Hi, I help run a small event (about 3000 people) but we have to cover a pretty wide area (about 3 square miles) so we added a repeater setup a few years ago and haven't looked back. However, as more and more teams are spread out over the whole property we decided to move to a trunked repeater setup this year (Motorola Capacity Plus). It mostly worked really well until I had teams tying up the first repeater's 2 time slots. As the second repeater's antenna was 10' farther down the mast it didn't always pick up the signal from the portable radios. So I'm trying to figure out a solution to get the second repeater to work better.
Ideally I'd love to get one antenna for both repeaters, but from what I can tell that takes a ridiculous amount of equipment and introduces high amounts of signal loss.
So I was thinking about trying to consolidate the TX and RX antennas instead of having each repeater on it's own antenna like now. Put the RX antenna at the top of the mast (and maybe get a high gain antenna for the RX while I'm at it). Can I just get my existing duplexers retuned for this or do I need different equipment to consolidate the repeaters in this manner? Any other downsides I'm not thinking about?
Ideally I'd love to get one antenna for both repeaters, but from what I can tell that takes a ridiculous amount of equipment and introduces high amounts of signal loss.
So I was thinking about trying to consolidate the TX and RX antennas instead of having each repeater on it's own antenna like now. Put the RX antenna at the top of the mast (and maybe get a high gain antenna for the RX while I'm at it). Can I just get my existing duplexers retuned for this or do I need different equipment to consolidate the repeaters in this manner? Any other downsides I'm not thinking about?