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DEFINITELY not speaking for BTECH here... The GMRS-RPT50 fills (what seems to be) a nice market, compared to some of the other BTECH products. Different suppliers behave differently - BTECH can just tell Baofeng "Here is the new manual copy for the BF-F8HP Pro" and it will start appearing in the boxes with newly-manufactured radios. I know, as I reviewed all of / wrote some of the manual copy. Not all suppliers are so easy to work with. I got called in on the RPT50 product because the routine to enable the microphone for communication, as opposed to just programming, came with a pirated copy of a utility that was entirely in Chinese. I came up with the routine using the free ExtraPuTTY program. I have mine set to ID 15 minutes after a conversation ends - any repeater traffic before the timer expires resets the timer.

I'd be curious to know if turning it all the way up would 'fix' it. That's not ideal, obviously, but it would be a data point, on whether or not it had much of an effect.

I believe I have it at 5 now.

Can you reference a repeater in SoCal that triggers this “problem”? I’d be happy to take a drive… Yellowstone… not so much!

Not quite sure what you're asking, regarding privacy on simplex. Can you clarify at all? Regarding the DM32, are you referencing the baofeng dm32 (dmr radio)?

Got it.

No, of course not. They have their own frequencies / repeaters. But last I checked, GMRS radios are allowed to listen to non GMRS stations. Before the trip, I programmed in the repeaters for the park areas we were going to be in, with transmit disabled.

The rangers use GMRS in the park?

Yeah, naa, it's a pretty widely known issue with these. Mine hasn't ever done it within a couple hours of home. But some repeaters, when they transmit, are doing...something... that causes the radio's squelch to hang open. See also, my Yellowstone Park example. It's only ever done it, for me, with the repeaters in the park, never anywhere else I've found. Why? No idea.

Will this work as a way of privacy on simplex? And have you seen the Dm32?

You can go with a high gain antenna. There is no rule on the ERP with the 462 MHz main channels, but that will change your effective radiation pattern.

Sorry, but with over 200 channels and scanning I have never exhibited this problem. Can you still return it?

Not that I've seen. If you figure out what setting does it, PLEASE let us know. I'm curious, what's your squelch set at?

Mine does really bad on the local Amtrak frequencies, and one or two other HAM repeaters. But all other repeaters are fine. I was just hoping someone might know how to mess with those settings to fix it.

It's my one complaint with my the DB20-G. It's more of a squelch issue than STE. I dont' get to play with it much, as mine has ONLY ever done it when listening to the park ranger repeaters at Yellowstone, and I'm no where near there right now haha

Just so you know, I have been railing against using the "Technical Discussions" subtopic, because it ranks posts by "popularity" by default instead of chronological (although, yes, someone in the "know" can manually change the order back to chronological; BUT new members, such as @Destro don't know this!). Just as I was doing the research over in the DB20-G Topic, I came across some earlier links to discussions in Technical Discussions from years ago and when ranked by popularity, there are posts that are just plain out of context: Not everybody "quotes" the prior topic they are responding to; sometimes they just respond to the most recent prior post and when ranked by popularity, context is lost. In my case I use General Discussions or Equipment Reviews subtopics when I post.

This ^

That's not a squelch tail. A squelch tail is a very quick loud static sound usually. Not more than a second or so. Unless I'm mistaken it sounds like it's something with your radio. Especially if you have to key up the mic to get it to go away.

The legal way to get 50 watts out of the duplexer is to buy an all in one repeater. The duplexer is internal to the repeater unit and the output on the antenna connection can't be more than 50 watts. In order to do that you have to put 60-70 watts into the duplexer which is fine as long as the output on the connector isn't above 50 watts. I'm running such a repeater.

Length, SWR and how high you can get the antenna will all add range.

I relocked my Anytone back to GMRS. What I did was I used the Radioddity CPS software to setup Channels 31 - 39 as a repeat of Channels 23 - 30 as "dummy" repeater settings and hope to use the keypad/mic to change the Tones needed on the fly! Refresh my memory. How do we manually set the Tone from the keypad/mic in Channels 23 - 30 in locked mode, so that we can see if this will work on the dummy repeater Channels 31 - 39? Here is that "locked" codeplug: Anytone AT-779UV GMRS 202509071200.dat

Well, lets address these separately. The answer is "none of the above". It's logarithmic. Calculating range verses distance in free-space (not accounting for the curve of the Earth nor obstacles) involves a complex formula, based on things like the distance between the antennas, the frequency, the gain of both the transmitting antenna and the receiving antenna, and the attenuation value of the atmosphere. If we assume that neither antenna has gain, at 465MHz (about the center of the GMRS frequencies), 1 mile of free space has about 90dB of signal attenuation. At 10 miles, there is 110dB of attenuation. At 100 miles, there is 130dB of attenuation. So, lets say you are transmitting a 1 watt signal to a station 1 mile away. Your signal will be reduced to 1 nano-watt, or about 224 micro-volts. This is just a little higher than the 60% mark of receive sensitivity for most retail OTC radios. That station can receive your signal, but its about 60% audio and 40% static. It's usable, but a lot of static. If you want a station 10 miles away you hear you just as well, you need to increase your power to 100 watts. If you want to have a station 100 miles away be able to receive your signal at the same levels, you would have to increase your power to 10,000 watts. As you can see, trying to increase your range by increasing your power becomes very impractical. Most of the time we look at things like using antennas with high gain or increasing receive sensitivity and selectivity. For example, if you use that same 1 watt with a 14dB gain beam antenna on both ends of the communication path, that would be like increasing your power to 630 watts and both antennas having no gain. To make life easy for yourself, to figure out how much more power you need, just estimate foliage loss using the 15–20 dB rule of thumb. Increasing power does help penetrate through trees and buildings. It does help fill-in hole and dead spots a bit too... but like free-space attenuation... more power has massively diminishing returns. If you want to "know" actual numbers to calculate the RF power needed to penetrate foliage, you need to determine the signal attenuation caused by the vegetation. You need to use the frequency, vegetation depth you want to penetrate, the water content in the leaves and trees, and the path geometry. The angle the signal gets bent to as the signal passes through the foliage affects the amount of attenuation. Vegetation type and density affects signal scattering and absorption, too. And did I mention this changes seasonally? And the more dramatic the season changes, the more dramatic the variations will be.

That’s why I unlock mine and use my FCC Part 95E-compliant GMRS codeplug for "unlocked" mode:

I did also take off all my RX CTCSS tones off on the repeaters. Should I put those back on?

Hey, on my Retevis RA25, I sometimes get that dreaded squelch tail after someone transmits from a repeater. Not all repeaters, but some are really bad, like 10-30 seconds. It will stop if I key the PTT. I have searched all over Google to find the answer. I have found several different settings in the Retevis CPS, but I have no idea what I should set them at. Here is a post from Reddit asking about the same issue and settings: