DX Radio debuts digital/analog repeater
DX Radio introduced a digital/analog repeater that is a transceiver in a single module, according to Don Klabunde, the company’s president.
“Previously we had to have two modules to make a repeater,” he said.
The company has combined forces in the U.S. market with Australia’s RFTechnology, with which DX Radio has been collaborating on product development for about two decades. RFTechnology CEO Frank Romanin said the new digital/analog repeater is unique because it was designed “from the ground up” to be a digital base station.
“Not like others, that have taken their old RF design and then added a circuit board that digitizes the baseband audio,” Romanin said.
Because the repeater leverages a software-defined radio, it is modular. “You can add blocks as you want,” Romanin said, adding that the radio is compliant with the U.S. military’s digital modular radio standard. In addition, because the radio is software-upgradable, agencies that currently are operating analog systems could purchase the repeater in analog mode and then transition to digital mode later, letting such agencies avoid a fork-lift migration, Romanin said.
The radio’s software has a “roll-back” feature that lets users revert to a previous version in case a glitch is encountered during a migration to digital. “Sometimes digital systems don’t work when they’re first installed. When that happens, they can be without communications for several days. Our software lets you go back to analog operation until the bug is fixed.”