. Once you put up a digipeater, or a voice repeater for that matter, and the local amateur radio community comes to depend on that resource, how much responsibility do you have to the community to keep the resource running?
Yes sir, that's how I look at it. Repeater and digi providers are offering a service to the ham community. In my opinion, when you make that commitment, you are now a service provider. With my digi's and repeaters on the air, I don't expect a dime from the users. If folks use it, find it useful and enjoy it, then that's all the payback I need. I don't want to be "that ham" that totally destroys VHF for everybody within a 10 mile radius with spurs.
Clemson, the big issue I have with this idea of using a china radio as a digi, these things are not known for their clean spectral purity. If that "70 watt" mobile is on a high spot cranking out packets on 144.39, 149.39, 151.24, 158.16, 160.575...etc, that's totally unacceptable. Most hams won't consider this as they haven't had experience with commercial/public safety radio systems and have to deal with intermod or interference. You mention spurs and you get the deer in the headlight look.
Hams will be the first to pound their fist, stomp their feet and cry for blood when a commercial system interferes with their ham equipment. But, when the tables are turned and the ham stuff is cranking out spurs/intermod everywhere, we have an obligation to respect our spectrum neighbors as well. It's a two way street...no pun intended lol. Again, you never want to be known as "that ham" who just doesn't care and pollutes the airwaves.
Clemson, I am not trying to come off as a jerk towards you but I am being a bit direct here because this is a very important topic. I am trying to hammer in a concept that many overlook. You need to be aware of your RF frequency neighbors above and below the ham radio bands. If you install a low quality transmitter and it throws spurs all over the band, that makes hams in general look really bad when the commercial/PS techs have to go out looking for it because you are jamming their systems. You didn't intentionally do it, but it is a side effect of a radio that was $50 on Amazon with about $50 spent engineering a copy of a copy of a copy of a radio with each time cutting corners to make it cheaper.
Receiver performance just hurts you and the hams who use it. If the receiver has no selectivity, then that's on us and at least doesn't cause harm to other users of VHF nearby. Your digi reliability will take the hit and stop passing traffic and you will be wondering why you aren't being digipeated.
Using china grade radios as repeaters, digi's, links..etc is never ever recommended. If you want to use one as your mobile or home base radio then....whatever. For a digi, you'd be much better off to purchase a used commercial grade radio. A simple, used, Motorola or Kenwood commercial mobile radio would make an excellent digi radio. It doesn't even need to be fancy. Just a simple 2 channel 25 watt mobile with an accessory connector would be the cat's meow. I use Motorola gear, but Kenwood makes several fine commercial mobile radios that would work just as well.
Clemson, I hope you reconsider your radio of choice and take the advice given to you. While you can use 5 devices with a nest of cables everywhere to make a digi, I prefer to keep it clean, professional and reliable with a quality commercial mobile radio and the WX3in1. One radio, one APRS device....done. No SD cards to corrupt, no OS to update just a simple device that works when you power it up.
I see a huge red flag here and I hope we can avoid it now before things go on the air and make APRS actually worse in that area.
Good luck.
