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^That's where I'm probably going to go with it. Thanks.

This is a thankless task with handheld antennas. There's way too much interaction with the HT and your body to do any real-world analysis. I set up a test rig for this, but decided that it wasn't worthwhile testing antennas beyond a "probably good / probably fake" check on their factory tuning. My setup is a 36" diameter aluminum disc with a hole in the center with a mating SMA-M connector and 25' of RG316 coax. The disc is supported off the (concrete) floor with three 3" Teflon cubes (which I had laying around). These components are inside a shielded, un-powered building. The other end of the coax runs through a building penetration to a NanoVNA H4. The NanoVNA is connected to a laptop PC via a USB cable with ferrites at each end, and the laptop PC is running on battery power to avoid coupling AC line noise into the NanoVNA or antenna line. This gives me nice, repeatable readings which have little to no relevance in the real world.

Your repeater works pretty decent. I was hitting it pretty strong from 605 for a ways last month.

I got my NanoVNA H2 in today and was planning on doing a video on antenna swril with the antennas I have. I'd originally planned on doing a 401 node sweep of from 120MHz to 470MHz then see where each antenna worked best between that range. Now I'm thinking I should break each range up by Band(2M, 1.25M, MURS, 70cm, and GMRS)to get more accurate readings. Does that sound about right? I'm curious to see which antennas are more limited to some frequencies and which word on a broader spectrum. Should be a fun experiment and make for an interesting video.

I got my repeater up for under $1k .. Not the biggest/best in the area but it has about 900sq miles of coverage.

You can get a decent repeater going for 2k.

You got ten grand?

Received the radio today and enjoying it so far! CPS and Chirp Windows 11 (via UTM virtual machine) wasn’t recognizing my old programming cable right away so figured I’d try Chirp on Mac. There’s actually good support for this radio’s features including the channel banks and just saw that support for the v0.44 firmware changes just got merged into Chirp too so should be in the next release.

If swr is halfway decent it will work just fine... i have been operating a 25w anytone 778uv base setup(just upgraded to 50w anytone 5888uv, which seems to output about 42w on gmrs) off a "bingfu" 30" mobile dual band antenna literally electrical taped to a piece of conduit with a radial ground plane, and can operate a repeater 22 miles away on a daily basis, on a $30 antenna showing approximately a 1.9-2.2swr on gmrs frequencies.... and i can hit the repeater better than someone right up the road from me also running 50w, thru a commercial 6' comet for gmrs, with a 1.4 swr across the repeater band.... All that said, TLDR..... get the free antenna and see what it can do.... worst that can happen is the FREE amtenna doesnt work well, and you end up padsing it along to someone else who can use it....

The Smiley rubber duck antenna is a 5/8 wave.

I have the RT97S and it's easy enough to program them to receive and transmit on different frequencies. But the reverse setup of receiving on low and transmitting on high would need a differently tuned duplexer. I guess you could just reverse the cables on the low and high sides on one of the repeaters.

I was asking myself the same question and have been reading the rules and so far I don’t see a problem. It’s not simplex, it’s through repeaters. I could see a situation where HT One is hearing both from HT Two through both repeaters and from say a third HT only going through the first repeater. I don’t think I’d want to do this but I’m with you on the thought exercise. Mc Escher drawing only with radios?

Yes, I know, but GMRS operates by somewhat different rules and serves a different purpose. I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, but I could have missed it. I'd be surprised if GMRS radios would even let you program it in, although ham radios on GMRS channels could probably do it.

Not at all. In amateur radio it’s not terribly unusual to work split like that.

So, here's a silly question, just because this got me thinking... It's technically possible to transmit on one "primary" frequency and receive on another. For example, you transmit on 462.55000 and receive on 462.57500 while your friend's radio is setup the "reverse" way. Is there anything in the rules which prohibits it? If there is, I didn't see it. TBH, I can't think of a reason why I'd want to; it's just a thought exercise.

… and yeah, this is a new idea to me at least. Very interesting.

Since it looks like Retevis has to set this up before shipping and is irreversible I bet a major YouTube guy like yourself could get them to send you a pair.

I doubt you could do it with two off-the-shelf RT97Ls since they can only listen on one frequency at a time. If I understand the setup, each one has to monitor two frequencies simultaneously. It's a pretty cool setup, though.

If the SWR is acceptable, it may work well enough for what you want. It won't be ideal, but hams use all kinds of weird crap for antennas and get a signal out. I saw a guy on YouTube use a bridge railing -- still on the bridge. If you put it on a 20' mast, you'd probably get 3 miles. It will never work as well as an antenna tuned for the GMRS band, but it may do what you want. "Good enough" is a valid concept.

I had a smiley on my 935 and UV9G. They seem to work better than the stock ones. Just my thoughts from the peanut gallery.

Marc ▪︎ Roger. Sounds like the snubnose 19-inch rack is going to be fastened down for greater installation hardening. That'll truly add an even mkre customized appearance with the added benefit of fastening everything down. I supposed you could consider some short heavy duty springs between the brackets and 19-inch rack to arrest resonance and vibration ... especially during trail events. Peter

That's awesome to hear! Once all the brackets are made and the cosmetics are done, I have to get some fresh images out!

Bummer... hopefully the next one will work out. I am trying to do them at least once a quarter... sometimes more.

Bummer. I can't make it due to another commitment.