On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:28 PM, KENNETH E REINARD kreinard@bellsouth.net wrote:
I handle the radios for a Search and Rescue Group in West Tennessee and like most organizations we are always tight on money so we are running test with Baofeng radios to help out our water and land operations on top of our Motorola gear. I was told to look into the Chirp software for all of our programming needs. I have a basic understanding of radio theory and I in my Day Job that pays the bills I am an engineer. Here is my question. Here there a basic document covering all the functions of Chirp, I figured out how to do the TX/RX repeater split from the FAQ but I have several goverment agencies that use different PL codes for the TX and RX in addition to some digital encoding. Some of these settings I would just like to know more about.
Using different codes for TX and RX is called Cross in Chirp nomenclature. Set Tone Mode to "Cross" and Cross Mode to "Tone->Tone" to set different CTCSS tones for TX and RX. You'll see there are variants for digital tones as well.
Please do test out these radios before relying on them for life safety applications. Our SAR group found that adjacent channel interference made these radios unsuitable. However, now that everyone is narrow deviation, but still mostly 15 KHz spacing, this might not be as much of an issue. In this area, various SAR groups occupy frequencies 155.205 through 155.325 with 15 KHz spacing, and now there are some 7.5 KHz spaced channels in there as well.
Tom KD7LXL