For certain users, audio is in and out

[n0xmz]

Using straight RF, I'm listening to a couple of guys talking on a DMR repeater and hear both sides of the conversation perfectly.
But when I listen to the same conversation over a hotspot, one of the guys audio is in and out. I hear a few words then silence for a a second and then a few more words. This continues the entire time he transmits and every time. The silent parts are always the same time, about 1 or 2 seconds long. It's never random and never varies. His ID shows on the display when I hear him but during those seconds when I don't, it disappears. The other guy? I hear everything he says with no issue.

Looking at the pi-star dashboard, both stations have zero loss and BER. I have a spectrum analyzer and the signal is crisp, clean, and on-frequency the entire time.

And it's not just one station. I hear this with other stations that come across a hotspot. Most people come in clear but every once in a while, there's a conversation where one of the users is in and out with the signal just like I described (same timing too). I never hear this happen when listening to RF repeaters, only the hotspots.

There are two hotspots, BTW. One is duplex, operating at 448.72 TX, 438.72 RX and the other is a simplex unit on 442.72. No frequency is too close to another. I'm not sure if it happens on just one hotspot or both, trying to determine that today.

I don't blame the operatorsbecause the signal sounds perfect coming from the repeater. If it were my home network, it wouldn't affect just certain people, it would be more random.

Any ideas on what I might look at next?

[n0xmz]

I stumped y'all, huh? One of the guys I heard that was breaking up, he sounded just fine yesterday. At this point, I'm gonna blame Brandmeister because I've pretty much ruled out everything else. I guess I'll just live with it, hope it doesn't interfere with my own comms.

[MW0MWZ]

In the same way the RX offset needs tuning, the TX offset does too... it's also not always the same value as the RX offset.