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I thought I would try to give an explanation about repeater codes since it has been a topic lately on the air. I think it is much easier to grasp if you look at it from the point of view of LISTENING. Codes are a way for a radio to IGNORE or REJECT signals that the listening operator DOES NOT want to hear. Any radio with a code set on its RECEIVE frequency will only open the squelch to let the properly coded signal audio “break” through. The code is a key to the lock. The assigned code must be present in the signal from the TRANSMITTING radio to open that lock and for the receiver to hear. Our community repeaters are programmed with that RECEIVE code set and expected so they only engage properly coded transmissions. They reject every other stray transmission that might be occurring on that receive frequency, (467 mHz). We have to put that code in our TRANSMITTING frequency when we program so the repeater will respond to our transmission. When the repeater “hears” you because the code indeed matches, electrical circuit magic instantaneously happens, and the repeater simultaneously re-transmits your message on the designated output channel (462 mHz). But, people listening for your radio signal from the repeater usually are only interested in that particular repeater’s transmissions, not the other noise happening in the background. So, for your benefit, repeaters are usually set with their own TRANSMIT code. If your radio has that matching code set for your RECEIVE frequency requirement, you, too, will only hear that repeater’s properly coded transmission. Your lock has been opened. But if you don’t set a receive code, ALL POSSIBLE signals on that channel will be heard by you, including the repeater signal you want. This code setting also provides a low level of protection against unauthorized people using the repeater or talking to you on your receive frequency, since a person must know the code being used to unlock either radio. Since there are only 8 repeater pair channels, there is a high level of duplication of the frequencies across the region. If they are close together geographically, these codes help keep the overlapping chatter separate, but it’s not perfect. Closing notes: 1) There are a couple hundred possible alpha numeric codes available consisting of two different types: CTCSS and DCS. 2) Not all manufacturers make available all the same codes. 3) It is possible to have any radio “fooled” into “hearing” a non-coded signal if a coded signal comes in at the same time, opening the squelch. 4) Your own radio is not required to have a receive code set, if you want to hear everything possible on the channel. I have done that with our own Gallatin and Grassland repeaters at times. I listen to two repeaters at once, no code. 5) It is possible, but uncommon, for a repeater to have one alpha numeric code for RECEIVE and use a different one for TRANSMIT, so you need to double check on the repeater listings for what is being used. 6) Remember when using the term TRANSMIT and RECEIVE, make sure you understand which radio in the conversation is being referenced. 7) Our community repeaters are “duplex” requiring the use of two frequencies. They listen on one and simultaneously and instantly retransmit our signals on the other. Our radio’s frequencies are “flipped” to do the same. The repeater receive (our transmit) is 5 mHz higher, with the decimal being the same. A radio hiccup (feature?): I noticed when I am scanning, my radio will rest silently on the Gallatin repeater when someone is transmitting on Grasslands, and vice versa, even with my codes set. So, the radio does “know” there is a transmission occurring, but it won’t let the audio come through the squelch without the right code. In my inexperience, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on! That’s why you may still see a receive light on a channel that has a silent radio. Enough! Steve WSGH297

