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Did my walk around the block with to have a record of the 2nd original duplexer. Since I do these things late at night I have a digital recorder I use to "listen" to me. I do the test of the repeater and then switch to talk around to let me know where I am in case the repeater test doesn't go through. There are a few spots on my walk that are iffy. Like I've mentioned in other threads I have 1.6KM of dense forest in the way of my signal, 70' trees with my antenna at 40'. After the new single channel tuned duplexer is installed I'll try to do the same test in the same spots.

The Hampton West 575 has quite a few users. 462.575, CTCSS tone 203.5. NETs are held the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:30 PM on this repeater. The July 9th 2025 NET will be the first GMRS Hurricane Exercise for the GMRS users/reporting operators in the Tidewater area. Everyone is encouraged to attend; this will be a controlled NET with a Net Controller. Find out how you can help the City of Hampton and your city during a disaster in your own neighborhood using GMRS! Your information will be forwarded by Net Control to the Hampton Public Service Team in Hampton to provide weather related incidents to the City of Hampton Emergency Management. THIS WIL BE AN IMPORTANT NET TO HELP THE CITY OF HAMPTON DETERMINE HOW MANY VOLUNTEERS IN THE CITY ARE ABLE TO PROVIDE DAMAGE ASSESSMENTS AND REPORTS IN YOUR AREA.

The Hampton West 575 has quite a few users. 462.575, CTCSS tone 203.5. NETs are held the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:30 PM on this repeater. The July 9th 2025 NET will be the first GMRS Hurricane Exercise for the GMRS users/reporting operators in the Tidewater area. Everyone is encouraged to attend; this will be a controlled NET with a Net Controller. Find out how you can help the City of Hampton and your city during a disaster in your own neighborhood using GMRS! Your information will be forwarded by Net Control to the Hampton Public Service Team in Hampton to provide weather related incidents to the City of Hampton Emergency Management.

See, I told you would get a lot of assistance from the people on here!

That 778 is the one I have. Nice radio for the price. It can transmit on 2m, 70cm, and GMRS if you pick the right band range. Yes, I know, I'm slapping my own hand for saying it.

Scadacore will let you model the RF path between your two sites by showing the terrain and earth curvature you need to factor in for antenna height. As far as equipment, the three most important things are: 1) Antenna; 2) Height above ground (AGL) at both sites; 3) radio. If you don't have a clear path, no antenna or radio will work at GMRS frequencies as the signal travels about 15% further than the horizon. Power just means there is more signal in the area, not more distance. The 20 mile distance you estimate would be adequately served with a 25W radio in most instances. Personally, I would choose an Anytone radio over the two you mention as their price/performance is on a par with much more expensive units from other Chinese manufactures. RF Line of Sight - SCADACore

If it satisfies your communication requirements then it was a good choice.

I could do a Radio Mobile calculation to let you know if you have line of site or not. I would need pretty specific gps location to do so.

Your username is mdyoungblood if that helps.

Be sure to check your Junk/Spam folder after using the Forgot Password feature.

The Midland is a solid unit for GMRS, but it’s quite expensive. It also ONLY does GMRS – no VHF/UHF scanning. That B-TECH is far less expensive, but I’ve read reports that it’s a bit quirky, sometimes noisy, and the volume is only accessible via menus. But it has fully integrated mic controls and can scan VHF/UHF. For my mobile station, I eventually settled on the AnyTone 778II (w VOX). It’s only 25W, but sounds amazing, scans VHF/UHF, and seems to have plenty of power to throw signal where I need it. AnyTone is also highly regarded in the budget mobile/base radio segment. See if they have a 50W radio that meets your needs, but I’m betting 25W would serve you well with the right antenna and mount location.

I’ve been running this little Midland for a few weeks now in various regions (MidTN, Chatty, Northern AL, Bham, MidMS) and have been quite impressed with its performance. Sure, other antennas can throw farther, but this little guy is doing very well with its diminutive profile. Would recommend.

fort cambell?

