A curious problem...
I have been working for over a year on resolving the issue I am experiencing with nothing conclusive and hoping you may be able to shed some light on it.
I have received several reports, over the past year, of intermittent loss of connectivity to the system and dropped calls. Conversations will occur and a user will be hearing the conversation – for example during a radio net – and then after their turn and they answer up for the net call, they no longer hear anything else and their radio will give a “bonk”. The “bonk” occurs but the radio wont show out-of-range.
I had assumed that as the rest channel changes, there may have been a programming error that would cause the radio to not correctly associate. Possible an incorrect freq or swapped Tx/Rx but this seemed to not be the cause after review.
After, going through the programming and monitoring the repeaters, I shut down all 3 peers and began solely operating off the single Master. This has seemed to resolve the issue.
However, this is where I have reached a stopping point. I am not sure what/how to further test as I cannot find, on a technical level, any documentation on how the system is supposed to function correctly or rather what a correctly functioning system looks like.
When I power up all the repeaters, the symptoms return. And after watching the repeaters for a while I noticed several strange things… I will get the typical beaconing from one repeater but will have the other repeaters doing a longer data blast (often 4-6 seconds) when there is nothing coming in on the Rx. At times all repeaters begin transmitting this longer data blast without any Rx lights illuminating at the same time. I am not sure what this is or why it is happening and if this is causing the symptoms described above.
Any thoughts or direction would be tremendously appreciated or ideas how to test these repeaters for any internal issues? All the manuals say nothing should need to be adjusted on these.
I had assumed that as the rest channel changes, there may have been a programming error that would cause the radio to not correctly associate. Possible an incorrect freq or swapped Tx/Rx but this seemed to not be the cause after review.
After, going through the programming and monitoring the repeaters, I shut down all 3 peers and began solely operating off the single Master. This has seemed to resolve the issue.
However, this is where I have reached a stopping point. I am not sure what/how to further test as I cannot find, on a technical level, any documentation on how the system is supposed to function correctly or rather what a correctly functioning system looks like.
When I power up all the repeaters, the symptoms return. And after watching the repeaters for a while I noticed several strange things… I will get the typical beaconing from one repeater but will have the other repeaters doing a longer data blast (often 4-6 seconds) when there is nothing coming in on the Rx. At times all repeaters begin transmitting this longer data blast without any Rx lights illuminating at the same time. I am not sure what this is or why it is happening and if this is causing the symptoms described above.
Any thoughts or direction would be tremendously appreciated or ideas how to test these repeaters for any internal issues? All the manuals say nothing should need to be adjusted on these.
I can send photos and videos if that is helpful.
Config notes:
IP Site connect data beacon is turned off in programming.
Each repeater is set to the same priority with a TOT of 4 mins.
Antennas have been swapped and Cans tuned properly.
Repeaters and gateway are linked through an 8 port HUB.
A. My first guess would be that you have an interference problem. What makes me think this is that the symptom disappears when you turn the other repeaters off.
You say you are using a hub? is it really a hub or is it an ethernet switch? A hub is not the greatest thing for connecting stuff as it just shoots out frames on all ports. I don't think this would cause your problem but its something I would look at without delay.
When you say "IP Site connect data beacon is turned off in programming." are you referring to the Capacity Plus Beacons? I don't think you can turn these off as they're needed for when the repeater is the rest channel host.
The best would be to contact someone from technical support as they would need to look at your codeplugs; network settings and repeater logs.
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