Radios

[gary in ohio]

My understanding of the rule is that a station needs to be identified and under the control of a licensed ham. That means a repeater doesn't necessarily have to auto ID as long as there's a ham in control of it. So my interpretation is that as long as you ID the station and shut it down after you are finished, you are in compliance. Using a repeater to retransmit your low QRP HT signal, as a half duplex cross band repeater, is certainly within the rules. Having the cross bander retransmit the received signal to your HT might be skirting the rules, but as long as you ID the repeater, I don't see that it's blatant.

Every transmitter must identify itself every 10 minutes. regardless if someone is at the control point or not. the transmitter must identify. If your using your handheld 10ft from the truck then your NOT at the control point and cant ID the unit. You could identify 1/2 the cross band repeater. For example, Your cross band is UHF to VHF and then VHF to UHF. One station on 2m one on 440. Transmitter control point is using an HT on 440 and can identify the 440 HT transmitter and the 2m transmitter but has no way to identify the repeater 440 link he would be hearing.

The proper use of a cross band repeater is as a range extender. You have a dual band handheld with RX on 2m, and tx on 440. The crossband is only setup for UHF to VHF cross banding. This way all transmitters are id'ed.

There was a couple of yaesu dual band radio that had CW iders in them for legal cross band but those are no longer available.