To think that linking, which in many ways was harmful to the objectives of a general mobile radio service. The FCC says the service is for the following: That really doesn't seem like the intent is for cross regional linked repeater networks. And I'm not really the bearer of bad news here; the FCC clarified this position a few months back. There may BE a case for cross-regional linked repeater networks available to people with "pay to play" instead of "test and pay to play" licenses. But that's almost going to have to be a separate service. The FCC has made it rather clear that service is not GMRS. So if there's a strong enough use case for such a thing to exist in the VHF or UHF spectrum, it would probably need to be addressed as its own distinct service. What killed GMRS? I would say that the news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. It's just not as interesting to repeater linking people. But there are somewhere around 1000 new licenses granted every month, and that number is growing, not shrinking. Discontinuation of linking, to me, seems like it would make GMRS more friendly as it becomes more dedicated to neighborly regions, less about if someone in KY can talk to someone in VA and someone else in MA. But that's just speculation on my part. As for forum friendliness, we seem to have gotten the most abusive forum contributor sorted out. The rest of us are just typical grumps, not blatantly abusive grumps. Within individual repeaters where people talk amongst themselves, and where weekly nets often get held, I haven't seen any change in my area recently, other than a few repeaters becoming more active over time. In my area, for example the "West 1" repeater used to be a lot more quiet, and now seems to host nets and have more chatting going on than it used to. But again, the real purpose the FCC envisions for GMRS doesn't seem to be weekly nets and idle repeater rag chewing with other strangers. It's short-distance two-way voice communications ... to facilitate the activities of licensees and their immediate family members. The word "activities" is useful here. While rag chewing might be considered an "activity", I suspect they used the word thinking more of family outings, friends out doing things, and so on. Hiking, caravaning, RVing, offroading, skiing, small-craft boating, going to amusement parks, shopping, being tourists, camping, cycling, road-rallying, motorcycling, family reunioning, facilitating events... sorry to disappoint but radio as a hobby in and of itself is more in the domain of ham radio.

Is there a mountain between you and the further away repeater like with the closer one? I regularly and normally connect to a repeater 69 miles away on my handheld radios and using my base-station with a big antenna on the roof, i can connect to repeaters 80 or 90 miles away - yet there are other repeaters 10 miles away that I cant connect to because of hills/mountains.

Gregg is unlikely to be harassed. He has an easy going pleasant personality.

I have to agree with @SteveShannon. He tends to articulate better than I do. I don’t think you are being met with gatekeepers but rather people who want to preserve the availability to all users of the GMRS/FRS channels. That’s where I am coming from at least. Including those that have no interest in getting a license. People that use FRS for talking in campgrounds, between vehicles on family trips, little kids having fun, four wheelers, and on and on. People who will never even come to this site get a license or join a club but just want to use radios for what they are doing. These are all as important and valid as anything else. Try and organize and change a simple service for the people and make it into something that already exists elsewhere and you may see some pushback. For instance local ham clubs near me support bike races, marathons and other activities. just the sort of thing you look to do. They use simplex or their own repeaters to do so. One such club even has a dedicated repeater for such things. Plenty of room on the ham frequencies to do this as well as organized use of the bands and frequencies and it’s great that they do this. Would this also be great on GMRS? Not so much room on GMRS. I have witnessed people thinking that because they put a repeater on a GMRS frequency/channel that they somehow have priority to that channel, that it’s theirs. It is not, they do not. Yes we should all be respectful. So people may have concerns and wish to preserve what is all of ours. As for helping people understand how to use radios, set up repeaters, use of tones, programming, equipment reviews or troubleshooting this place, this forum is here for all that. No gatekeeping isn’t met very well here. My interpretation of gatekeeping is not sharing knowledge, which is just wrong. We can all work on making this site more welcome. But you didn’t ask about this site, you asked “Has GMRS lost its welcoming vibe?”. I don’t know but if it has it’s because some people think it’s theirs and I would just bet they are part of a club and not the kids up the street giggling on their radios.

It’s possible that it is tropospheric ducting. It’s also possible that the farther repeater’s signal is getting to you because they have a very high antenna or because it is reflecting off something or refracting over a sharp edge. And it’s also possible that the distant repeater is linked with a nearby repeater. If your radio doesn’t have a receive tone set, it won’t matter what the repeater output tone is; your radio will allow the audio to be reproduced.

You're not being targeted/harassed (yet). Say (post) something the Jeep crowd doesn't like and report back later. There are several that should have been banned but they have paid memberships.

I'm not completely convinced about the HAM part. but I am going to defer my opinion and agree with this. I do feel that each of the systems have many great uses for them.

I had not considered all of that, but now that you mention it. I see it, and have to agree whole heartedly. I myself used to only listen from my FRS and an old Baofeng UV-82 for years. I was lazy and was convinced at one point that if I even tried to talk on GMRS without a license I was going to jail. So I was content with listening in like a car radio. I remember when the repeaters around me all started going silent too. Thank you for that perspective.

