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As a relatively new gmrs user, I myself don’t use repeaters often because I know they are owned by people who put alot of time money and effort into them. I didn’t help them. I just found them listed on a website as “open”. And as such I feel like if I get on those repeaters im tying up their air space, using their resources, drawing their power and cycling their machines of which I did nothing to help with. So I try to stay off them unless absolutely necessary despite them being listed as “open”. I’ve never for a moment thought the big repeater owners actually wanted traffic on their machines by anyone other than those they give permission or those that are in their close knit groups because that would put wear and tear on their system by people they don’t even know. Maybe I’m off base. Maybe other people feel the way I do and it could be the reason a lot of useless tiny coverage repeaters pop up. I personally would rather see 1 repeater convering an area well than 4 covering it poorly but who am I to make any comment on the subject as I bet repeater owners prolly feel like everyone just leeches off their hard work which is what goes through my mind every time I key up someone’s “open” repeater. None of this is sent in jest or malice whatsoever. Just adding into the conversation is all. Huge respect to everyone keeping the positive vibes and RF pumping off their towers and over the airwaves.

Please fix the SKey1 Shortcut bug in BTECH BF-F8HP PRO CPS Version 1.2.5l. Window > Radio Function includes SKey2, but SKey1 is absent. When writing to radio, user preference for SKey1 Shortcut is lost. For example, if I set SKey1 to FM via radio keypad, then subsequently use CPS to modify memory channels/zones and write changes to radio, Skey1 Shortcut becomes inoperable and requires resetting to preference via keypad. Also, NOAA is an option for SKey1 and SKey2 via keypad, but not listed in the CPS shortcut picklist. Much appreciated! ...73

When you want to connect two or more LiFePO4 batteries together you top charge them individually and then when they are all fully charged you can put them in series or parallel. If you put two batteries together that are of unsimilar charged state they might discharge into one another but the protection circuits in each battery will shut it down if the current levels get excessive and out of the set spec of the BMS.

I second what @WRHS218 said. Once you join Texas GMRS Network you will have access to a lot of repeaters, many of which are not listed here. MyGMRS.com has a much better forum though.

I don't know how it got to this. I will tell you how it will end though. There seems to be an almost 'ham club' mentality about having a repeater. Long ago, someone told me if you found a town with 2 hams in it, there would be a minimum of 3 ham clubs. Because each one want's to have his own thing, and then the third club they are both members of. GMRS repeater ownership (and I use to see this a LOT in ham too) somehow is some status symbol, or just 'part of having the license'. People will stand up a medium to poor coverage repeater hanging an antenna at 20 feet in the air just so they can hear their call sign in CW on the air. Not that they know CW or know it's correct, but it's THEIR repeater. Never mind there is a monster coverage repeater or two in the area that everyone has access to, they need to do their own thing for whatever reason they have. SO here's the outcome. Guys that build monster coverage GMRS repeaters do it for others to enjoy and operate on. There is no other reason to build a repeater like that. It's far easier and cheaper to just build one with the antenna on the end of your garage and be done with it. This happens at a cost in time, money and labor. You don't park antenna's multiple hundreds of feet in the air using LMR400 or RG8. Antenna's that will put up with the wind at 200 feet do NOT come from Ed Fong, Retivis, or Comet. And they certainly aren't cheap. When the little play time repeaters start pulling the users away from the big repeaters, and it's not the asset that it was, or the owner doesn't see it that way, they will QUICKLY decide that it's not worth the effort to keep theirs on the air and the big repeaters will go away. You will go from being able to talk across an entire county on one repeater to hopscotching across a city from repeater to repeater trying to carry on a conversation that would have been no problem on the big repeater. And you can sit here and pontificate all you want about that not being the roll of GMRS. NO ONE care's. Figure it out. That's what it's being used for regardless of what you say, the regulations indicate, or the FCC has conveyed. It's a social gathering medium. Pure and simple. So while it may be meant for that use. It's what it's being used for. I just personally experienced a setback with a project at my site. We crested $400 A MONTH for the electric bill. I was looking to run an inverter to power part of the gear that will not power off DC any reasonable way. But converting 48 volts to 120 volts and the feeding servers don't make them draw less, the draw went up significantly. Which lead me to look at what I am sitting on. I have a bunch of good 75 and 105 Ah AGM batteries that would sell easily for 50 bucks a pop. Just the 48 volt plant batteries are worth a grand. Then there are another 12 divided between the 12 and 24 volt plants. So another thousand plus dollars. IN BATTERIES, sitting there so that others can use the repeaters I host for NO cost to them. SO yes, when it seems that Elvis as left the building and the repeaters aren't getting used, they will be shut off, sold off and I will NOT care in the slightest. I can't wrap my mind around why we are getting on here and COMPLAINING about the actions of others. Are these other repeaters interfering with YOUR repeater? Are you unable to put up you own 20 foot antenna for your own repeater that will equally not serve anyone, and have less coverage than two walkies on simplex? I fail to understand the issue here. Do you have thousands of dollars in equipment that the user base is slowly dwindling away because they put up their own repeaters and they choose to go hang out on them and talk to no one because no one is in the coverage footprint besides them?

