Batboard

I am getting my first UHF MTR new in the box. Do you have any tips for setup, programming, alignment? Also, I saw a MTR 4 wire lineboard that lightning burned the series resistors or jumpers for the 2 wire line. Do you think lightning hit the wireline, or did lightning hit the antenna and make an exit on the wireline? Wireline is underground.

I have 16 MTR 2000 rpts under my control and I can tell you with some authority; There is no tuning / allignment to be done with the exception of the duplexer if necessary. I think for sure that your 4 wire lineboard was hit by lightening and not the antenna. I you need more on the MTR, you can email me.

That's not really true...you can pretty much tune everything except the TX power. In fact, the factory sets the squelch level at 100 on the slider, when you need more like 45-55 to allow the unit to receive down to -119dBm...so that's one adjustment for sure you'll need to deal with.

I've found straight out of the box the frequency error is good, but within a year you'll probably need to adjust reference oscillator about 600Hz, as it seems to drift that much across the board.

Depending on what you're interfacing to it, you can adjust the aux tx input level, as well as the discriminator audio level output. If you have a wireline board, you can also se the 60% TX deviation level & wireline squelch among other things.

While more for trunking units, the reference modulation is also an important adjustment which you may need to deal with.

The diagnostics & live metering are cool to play with as well.

Todd

I don't think enough info was provided to determine if lightning hit the tower or came in through the copper tether (4-wire circuit). The results would be the same to the 4-wire card if it was coming or going. What to look for is other signs and damage that might suggest one or the other.

If that is the only damage, then you did OK.... do you have surge protection on the leased line?

RF Dude

The only protection is what the phone company provides. What is good to install?

The MTR2000 and Quantars I've seen seem to be shipped with a little card from Motorola. They have screw terminals and 3 little white gas discharge tubes. The 4-wire circuit is wired through this on its way to the radio. A large ground lug on the above card must be connected to a good ground to be effective. No ground... no protection.

Even better protection can be found at companies like Polyphasor.

The idea is that you provide a preferred path to ground (or from ground out the copper tether) thru the surge protection rather than through your equipment.

RF Dude