Ok guys...
You bring up a lot of interesting points, but nothing new to me.? Let me say that I've been in the 2-Meter repeater business for over 60 years.? I've always prided myself in good performance and good audio quality.? To me, and to many others, 300-3000 Hz audio doesn't cut it.? As it was said, this is Amateur Radio.? :)
The reason I want to access the wide band audio is to stay away from the typical narrow sound of many repeaters.? If you're in the southern California area, take a listen to the W6MEP 2-Meter repeater on 147.24 MHz.? It's very compatible with all 5 kHz dev radios, commercial and others.? The audio out of the completely home brewed receiver is wide band - 50 Hz to a little over 6 kHz? There is a very narrow P.L. notch filter in the controller.? The transmitter is direct FM. The modulation index is barely 1.? I do have audio processing in the system in the way of an Orban FM 8100A Optimod. (I do have the stereo turned off.) I have a low pass filter between the output of the processing and the input to the modulator.? The deviation is 4-4.5 kHz and is very consistent without sucking up noise between words.? The repeater is very transparent except that the transmitted audio is pretty consistent.? I get a lot of comments on how unusually clean and consistent the repeater sounds.
My plan is to add a Quantar receiver and transmitter, although the home brewed receiver, which was originally built in 1974 and recently updated, is a fairly high performance receiver and can perform better than Mt. Wilson will allow.? I intend to feed the QUANTAR transmitter from the Optimod and keep my 1960 vintage controller, which sometimes makes noise like a Pachinko machine.? It has personality and sounds good.? Besides, I'm having a great time doing all this stuff.? To each their own.
I'm presently fighting intermittent power line noise which is believed to be coming from the 37,000 volt line coming up the mountain very near our location.? There is also an intermittent intermod problem involving our own transmitter and there's no audio, not even ours, to give a clue as to what the other signal/s might be, just narrow band noise when it happens.? It comes and goes like flipping a switch on and off.? I suspect a transmitter that's spewing wide band noise.? I've sat there with a spectrum analyzer till I'm blue in the face.? It doesn't want to happen when I'm there.? Why is that?
You can go to and look up W6MEP to see a picture of the repeater as it is now and how it looked when Art, W6MEP built his amazing contraption back in the 1950's.? You can also go to to see my first repeater and the silliness I went through in having a good time.
I do appreciate the comments and I know where you're coming from, but I also know where I'm going and still remain a good neighbor to adjacent channel repeaters.
Thank you for putting up with me.
Burt, K6OQK
Burt K6OQK