The South Hampshire Repeater Group has recently established an on-demand link between the Fusion 70cm repeater GB7MT (Southampton) and the Fusion 70cm repeater GB7PO (Portsmouth) relying solely on RF. Whilst it is often common practice to use the Internet to link repeaters, the keepers of GB7MT and GB7PO decided to adopt an ‘RF only’ policy to linking their repeaters using off-the-peg (well, almost) Ubiquiti 5Ghz equipment.

The 13-mile hop between sites is achieving bandwidth in excess 100Mbps of which the repeaters use approx. 0.05Mbps! The idea was initially inspired by the Local Emergency Planning Officer Tim Pettis 2E0CXQ who, for resilience purposes was keen to establish a communications path between the two cities in the very unlikely event of an existing civil communications infrastructure outage.

“After much debate, the group adopted Fusion over DMR & DSTAR because it’s so simple to set-up. Enter your callsign, frequency + repeater shift and Bob’s your Uncle, no codeplugs to edit, reflectors to set or web interfaces to log go on, Fusion just works out of the box. Users simply enable a button press setting on their radios should they decide to appear on both repeaters at the same time, thus doubling the chance of a contact. At the repeater end it’s a similar story, the Yaesu DR-2XE repeater is also very simple to set-up and maintain.”

— SHRG chairman Andy Sillence G4MYS