• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Inexpensive FM Rebroadcast Receiver $669.00 US

That is a re-labeled Dayton receiver...and can be had for cheaper than that from your preferred broadcast equipment vendor.
 
That is definitely a Dayton. They are good for off air monitoring or EAS use, since they are fixed frequency. I have a couple of them. My luck with using them for translator applications hasn't been as spectacular. The problem is the close proximity of the translator's transmitter. It tends to desensitize the tuner and results in a noisy signal.

If your originating station's signal is pretty strong in translator's location, these might work OK, but then why do you need a translator? The only way I could get passable performance was to add about $500 worth of filters from Microwave Filter Co. That took most of the bargain out of the equation. There was still more noise than I'd like but it was passable. I found a Fanfare worked much better, but a Sony HD tuner will outperform the Dayton or the Fanfare. A BW Broadcast RBDX1 http://www.fm-receiver.com/ is the real answer. I have one of these on a 185 watt translator where the receive antenna is located about five feet (on the opposite side of the tower) from the transmitting antenna. It works great with no filters needed. I was amazed that it could do that.

The Sony, if you can find one, does not have a composite output. That means you will need a stereo generator in the transmitter, which may or may not be a problem. If it loses power, it must be manually reset. It is very inconvenient to have to drive to a translator location just to push the power button and retune the receiver. Running it on a full time inverter based UPS seems to solve the power problem, but still does nothing about the need for a composite output. Even so, a lot of these have found their way into translator service.
 
Chuck said:
The Sony, if you can find one, does not have a composite output. That means you will need a stereo generator in the transmitter, which may or may not be a problem. If it loses power, it must be manually reset. It is very inconvenient to have to drive to a translator location just to push the power button and retune the receiver. Running it on a full time inverter based UPS seems to solve the power problem, but still does nothing about the need for a composite output. Even so, a lot of these have found their way into translator service.
Click to expand...

Assuming you're talking about the XDR-F1HD, there are a couple of modifications out there that address the power-loss issue:

http://ham-radio.com/k6sti/xdr-f1hd.htm (scroll to the very end of the article & look for "Power Up"...)
http://www.ibit.com/HDRadio/

Note that I haven't tried either of these & can't vouch for them.

Due to the DSP, chances are a composite output is not possible.
 
I've dealt with one too. Was not impressed with the sensitivity. It did help some to stick a notch filter on the input to keep the translator output from deafening it.
 
In my case the transmit antenna is 75 feet up, while the receive antenna is 50 feet horizontally from the tower on the end of the studio building. Also wide input/output separation: 91.5 in, 95.9 out. 900 watt primary about 15 miles away, so on the hill adequate receive signal, not much down in town in the valley. Hence the need for a translator.

Still would recommend the Inovonics composite receiver for more demanding applications.
 
I've also purchased one of the Inovonics tuners. It has some very handy features and may work well in some instances, but in my application, it hasn’t been all that great. At least the one I have isn't. The Sony runs rings around it. The BW broadcast tuner is still "the best of the best." It has a lot of features not found on any other tuner, regardless of price. Almost everything is adjustable to make it work in very difficult situations, and it includes its own multiplex generator, so your translator signal is “clean as a whistle.” But it isn't cheap.

I should probably mention that every translator I'm responsible for has input and output frequencies that that are very close to each other. One of them has another 250 watt translator located about 300 feet away that transmits on the second adjacent of my receive frequency. Any way you look at it, these are difficult conditions. If your send and receive frequencies are on opposite ends of the dial, you may be able to get away with a much less elaborate tuner. I was not afforded that luxury.
 
Me too. I have a second-ajacent translator on a freak'in rooftop. Unfortuantly I put it in before the BW tuner came out. I have expensive filters on the input and output to make the thing barely work. Some day I'll have to take my BW tuner down to the site (pain in the butt... rooftop) and see if it will work without receive filters. Hopefully it will.
 
Is price your main issue?

If you really need 'cheap' you can't go past a modified Technics tuner (to give MPX output). It's relatively easy to do.
I have several of them working in translators at the moment. They hold their frequency if the power goes down so no
site visit needed to reset them.
Sure, they don't have the noise figures of the Inovonics, but the performance is more than acceptable and you can't
beat them on price.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom