A couple of macros I’ve been working on might interest a few people. They aren’t meant to be complete commands although you can execute them and see how they work. I intend them to become part of more complete and robust commands later. In the meanwhile you can enter these and they will speak nice things to you.
601 is a nice macro that says “The in door temperature isdegrees”. Go ahead and enter that from your radio with DTMF. Yes, try it. It works on either the UHF or VHF repeaters. The code I programmed for this is “N053 601 036 476 257 170 469 270 840 161”.
602 is a friendly little macro that says “The temperature out side isdegrees”. The code for this is: N053 602 036 476 469 364 441 270 841 161
603 gets a little more fancy. It tells you the time and then executes 601 and 602 with some nice wording . “At <time> <601> and <602>”. The code for this takes several lines to program the macro as follows:
N053 603 036 086 810
N056 603 601
n055 603 036 078
n055 603 602
I tinkered with the analog scale settings for the RSSI adjustments.
The Vertex VXR-7000 radios we are using have an RSSI voltage output that I have wired to the analog inputs of the RLC-3 repeater controller. The idea here is to give someone an idea of their signal strength into the repeater
The Vertex manual has a graph that describes the RSSI signal very loosely. Looking at the graph it seems to show that no input signal will give about 0.5 VDC on that pin. With maximum input we should see something in the neighbourhood of 2.5 VDC. Experimentation showed this to be pretty much close.
RLC-3 command 102 allows me to define the scale of the inputs. Keep in mind that the I/O board is designed for a 0 to 5 VDC input. We then scale our actual input to match. I’m still learning and hope I have this right. What I want here is to give the user a percentage. 2.5 Volts represents 100% so I have to use command 102 to tell the controller what the 5 volt value would be. Nevermind that we’ll never see more than 2.5 volts, it wants to know what the value would be for 5 volts. In this case 5 volts would be 200% or a value of 200. Telling it this means that when we see 2.5 volts it will call that 100% Thus the command could be: 102 1 3 0 0000 0 0200 and that gets it close.
The problem is the bottom of the range. There are a couple of challenges here. First is that the Vertex RSSI doesn’t actually go down to zero, it’s bottom is about 0.5 volts. Second is that the receiver always picks up some noise on the site. This is especially true because of the crappy Motorola 700 MHz radios on site which are putting out some seriously strong signals across the VHF and UHF bands. More on that later as it is causing us some extreme difficulties in other areas, particularly with the control link. I’ll spare you the details for now and say that I experimented with no signal to the receivers and applied a negative offset so that the analog input would expect 0 volts to be a negative value. That makes our 0 percent reading appear where it should. In the case of the UHF on port 3 I offset about -22. That made the actual code N102 1 3 1 0022 0 0200
You could read the value directly from your radio by using DTMF 100 1 3 which will tell you the value of I/O board #1, port #3. Go ahead and try it. If you try that while you’re on the UHF radio it will tell you your signal strength. If you are on VHF it will still tell you the UHF level. So if there isn’t anyone on UHF at 449.075 MHz that will be a low and meaningless number to you. If you’re on VHF you want DTMF 100 1 4 which will tell you your signal strength into the VHF receiver on 144.63 MHz.
That’s all wonderful, but not very friendly. So I’ve set up a couple of macros that put this all into useful language. Macro 604 reads UHF and macro 605 reads VHF. Either of them say “Repeater receive level aboutpercent” which I think is much nicer. The code for this is N053 604 036 411 404 288 058 842 376 for macro 604 and N053 605 036 411 404 288 058 843 376 for macro 605.
That’s where I’m at tonight. With time this should develop into some useful commands for repeater users. For now, don’t be afraid to play with some of these for yourself.