Recently I've discovered that I can run my gateway with the radio's squelch at zero. Microsat devices have a setting called Analog/Digital Detect. When my set up the gateway initially I had programmed this setting for Analog Detect and with squelch engaged. Basically what happens is it listens for a signal to open the squelch and for it to contain AX.25 packet traffic. I've been trying to get the signal from the radio to the gateway to be able to include weak and distant stations to be decoded. Part of this is because I'm using a radio with separate speaker/microphone connections (Yaesu FT-2980R) increasing the signal entails turning up the speaker volume. However the gateway also has the ability to amplify signals inside of the unit itself, but I tend to play with signal strength solely at the radio side.
I initially tried turning down the squelch to help facilitate the above. However doing so in Analog Detect mode tended to wreak havoc with the gateway's beacon time and the ability to deliver message ACK packets to local stations given it's a bidirectional system. After much experimenting I found that if I selected Digital Detect, it would only wait for AX.25 packet traffic ignoring everything else including white noise from running the radio un-squelched. This in concert with turning up the radio output level just a tad has had a profound impact on detection range and decoding abilities of the gateway. I plan on tracking the gateway metrics over time to monitor the long term impacts on overall packet processing. Of course I also acknowledge that minor adjustments may be needed in the future as the local APRS network structure changes.
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