HAM is the ultimate emergency communications. It's just the ham'ers are going about it the wrong way. I had to explain to my county's EM Coordinator why ham was not only important but would be the fallback when the county's 911 system failed. And it isn't either/or anyway; ham and gmrs (and frs) can all be used together as needed.

greetings all! new to gmrs radio and had a repeater question. anyone now how its possible for my base station (20w) radio to make contact (receive & transmit) to a repeater that's over 75 miles away? i'm using a amazon special gmrs fiberglass antenna that's only mounted 10 ft off the ground. i have a local repeater approx. 6 miles away that uses .575 frequency with a tone of 162.2 in and out. i can't connect with it due to a mountain in between it and my location. as stated, the other evening i was able to communicate with the repeater that's further away which does have a .575 frequency with a tone of 162.2 in but 198.8 out. i'm not sure how this is possible; am i some how connecting to the repeater local to me and it relaying he signal to the further repeater even though it has a different output tone?

I did, and thank you. I might go out on a limb here and say for the most part that seems like the only "nice" section. It's gets a little wild outside of there.

I believe the biggest thing that slowed it down was the FCC thing with linking. GMRS was a social gathering spot that worked across not just state lines but different regions of the country. The FCC deciding to clamp down on linking I believe killed a LOT of interest. The repeaters (linked ones anyway) fell silent after they were unlinked, and some were just turned completely off, like mine was. Now I had two repeaters on the air. One was meant for local conversation and the linked was was wide area. That was by design and the local repeater stayed on the air. A few moved over to it, but other users just disappeared. And I bet that was common everywhere. Far as the gatekeeping. There does seem to be a contingent of people that got it in their head that GMRS was suppose to strictly be for immediate family and low level business communications and that social conversations weren't it's purpose, and argued that point until the rules specifically stating that is was for personal conversations between users. That sort of pulled the wind out of their sails about it's purpose. But if you are familiar with who those people are, there have been similar efforts made by them that weren't directly related to usage. But were negative about using the service as a social gathering place. Far as the whole 'sad hams' thing. Personal opinion was that sad hams that were spending their time wringing their hands about ham radio not seeing ANY growth or at least a significant drop off while GMRS was going like gang busters with new licenses every day. I can see them reciting from How the Grinch stole Christmas, but referring to how GMRS was stealing prospective hams because they had a required test that GMRS doesn't and it needed to be stopped. In fact the FCC guy from the ARRL luncheon video that made the comments about it being 'illegal' was a ham and had been for a LONG TIME (30 years) at the point he made the comments. There is quite a number of hams that are scared to death that the FCC is going to come in and take all the ham bands from them and auction them off for cell usage or something similar. Do I believe that sad hams called the FCC over and over complaining about GMRS repeater linking to force a reaction, YES I DO. The FCC got bored with it and instead of doing the hard thing and fixing the regulations so they couldn't be interpreted 3 different ways, which required a bunch of procedural stuff, they took the 'easy path' and decided to interpret them in as far fetched a way as they could and ban the act outright. WITHOUT ACTUALLY CHANGING THE REGULATIONS. Of course, that shut the hams up. Their phones quit ringing and that made them happy. Of course we got screwed in the process. But that's the breaks. Nevermind that at that time, there were more GMRS licensed operators than ham operators.... but you know, it was easier. I will openly admit that I have been a ham for 30 years. But I don't align myself with many of them and their bullshit. I do see that we need MORE technically savy people involved with GMRS since a larger number of the folks that were getting into it has ZERO technical knowledge, and were getting what little info they had from one or two people on YouTube that really aren't all that technically minded either. But I have also seen in here that the non-technically minded seem to want to argue with folks that have 15 or more years experience with two-way radio as a profession and make statements that clearly indicate they have no idea what they are commenting on. This is now to the point that I don't even want to bother with correcting the statements of stupidity because the commenter will argue the point, while being completely wrong. Yeah, I got started in two-way radio as a career path 15 years ago this past May. So I might just know a little something about UHF radio. So when it's getting to the point of infighting and the sort of crap that is going on now. Why would someone want to be bothered with GMRS or Ham for that matter?

