As you probably already know, Genesee County currently has 4 remote sites throughout the county to help with HT access into the 147.26 repeater. The 4 sites are located at fire stations in the following cities: Fenton, Flushing, Mt. Morris and Davison. The remotes are tied into a voter system that will allow the strongest signal to be output over the 26. Over the past few years we've noticed some issues with base stations keying up and transmitting over multiple remotes sites. This has especially been noticed during the Monday Night, ATV Digital Net when stations try and send MMSSTV images. The base stations key up (typically with more than 5 watts of power) and end up keying up the main site as well as the remote sites and when they attempt to transmit an image, the voter system switches back and forth between sites which causes distortion in the images.
At our last engineering meeting in February, it was decided to rectify the voting issue, we were going to change the PL on all the remotes from 100hz (same as main site) to be 88.5hz. Remember, the primary reason of having remote sites is to allow HTs on the fringes of the county to be able to access the repeater. Base and mobile stations should have enough power to be able to reach the main site and should not need to change their PL tones. If you have an HT, you will want to add a secondary channel to give you access to both the 100hz and 88.5hz tones (depending on where you are in the county). If you're in range of the main site, you will use the channel with 100hz and if you're near the outer edges of the county, you'll use the 88.5hz channel.
You'll probably want to add the secondary channel to your HTs soon as we will be starting the changes within the next day or so.
At our last engineering meeting in February, it was decided to rectify the voting issue, we were going to change the PL on all the remotes from 100hz (same as main site) to be 88.5hz. Remember, the primary reason of having remote sites is to allow HTs on the fringes of the county to be able to access the repeater. Base and mobile stations should have enough power to be able to reach the main site and should not need to change their PL tones. If you have an HT, you will want to add a secondary channel to give you access to both the 100hz and 88.5hz tones (depending on where you are in the county). If you're in range of the main site, you will use the channel with 100hz and if you're near the outer edges of the county, you'll use the 88.5hz channel.
You'll probably want to add the secondary channel to your HTs soon as we will be starting the changes within the next day or so.