kenwoodgeek
Member
Hi, everyone,
Wasn't sure where to post this, so I put it here. I do not own this repeater; I'm just the radio geek at my work that works on the radios, to some extent. Just looking for an answer out of curiosity, and to possibly give helpful info to our radio maintenance guy.
My bus company uses a conventional UHF repeater for our bus radios and portables. It is and has been a great system for a long time. Just in the past few weeks, though, there has been an ongoing issue that is making myself and all our drivers go crazy.
The repeater (at least I assume it's the repeater) has been transmitting a continuous DTMF tone for roughly 30 seconds every afternoon around the same time this week. It used to do this exact same thing last year and the year before, but it would last about a minute, and it only happened twice or three times a school year. During the first couple weeks of school, it was doing it maybe once or twice a week, but it has progressively gotten worse, to where it is happening every day now.
Here is what I do know. It happens completely randomly. Doesn't matter if someone is in the middle of transmitting, or if the radio has been dead silent for 5 minutes. It lasts about 30 seconds, and then stops. If dispatch keys the base radio over it, that has enough power to block it out, but if anyone farther from the tower tries to transmit, their transmission will just scramble up with the tone. There is no way it could be one of our bus radios, because our radios are not programmed to transmit DTMF tones of any kind, only FleetSync PTT ID. The tone has no FleetSync ID before or after it. I don't see why it would be an outside person jamming our frequency with malicious intent.
My absolute best guess is that something is going out on the repeater, and that it's some kind of an automatic error tone that the repeater is programmed to send out.
Does anyone have a better idea?
Thanks.
Wasn't sure where to post this, so I put it here. I do not own this repeater; I'm just the radio geek at my work that works on the radios, to some extent. Just looking for an answer out of curiosity, and to possibly give helpful info to our radio maintenance guy.
My bus company uses a conventional UHF repeater for our bus radios and portables. It is and has been a great system for a long time. Just in the past few weeks, though, there has been an ongoing issue that is making myself and all our drivers go crazy.
The repeater (at least I assume it's the repeater) has been transmitting a continuous DTMF tone for roughly 30 seconds every afternoon around the same time this week. It used to do this exact same thing last year and the year before, but it would last about a minute, and it only happened twice or three times a school year. During the first couple weeks of school, it was doing it maybe once or twice a week, but it has progressively gotten worse, to where it is happening every day now.
Here is what I do know. It happens completely randomly. Doesn't matter if someone is in the middle of transmitting, or if the radio has been dead silent for 5 minutes. It lasts about 30 seconds, and then stops. If dispatch keys the base radio over it, that has enough power to block it out, but if anyone farther from the tower tries to transmit, their transmission will just scramble up with the tone. There is no way it could be one of our bus radios, because our radios are not programmed to transmit DTMF tones of any kind, only FleetSync PTT ID. The tone has no FleetSync ID before or after it. I don't see why it would be an outside person jamming our frequency with malicious intent.
My absolute best guess is that something is going out on the repeater, and that it's some kind of an automatic error tone that the repeater is programmed to send out.
Does anyone have a better idea?
Thanks.