#CTCSS ENCODER KIT CODE#

So CTCSS has to be used, luckily radios are remarkably cheap these days, with dual band handies 4 or 1Watt out costing under ВЈ30 new, and these incorporate the vital CTCSS tones. On paper, this looked like a good idea for ham radio, but in practice it has been disastrous, as even if the repeater is open, without the tone superimposed on your transmission, it simply will not work. You can see the advantage of this in a densely populated area such as The City Of London. The upshot is, we feel, a great contributory factor to the demise of 2 metres, the main conduit of conversation, the local repeater, has been made unavailable to the vast majority who can not justify the expense of a new radio with the CTCSS feature.Д¬TCSS was introduced to allow several commercial radio users to share the same frequency without overhearing the other users conversations, you could have 2, 3, or 4 companies sharing the same frequency but each using their own CTCSS tone, so the squelch would only open for calls intended for them. What would have been sensible would be to have adopted the same CTCSS tone for all repeaters in a specific area so you could buy a cheap tone board and easily fit it, but no, they all need vastly different tones and trying to use an add-on tone board is impractical. There are a whole set of tones, see the table below, and every repeater needs to accurately receive the correct one to work, before 1750kHz was universal, but now it is infinitely more complex. No problem, we are technical people, buy an add-on board and away we go! NO, if only it were so simple. That is the supposedly good side of this, but it means that the majority of radios out there are obsolete, as they don't have a CTCSS tone facility. CTCSS does away with that, ensuring that only the correct radio amateur signals are repeated. The old system meant that you could 'whistle up' the repeater without a tone burst, but also spurious transmissions would activate it as well. Some repeaters are yet to be modified, and some still accept both, but it will all be CTCSS soon, so we need to move on. In practice, you just key the mike and the repeater works without any further action from you. Basically what happens is a sub audible tone is superimposed on your transmission and the repeater recognises this and opens or re-transmits your signal without the need of the 1750kHz tone. However, some repeater keepers seem to have had the temerity to use a speech synthesiser with an extremely offensive American accent!ДЄ CTCSS tone is a Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System, something brought over to the hobby from PMR.

#CTCSS ENCODER KIT CODE#

By 'both sides' we mean the traditional radio amateur, as opposed to those who want to introduce new technology - however an anomaly is that repeaters are required to identify themselves with the archaic Morse Code that dates back to the early 1800's. This has both benefits and disadvantages for both sides, so much so that they seem to balance each other out. In fact CTCSS became mandatory in 2004 for new repeaters. In recent years, more and more repeaters have appeared that require CTCSS tones, or codes, to access them, and some of the older repeaters have been modified in this way too.

Ctcss encoder kit