CD Upgrades Field Communications for 2016

For 2016 we’re happy to announce a significant upgrade in our field communications capabilities. Working with Kent at Tactical Repeater, we’ve put together a digital (DMR) based repeater system that will give us superior coverage, signal strength, bandwidth, and flexibility compared to our old radio system.

Our new system is field portable and completely self sufficient once in place. Kent built us a complete package to meet our needs based on the Hytera field repeater. The Pelican 1500 case contains the “brains” (the Hytera) along with the “brawn”, 40 Ah of battery power, as well as a tuned and extremely clean duplexer and a charge controller. When hooked up to a 60 Watt milspec solar panel, the repeater can continue operations indefinitely.

A repeater works by receiving on one frequency and retransmitting on another frequency. Client radios are configured to receive on the repeater’s sending frequency, and vice versa. When placed in a position of advantage (such as a mountaintop), a single low power repeater enables communications between any subscribing-radio users in its coverage area (ie near line of sight). DMR is a digital radio technology that permits voice communications when the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than what a typical analog VHF/UHF radio will pass. DMR also uses time duplexing so it’s like having two independent channels in one system.

TACTICAL REPEATER builds self-sufficient portable/tactical repeaters for UHF and VHF analog, as well as DMR. Its equipment is used all over the world by small groups who need radio communications in remote areas.