My radio resides on the dash of the JEEP and there is no necessary reason for it to venture "in a working mode" into my home. We just don't have any repeaters around and those that have GMRS radios in their vehicles don't turn'em on to my knowledge. Workers use the FRS radios and even a friend of mine hardly every uses his except off road... The most I ever used ths one was when I had a friend that traveled with us off road. He got sick and is home bound 70 miles away.. AND THANKS for the list of other radios Nokones. That was a kind gesture.

Open up Device Manager and then click on Ports. FTDI chips will say Silicon Labs since that is who created the drivers for the FTDI chips

Line of sight does make more of a difference when using VHF and UHF. I'm glad to hear that you are getting into all of the repeaters now. A j pole antenna has zero gain when measured in dBd, which is the same as a dipole antenna. Using the kv5r loss calculator and your specs, you will have an ERP of 21.8 watts. As you see that will still work even though you are losing about half your power output. Switching to 50 feet of LMR400 will only gain you 6.9 more watts on ERP. I would not bother switching out the RG-213 to LMR400 for that little power gain. What will make a difference is going with an antenna with higher gain. But no need to change anything if it is working well for your needs.

I did figure out the port part but as far as the cable goes I don’t know which one I have

Do you have the FTDI chip programming cable or the Prolific cable. You need to make sure that you have the appropriate driver for the type of cable you using. And you do need to select the correct port in the CPS. Usually, the correct port will have a white background and the others are grayed out. Select the port that is white

CHIRP's idea of zones is very different from zoned Baofeng (and similar) brands. I think it may be based on some high-end radio. Anyway, to CHIRP, zones are a table where you can use a checkbox to put a channel into one (or more, or zero) zones. On the Baofeng radios, zone names are basically text strings that live in the settings menu and channels go into zones based on channel number as someone described above. Regarding your issues with the BTECH CPS, I'd be very interested in hearing about them, since I wrote that software. Assuming you are using CPS version 1.2.5l, can you give me more details (via DM if you like). In particular, were the unexpected channels created on the radio after a write, or did the duplicates appear in the programming software? If you have a .dat file that causes the problem, I'd like to see it. You can either DM me here or email BTECH support (not putting the email address here to foil spam crawlers) and just put "Terri asked me to have you forward this to her" near the top of your email if you don't want to reach out to me directly (just because I say I wrote it is no proof that I did, although the "About" box will provide a hint). Before we get that far, can you load your .dat file and just click "[Next]" at the bottom of the channel window to go through all 10 zones? You might get a message about corrupted data when moving to a new zone. The CPS assumes that if it's in a .dat file it can load, it's valid. But paging through each zone does additional checks to make sure all the settings are valid.

I also am having issues with the cable . I have a programming cable from a TM-481A and from what I understand is the same cable for the 880. But I’m also told that I need a cable driver for it to work ? I am running a mini computer can’t seem to get the software to read my 880 . Any and all help would be greatly appreciated

That is the important part. I changed the Tx power calibrations on my radio by accident using the factory debug software (sorry, I can't share, please don't ask). A Surecom SW-102 hooked directly up to the radio didn't register any power or even the frequency I was "transmitting" on. However, another radio next to it could hear it and we could carry on a conversation in the same room, but not at any greater distance. If the OP can talk to the other radio at 1/4 mile in simplex, then I'd look to see that the Tx / Rx (if used) tones for accessing the repeater didn't get clobbered somehow.

I am considering the Wouxun KG-905G based on a test done recently by myself and a friend. His house is over 13 miles away from mine. While testing my 10-watt portable repeater he could receive on his various inexpensive handhelds but couldn't really make out any words. However, on his Wouxun KG-905G he could hear me clearly with little background noise. This may never be an issue for most folks (receiving while on the fringe of coverage) but it did show that there is a difference, at least on receiving. This is probably simply due to the Wouxun KG-905G being a super heterodyne radio.

I'm using a 40 watt radio with 50 ft of RG 213. Moving my antenna high enough to get a clear line of sight made all the difference. Turns out, I was misreading the line of sight graph. Now, I can carry on clear conversations with all the repeaters within my local area.

