Batboard

1. I plan to set-up a 15W cont. duty UHF MICOR as the local UHF ham repeater.
I'm sure that this will place an end to the reliability problems we had with the home-made solutions we applied before, BUT the recvr has not the pre-amp option.
How realy we are in need of it? Will it be deaf or what?

2. Any good source to order new crystals? ICM?

A stock MICOR is rated at .5 uv for 20 db
With the factory pre amp, you should get .25 uv.

With an after market pre amp I have seen .1 uv or less.

Using a pre amp depends alot on the enviroment of the site.

If there are a lot of other transmitters, you might not relize any improvement because of the other strong RF fields over loading the front end of your receiver.

thanks Dennis,
I I'll leave it as it is. I think it's sensitivity is adequate for local, in-city use. It's gonna be placed on top of a tall building inside the city harbor where you're lucky if you can place your antenna 3ft apart of the next one...