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Reviews For: MA/Com MASTR III

Category: Ham Repeaters

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Review Summary For : MA/Com MASTR III
Reviews: 1MSRP:
Description:
VHF, UHF, 800, 900 repeaters, base stations, and receivers
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.macom-wireless.com/products/pve/Conventional%20MASTR%203%20Stations.asp
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0015
K6ZRX Rating: 2009-02-07
The radio of how many companies??? Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The MASTR III is of course the replacement for the MASTR II, and is programmable, no rocks needed. It is MA/Com's offering for high end stations. This radio started out as a General Electric product years ago, and has lasted through many changes in company ownership. The stations often just have "MASTR III" printed on them with no company name! Very nice stations. I only have 3 of them, one a UHF ham repeater, and the other fire dispatch base stations. The two fire radios have been in service for over 10 years without any problems at all! They come in various configurations, including receive only units for monitoring and voting applications. Interfacing an external controller was a bit of work, but can be done. I noticed that the UHF station has a built in DTMF decoder which can be used to turn repeat function on and off. Great for a backup station. I believe features vary based on firmware version. Documentation is readily available online. The 100 watt UHF repeater I have in ham service took a few mods the the VCO, but they were easy. This station was given to me since the "PA burned up". It was a community repeater that saw a lot of use. Those boys in Lynchburg though the fan needed to have two speeds, one for starting, and one for normal ops. Who knows why, but the comparator IC that controls the fan speed with control from the microprocesor went bad. The fan stopped, the PA got hot and the transistors unsoldered themselves. I fixed the fan control, resoldered the transistors, put it into a dummy load and watched it on the spectrum analyzer for a few hours at full power. No smoke and no spurs. Seems they don't show up surplus too often. I don't think they get replaced unless an agency changes bands or just has $$$ to spend on new equipment. I'll report back on narrowbanding an older station as that is something I need to do with the stations at work.