaters do share the same TX RAN currently, so that we can use the FD Ground channel the same no matter which repeater we may have to use. Will that cause an issue?

 

[kd4efm]

They are not co-located, Main site is in heart of the county, the secondary is on the south end, on the highway.
There is no fault switch, or take-over programmed at the moment. Currently they are just 2 standalone repeaters. The secondary just stays powered on, but dormant until needed.

I have not changed anything on them yet, I didn't want to do a lot of changing things until I had the KTI-3s in hand. I've been waiting on them forever. Hopefully it won't be long now.

The 2 repeaters do share the same TX RAN currently, so that we can use the FD Ground channel the same no matter which repeater we may have to use. Will that cause an issue?

if each RX RAN is different, but the TX RAN is same, should be okay for now.
just know if someone keys up on the secondary by mistake, it will cause garble data

 

[jcefd10]

Any recommended settings on repeater/radio as far as times and such for the roaming?

 

[jcefd10]

I want to bump this really quick as I had a thought.
So the county shot down my idea of Site Roaming. So I'll be doing another IP site link on these 2 repeaters instead of a Site Roam. As stated before, the RX/TX of the repeaters is the same, only the RAN is different.
I don't want to change that with the site linked, because they will try to walk over one another, correct?

EDIT: I know it's aq stupid question.

 

[hst111]

Use Site Roaming with RAN at same frequency. Set up different RAN in two repeaters.
In NXR CPS, set up the main repeater as primary and use beacon for site roaming, like 8000ms.
Enter the repeater IP address and set the secondary as secondary in CPS/networks.

(Don't use secondary(discontinued), if the primary is down that secondary will stop beacon.)