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If you're just doing Simplex, I wouldn't even buy anything special to be honest with you. I'd get an old decommissioned computer, an old laptop or something, and just make a little interface that goes one wire to a COM port or a USB to COM port, whatever. You need one wire to trip the PTT from the computer. It sends a signal. It's called a cost line, and that's what makes it so that when the computer receives something, it trips the PTT on the radio. I would just build a very simple interface. I've got one here. It's a little board. It's got a couple of resistors on it and a little LED and whatnot to show transmit and receive. And then that hooks to your computer, and then the other end hooks to the radio, be it the radio's audio inputs and outputs or whatever way you want to do it. Mine runs into the microphone socket. Like, you know, the microphone socket. It's like an RJ45 network connector. So you just cut that off and you find your transmit and receive wires for the speaker mic, and then you find the cost line, and you connect it all up, and boom, that's your setup. And it ain't going to cost you no more than the price of the radio and maybe two or three bucks for it in parts to build that little interface. And then you're on the air, man. Your connections going to be as powerful as the radio you choose. That's the way I go about it. And when it comes to repeaters, they're not overly big. My repeater is about the size of two radios side by side put inside a metal case, but it's a professionally built one. It's a commercial high terra repeater. The duplexer is the biggest part of my repeater, and even that is only about the size of a HF rig. And then the laptop that's my repeater controller. That's it. And those things just stack on top of each other, and you lay them on a little table and tuck them in a corner. And when you use a duplexer, you don't have to use two antennas, because if you don't, you've got to use a transmit antenna and a receive antenna, and those have got to be spaced very far apart from each other and stacked. One needs to be at a different elevation than the other. But if you use a duplexer, both of those inputs and outputs, your transmit and receive, go into the duplexer, and then one antenna line comes out of the duplexer. So you've only got to use one antenna for transmit and receive, which is the way to go, of course. So, yeah. Lots of fun, man. It really is. All right. We're going to go to Steve, N0BF, then we're going to make the final call for check-ins.
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