I suddenly realized that there was no CTCSS technology in this radio, but I could never tell while on air, on SO-50, AO-91, or AO-92, today!
Hi Cee,
I'm afraid despite your observation, it DOES matter on SO-50... it will not retransmit your signal without the tone. (unless it's while you are overriding someone else's signal) Please DO NOT transmit to SO-50 without a CTCSS tone of 67.0 Hz as you can and likely will CAUSE QRM. There are a number of terrestrial stations now (cross band repeaters, remote bases, etc.) that transmit on the SO-50 2m uplink without a tone and cause considerable QRM problems. Their strong signals 'collide' with stations trying to talk through SO-50 and it results in at most a squealing crash of signals, but more than likely nothing getting repeated at all. (Sometimes the 'dead air' on SO-50 is because of either this or because too many ops are trying to transmit at once... no one clearly gets through and the tone is not heard by the receiver; SO, it doesn't key up the downlink.) Without the tone, we cannot hear these QRMing stations when they 'transmit in the clear' in order to catch a callsign or a location.
Just to be clear... this is the case with SO-50... AO-85, AO-91 and AO-92 are different.
Thanks & 73, Kevin N4UFO