Just a quick and dirty post. A number of the Wouxun HTs are advertised as being able to be cross band repeaters.
A by-product of that is they are full duplex radios...at least in the crossband (can't confirm any other configurations)
A repeater receives a transmission and then immediately rebroadcasts it.
Most Amateur Radio repeaters repeat on the same band with a predefined frequency offset (depending on the band)
A crossband repeater receives on one band and retransmits on another band. All the AMSAT/ARISS satellite repeaters operate in this way. Most of them are 70CM and 2M for the two bands.
If you want to communicate on these satellites, you will transmit on the uplink frequency and receive on the downlink frequency.
The simplest setup to do this is one antenna on one radio, and a different antenna on a different radio.
A more complex way to do this is a dual band antenna (or two antennas through a duplexer) connected to a full duplex radio.
There are a few full duplex mobile radios out there...In my opinion the nicest new one is the Icom IC-9700.
There are very few full duplex HTs. Kenwood used to have a bunch of them...but the last one they made was the TH-D72...the 74 and later are NOT full duplex.
So I picked up the KG-UB9D Plus, not for duplex, but because it could receive around 7 bands of radio frequencies...I thought that would be interesting.
Just a week or so ago Jason at the Ham Radio 2.0 YouTube channel meantioned that a different version of the Wouxun HT was full duplex.
So I looked at mine and read the specs...and sure enough my was supposed to be able to do crossband repeater work.
I will skip to the punch line, the manual is very hard to follow, and for whatever reason, you cannot word search it...so I had to dig.
I tested trying to duplex it, and it seemed to be transmitting the same time it was repeating (both signal meters were alive) but no receive audio as soon as you hit the PTT. The speaker icon on the receive side would indicate mute.
So I had to locate whatever was causing the mute...
MENU 60 - Mute on the sub area (S-MUTE). "Setting the volume status on the sub band when the transceiver is working on the main band.
Option: OFF/RX mute/TX mute/RX and TX mute
Default: OFF"
So for all that gobbly gook...to get full duplex where you can hear the receive audio...
Hit the MENU button (on my radio it is orange)
Dial the freq knob (top next to volume) CCW to MENU 60, "S-MUTE" will be on the display.
Hit the MENU button again, this will display the current setting...you want to see "OFF"
Sub band is which ever one is not main...seems obvious, but some radios use A or B (top or bottom freq of display) to define some functions freq on the display...this just uses Main and Sub...much easier to understand. (However there is still a A and B side... top is A and that is the only half that can do AM)
Mine was not set to the Default...so at some time in the programming that got swapped.
I tried to reproduce the mute function...but couldn't so I listed the rest of the settings that might affect it
MENU 43 "TYPE-SET" - TALKIE
MENU 44 "RPT-SPK" - ON
MENU 60 "S-MUTE" - OFF
Until the few hours I spent solving the duplex problem I had NEVER changed any menu entry...and about half of mine were not the defaults as listed in the manual...so maybe check them all.
Hopefully something in there helps.
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