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2- Selecting a repeater

It is very likely you are in range of one or more amateur radio repeaters. A very handy tool to identify them is RepeaterBook. You can use RepeaterBook to search for repeaters in nearby cities/regions.

For example, at time of writing this guide, searching for "Montreal" yields 44 results. In this guide, we will be using the VE2MRC FM VHF repeater whose antennas are located on top of Cégep de Rosemont in Montreal.

You want that both you and the person you want to communicate with over the repeater are in range of the repeater. In some cases, even when you are in the stated range in distance, communication is still difficult or impossible due to poor wave propagation.

Once you've chosen a repeater you want to communicate with, you need to identify the following information about it:

  • downlink frequency (usually given in MHz)
  • offset (difference between the uplink and the downlink frequency)
  • uplink tone, if any
tip

Most repeaters use uplink tones, tones that must be heard by the repeater to trigger retransmission. Some don't (like the Concordia University station VE2RCU) and others use different mechanisms to come to the same result such as DMR color codes1 but those are outside the scope of this guide.

Footnotes​

  1. https://www.repeaterbook.com/wiki/doku.php?id=dmr ↩