Bob,
Welcome aboard! I was eating a late lunch and saw notice of this come in. In case you did not know it, you can subscribe to get updates from each of the forum areas. Here – Website Forums – Tips & Tricks #1 – is a link to review that. Now, to your problem.
I have reached out to a fellow Club member with access to software for modeling terrain and asked him to look at where you are relative to where our repeater is located. Hopefully he can post here if he has anything meaningful. If he can’t make a post but he passes anything along to me, I will post it.
I do wonder about one thing – Have you ever successfully gotten “into the repeater”? We use a “tone” (146.76- PL 203.5) to differentiate our repeater from others on the same frequency. We have to do that otherwise we would experience even more interference than currently exists. No tone means that you would be able to hear, but you would not be able to transmit. Which sounds a lot like your current symptoms. So, if you have not gotten into the repeater previously and if you can come to the Club meeting this coming Saturday, please bring your handheld. Closer to the repeater we can confirm that it is programmed correctly. If we can get a good test from High Cotton Kitchen, we have eliminated range and tone issues as the cause.
We might even be able to help with confirming tone is correctly programmed with this exchange. What is the make and model of the two radios?
I will standby for some follow up to those observations and questions.
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)