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To do this right you need three repeaters total, one exterior repeater and an in-building repeater for each building. All three should be inter-connected via your corporate LAN, which I assume already spans both buildings.

This will pretty much solve all of your problems unless you get some shadowing on one side of a building or another.

I'd say stay with the band you are already on (which is what?) in order to avoid replacing a lot of equipment or licensing issues.

Ok do radios need to cover both buildings or just the one for each repeater. If one repeater for one building a section of leaky coax might help the inside coverage. It would be placed near the roof to let signals in from inside the building.

I just read this in GD as well as this forum and liked both responses. There might be a way to get inside coverage by using what's called a passive repeater, it literally is two antennas, one inside, one outside connected by a common coax thus the signal will go both directions connecting the indoors to the repeater system. Depending upon the size of the buildings it might need to be done in more than one location indoors but in keeping the with original system, the cost would minimal. Running a splitter to an additional antenna indoors as Gamma 7.62 suggested would be the next step up. If your business model shows more capacity will be needed in the future go with the more expansive option.
73,
Rob

I came here to post this. The Titan II silos had an unbroken loop of coax run through the entire complex; the coax shield was broken every (IIRC) 1/2 wavelength.

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You most likely won't be able to easily obtain licenses for 800 MHz...900 MHz is pretty much a no-go.

From a professional perspective, you are better off going to UHF (VHF will perform worse indoors).

In 90% of warehouse type applications, a 0 dBd antenna mounted on the roof is typically your best bet. The go to antenna for this application is the Telewave ANT450D (the ANT150D is it's VHF variant but I don't recommend VHF for your application). This provides a much better radiation pattern for covering below the antenna. Depending on what you need, you could go this route and stay analog or go digital and two repeaters per building is acceptable (if you need something like Capacity Plus trunking).
Some examples (which I may have installed) of these setups are...

• Handful of Amazon DC's in Texas


• Walmart DC 7842 in Bentonville, AR


• Nestle's Aliance DC in Fort Worth


• Peterbilt's Denton plant (actually replaced 4 XPR8400's with SLR5700's a few years ago)


• Tyson's facility in Haltom City, TX


• Several dozen schools around the DFW Metroplex


• Methodist Hospital Dallas, TX


• Methodist-Charlton Hospital Dallas, TX


• GM's Arlington, TX Plant

Now if you are in certain environments (buildings with preform concrete walls, low-e glass, etc) you really need to consider having a DAS built in the building. This can be tapped directly off the repeater but takes some more work to get done. In this day and age, I do not recommend a leaky feeder system...

• Huber Materials mine located under Marble Falls, TX


• JC Penny DC at Fort Worth Alliance

So as you can see as I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to find examples where a repeater is directly integrated with a DAS...not something you see very often.

First step, take whatever you have and set it to talk around (most likely your radio vendor provided some form of talk around, typically named Direct, "D", Talk Around, or TA) and have someone stand on the roof (if possible). Then have another person walk around the building and see what where communications are good and where it is bad. Mark and note (this is a step most radio shops will also perform). We've seen some situations where changing an antenna makes a massive difference...and others where you have to become a little bit more creative.

For reference, here's two co-located repeaters on top of an old IBM facility that use two ANT450D's sharing the same mast.

This is an old trick which may of may not work for you.
On each building, two antennas, one on the roof and another inside, connected together. The inside antenna should be mounted with a clear shot to as much as the building as possible. Since it's just between the two buildings, you could go so far as to use Yagis on the roofs aimed at each other for better gain.

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As I posted in the other thread, I've had great success and recommend a low gain circular polarized antenna for in-building coverage. AFAIK nobody actually manufactures one, but a competent technical person should be able to put one together from a dipole array antenna such as the ones pictured.

The codes you stated in the other post are DPL tones (Motorola's trade name for DCS). Nothing funky about them but they just look weird if you've never worked with DPL and are used to PL of which Motorola used to certain designators for. As an example, on my commercial stuff I run a PL of 3Z (123.0 Hz) and M7 (250.3 Hz). Older Motorola (like 30+ years) used to only refer to PL by the two digit designation but now most of their gear is aimed in both. It's not like a NAC (of which I run some interesting ones such as 3D1, 3D2 and ABC) for P25.

Those are Decibel/Andrews/CommScope (CommScope is current) DB-222 antennas. They have +3 dBd of gain IIRC. The difference between your setup and mine is would only run a single mast with two elements on it. Not two, dual "bay" (co-phased elements) masts.