Topic: Davis Long Range Repeater Retry strategy

[miraculon]

I lost the signal from the local Marina ISS a couple of days ago. It was working flawlessly for about a year and a half, then suddenly stopped.

After troubleshooting, I discovered that the power supply feeding the preamp (necessary due to the distance) was not putting out a voltage. Good reason for that, the AC power feeding the supply was also off. The GFCI failed and would not reset.

After replacing the GFCI, I once again had 15V on my preamp (the proper voltage for the mini-circuits preamp).

I have noticed previously that it takes a long time to resynch after the preamp power comes back. (e.g after a power failure)

Since my repeater is dependent on this preamp working, the repeater behaves like it has no signal (because it doesn't) when the preamp power is lost.

I could not find anything in the current repeater manual regarding the resynch time for the repeater.

I did find this in the older repeater manual (7625 Davis Talk):

If a repeater is set to listen for more than one signal, the repeater waits until
it has acquired all the signals you have told it to listen to before it begins
repeating. If it fails to acquire one or more of the signals after one minute,
the repeater will begin repeating the signals it has found and will check
again for the missing signals once every hour.

Note:
If the repeater fails to acquire any signals at all, it will time out after one minute. Reposition
the repeater, check that its DIP switches are set correctly and that the transmitter/repeater
it is listening for is functioning properly, and then power the repeater up again.

For this earlier repeater, it sounds like if it can't find a signal within a minute, it will lock out for an hour.

Today, after repairing the GFCI and powering up the preamp for the repeater, it took the better part of an hour for Envoy 8x and VUE console to re-acquire the Marina signal. There is probably a combination of the repeater reacquiring and the console/Envoy synching after the repeater does.

Does anyone know the repeater retry rate? Are the current Davis repeaters the same as the older one? (hopefully I am interpreting the old manual correctly)

I can't go up on a snow-covered roof to force the repeater to acquire, I have to wait for it to try again on its own.

Greg H.

[johnd]

To the best of my knowledge this is information that isn't disclosed by Davis. But even if they did I'm not sure how easy it would be to interpret in any practical scenario given the number of variables likely to be involved. Maybe someone here who dabbles more in the SDR world might know more about the specification and behaviour of the receiver chip.

It's perhaps worth considering that the repeaters seem to synch up more quickly on low channel numbers so if it's possible to use #1 then that might be a good start.

[miraculon]

To the best of my knowledge this is information that isn't disclosed by Davis. But even if they did I'm not sure how easy it would be to interpret in any practical scenario given the number of variables likely to be involved. Maybe someone here who dabbles more in the SDR world might know more about the specification and behaviour of the receiver chip.

It's perhaps worth considering that the repeaters seem to synch up more quickly on low channel numbers so if it's possible to use #1 then that might be a good start.

OK, thank you. The Marina ISS is set on channel #1. I have my repeater set as "A".

Greg H.