Some may be operated by clubs. Since you can't get a (new) GMRS license other than as an individual, somebody has to be the "responsible party" for each repeater. If a club has several and has someone with the expertise to maintain them, centrally manage access control, etc. they'll show up as the "owner" of multiple repeaters. In my case, here in JC we (supposedly) had a community service one on 700, but the user's FCC license expired 5+ years ago, they haven't been active here for 7+ years, and standing outside the building where the repeater supposedly, is there's nothing that responds. Hopefully that owner just lost interest in radio and/or moved away. Given some of our ages (I'm 66+ and realized that Val Kilmer was younger than me), the former repeater owner might be deceased. Hopefully not. Anyway, since I've had my GMRS license for 6+ years, I've benefited from using other repeaters while traveling, I'm on top of a ridge and have a 3-story house, and a 50W repeater "fell into my lap" (ouch!), I decided to start The New JC 700 as a community service as the only repeaters (other than the defunct 700) here are either open only to emergency responders, require membership in a club whos home page serves up malware and their repeater time announcement is off by 58 minutes (DST + clock drift) so "nobody's minding the store". Right now I'm running on a NMO-HDG at a lower elevation until my DB408-B, 7/8" heliax and climber/installer arrive. I have 8 ground rods, 150' of #4 copper and a ground rod driver and just need to create the ground field. Even with the free repeater, I'll probably be $4000-ish out-of-pocket. But since anyone with a 5W "repeater in a box" can validly register a repeater, some of the ones you see may be low-power. And some here are defunct - I messaged the management about the old 700 here, pointing out that their license was expired and they hadn't been here in 7+ years, and it was removed some time later.

Was on the phone yesterday with my stock broker and the hot investments right now are American companies competing with the Chinese market in hobby and light industiral arts stuff like 3D Printers, Laser cutters and etchers. etc. He also told me some products coming from China like the Bambu Labs 3D printers are going to be made in America still owned by China investors. Overall, i think this is all good and will drive quality back into the things we buy.

I can see that. I use Car Play to avoid that but not everyone has it or wants to pair their phone to their car (my wife is one of them).

When all else fails, read the instructions rather than relying on online comments. Here's the data sheet from Times Microwave: https://static.dxengineering.com/global/images/chartsguides/t/tmv-lmr-400.pdf?_gl=1*1hg8kam*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE3NDM3Mjc4MzYuQ2p3S0NBanc0N2lfQmhCVEVpd0FhSmZQcG9uNzhndGVzUVhZb0V3OE10XzRiYm5nUzZrMENsT0c1cnFaeDRZNllDaEFzTzI5RnpUVlJ4b0NjYkFRQXZEX0J3RQ..*_gcl_au*MTIxOTYzODQxNS4xNzQwNTkxMzk4*_ga*MTMxOTg2NjcwNi4xNzAxNzEzMzMy*_ga_NZB590FMHY*MTc0MzcyNzgyNC42LjEuMTc0MzcyNzgzNi40OC4wLjA. While they do list TC connectors, they also list EZ connectors (third page of the extract) including the EZ-400-UM (https://timesmicrowave.com/connectors/ez-400-um-coax-connectors/). Finally, here is information on the difference between TC and EZ. They do indicate TC for stranded center conductors. I’m sure that’s because forcing a stranded center conductor through the spring fingers probably causes a bird’s nest. Any soldered center conductor should be fine. Personally, I would use the crimp shield and soldered center conductor tip. https://timesmicrowave.com/ez-vs-tc-connectors-whats-the-difference/

Outstanding that worked out for you.

Me not being a genius, I guess I got lucky when it came to learning the Motorola programming software decades ago. I started out with the RSS DOS stuff for the HT1000 and MT2000 radios and some of the Radius stuff like the P110 and GP 300s over 30 years ago and became real comfortable with it and my first CPS was the MTS2000 and MCS2000 which I figured it out with no problems. Then came the XTS1500 portables and overtime, I got into the other stuff like the HT1250 and HT1550 and CDMs, PM400. The Astro Sabers and XTS3000 are the same CPS so there was no problem there for me. For some reason, I just was able to get into it and became real comfortable with the Motorola programming software programs. These days, I am trying to learn the XPR series and DMR. After, trying different programming steps, some how I stumbled across doing something right and making a DMR channel work. In my opinion, setting up a P25 conventional channel is a piece of cake as compared to setting up a DMR channel. Oh, by the way, I still don't like Chirp programming.

J-Poles don't like any type of obstruction around them.. I have talked 90 miles + with my portable setup when mounted out in a wide open area.. But when i get around something like a single treee, it goes to hell like what you are describing. Overall i get pretty good performance from it, defiantly better than a fire stick. I also built a Ladder Lead J-pole, like the Ed Fong version, the copper version seems to work much better.

I considered myself a semi-radio-dork and thought I knew everything but after spending days trying to figure out how to use the Motorola CPS to try and program my first XTL, i HATED everything about radios and was ready to throw the thing against the wall!

Hey all I think I have my radio setup correctly but I don’t seem to be able to transmit, I have a tidradio td-h3, I programmed the Thompson station repeater into it and heard a few people but no one could hear me, any advice?

I wasn't going to try guessing his radio simplicity level, but I thought it would be nice to offer him some food for thought on some options for his future radio.