IME,you'll save yourself a lot of hassle by buying a programming cable with the FTDI chip. There are no driver issues.

Welcome Did you find the “Welcome” forum where new people can introduce themselves? Please tell us more about yourself and what you’re doing with GMRS.

Again, just my personal opinion, what you used to do for a living has nothing to do with membership value. With the exception of the privilege of saying they are a member, what does the organization bring to the table, that we cannot otherwise get for free somewhere else?

Eh... I do all of this for free for 3 different groups... we have people who volunteer time and I pay for all of our digital footprint. Unlimited storage, unlimited throughput, unlimited email accounts and email storage for $150 per yeah. Few bucks per registered URL / Domain. I spend more for dinner for my family one night out at a restaurant than for our internet footprint for a year. Having donation options would be one thing, but there is zero chance you're convincing me that you need to collect a membership fee to cover costs, imho

Sorry, but I have to disagree. There will always be some knuckleheads sure, but when I wandered in here a couple years ago as a clueless wonder my first reaction was that this was one of the most professional, knowledgeable and helpful forums I'd ever run into. That's still true, IMHO. People don't always agree on everything, but that's life. "Hostile" is the last adjective that leaps to mind.

I can understand. The part of " Nor should there need to be." is my hang up. For a radio service that advertises itself as being for families and group activities, there really should be some kind of friendly nature or support for and around it. YES. mostly agreed. A lot of the people I personally have interacted with and know that use GMRS (and FRS) tend to see it as the happy middle between CB's wild west cavalier users, and the well structured HAM. There is a bit of structure to GMRS, hence its used for EmComm activities and CERT where CB really has no practical use, and not much utility to HAM in local emergency response. I could be wrong though. That is why I really had preferred not to discuss much of anything here. But, since I was prompted elsewhere. Why not?! Also, thank you for the response.

Fine, so bring those ideas here.

Oh no, this topic wasn't introduced because of that. That was just one more thing on the list, yes. I've wandered this forum a lot before considering posting. and other places such as YouTube, etc. on the subject.

Absolutely correct. So that means there is room for ideas from other places. That is probably also why there is such lack of support for GMRS outside of a scattering of HAM operators who casually play around with GMRS.

It did not start as a top down, and I don't see it that way still. I pretty much left it open. However, I did intentionally include the thought of "hey here is some national level ideas" for the GOTA program idea. Perhaps the club and the GOTA program should have been posted separately some how. I'll have to consider it. As I said to UncleYoda, I didn't see anywhere that said I had to ask permission to start a club or what it's purpose would be for. and I do say that with all due respect. Please don't take that as me being dismissive or come off as rude. There was enough interest in the group of people I spoke too long before I posted it on here. We shall see if anyone is interested. If not, then perhaps we'll all get lucky and it will fade away like a bad dream. haha. I agree, and thats unfortunate that this site is the only one. GMRS needs much more representation from the dedicated GMRS users. I have respect for HAM operators, but that is a WHOLE different purpose and use cases. Thank you for all of your thoughts, opinions, and considerations. We shall see how it goes.

Well said as always Steve.

Very much appreciated. I am not interested in getting into HAM, as I don't see any value or use to my needs or future plans. It's a good thought though. Networking? We have a Discord channel, and will chat with email to discuss over arching ideas and thoughts. The GOTA website would end up having a forum like set up to place 'reports' for those who want to do it, and get rewards similar to POTA - and then some. Still working out ideas on that. Since GMRS is more of a local comm thing, there really isn't much more of a use for state, and national communications outside of email and social media programs to help each other out. re: fees addressed. Yeah. sorry, I posted in the club discussions that the fees and even membership levels are still undetermined but listed the latest idea. Still gathering a best way forward idea with transparency to where the money goes. The idea is a bit small right now to really be considering this as a hot ticket item. Thank you again, for addressing things that may need more looking into.