RF line of sight could be a problem, depending on how high you can realistically mount your antennas. An antenna mast with mounting hardware could easily set you back a couple hundred, to get your masts up 30 feet. On the other hand, mounting each antenna fifteen feet up on the roof, with one property 140 feet above the other property, could get you right around 20 miles. This is good news because it also means RF line of sight roof-top to roof-top is something you can verify with a couple of inexpensive handheld radios. So before buying nice radios, and before buying masts and antennas, buy a couple cheap GMRS handhelds for $30 each. Each of you stand on your roof. And try to talk to each other. If you get nothing, no static, no roger beeps, nothing, you're just out of luck. Those wooded areas between you are attenuating too much of your signal. On the other hand, if you're able to break squelch and hear each other a little, you can proceed. Now assume that you were able to break squelch for each other. What next? Each of you get a 25w to 50w radio, however many feet of LMR400 cable you each need, lightning arrestors, some fittings, and appropriate mounting hardware for the roof. Get a couple of antenna such as the Comet GP6NC GMRS antenna. Oh, and get 13.8v power supplies. Adding it all up you'll be spending around $525 to $725 each. As for repeaters; a repeater is useful if it can be higher than the other radios, and/or positioned somewhere between the other radios. It's useless to put a repeater on your roof, if the goal is just to extend range from your roof to the other person's roof. A repeater won't be giving you more range. What a repeater does is it allows one radio talking to the repeater to hear another radio talking to the repeater. If A and B cannot hear each other, but A can hear C, and B can hear C, then putting a repeater at position C will allow A and B to hear each other by talking through C. Another thing to do is to investigate what ham repeaters are in your area. If there are no GMRS repeaters, you may discover there *are* ham repeaters. Then you get licensed for whatever type of repeater exists in your area. If you find GMRS repeaters, great, get your GMRS license. If you find ham repeaters, you and the other party need to study for a couple weeks and get your ham licenses. If you are fortunate enough that there are good repeaters in your area (ham or gmrs), then you don't need to spend 500-700 each. You can each get a $30 radio that is made for the service type you're getting licensed in, and talk through the repeater. In my area there are about seven or eight pretty good GMRS repeaters. But there are also at least 25 very good 2m or 70cm amateur/ham repeaters. If that ratio holds true elsewhere, even if you don't have a GMRS repeater in your area, you may find there are one or more decent ham repeaters.

Pretty new here as well. If you are looking for a lot of good information, and not a little entertainment go here. https://www.youtube.com/@TheNotaRubicon

Hi, Both choices are good ones, I would say the Kind of antenna is very important. Look up GMRS antennas on amazon, also look at YouTube for some tips as well. I sure some of the other Radio Experts (in my opinion, Great people by BTW) on here will give more feedback to this question, but I would say a repeater even if it's the portable one: Amazon.com: Retevis RT97S GMRS Repeater, RT97 Upgraded Version, Radio Repeater, Full Duplex Long Range, Compatible with Raspberry Pi, Portable, LCD Screen(1 Pack) : Electronics I understand you are budgeting things out. just put this on the list this can maybe be deployed in the event of a storm and then you can cover the 20-mile gap. I'm just thinking of Quick deployment scenarios. I'm also New to GMRS.

There was a pretty big pass hack recently Perhaps the site owner or service provider instituted a required password change.

You have to start somewhere. We have a neighborhood group that currently is all simplex. Our biggest issues are earthquake and tsunami. Though after the Palisades fire, my area is similar geographically to that area, fire has popped up on our radar. It began after a neighbor had a home invasion and the LAPD showed up two hours later (she was hiding in her home on the phone with 911 as it happened). So now some of us have a secondary means for summoning help. Help that will be much quicker and probably better armed. A secondary use is we just check in with those more limited in mobility.

Interesting..

Hello, i am looking to get into the GMRS world and would like some input and advice on the how to's and what not's to achieve my goal. here's what im after, i am trying to connect 2 locations via Radio for emergency purposes. After Hurricane Helene hit us our entire AO was without comms for several days and i want to ensure that this does not happen again. said locations are almost 20 miles apart in a straight line with location A being roughly 140ft higher in elevation than B. mostly woodland with several open fields in between, all rural land in S.E. Georgia. There are no know repeater locations near nor between location A/B according to the map on here. i was looking at the MIDLAND MXT500 Base Station Radio or the BTECH GMRS-50V2 50W 256 for both locations along with a few handhelds to use within each locations immediate area. i know i will need an antenna for each location and im thinking that a 30ft pole for each site will be suffice but im just not sure what kind. Also, i may also consider adding a repeater at location A down the road. i am not able to go "no limit" budget but also do not want to go the cheapest route. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!

BTWR has been great for me. They have had excellent customer service!

You mean this one?

We are attempting to do something like this in our neighborhood, starting with using a base station to make announcements. 1,500+ acres though the woods may require a serious repeater eventually, but the idea of getting emergency information out to anyone holding a $10 radio is very appealing. We are 24 days into official hurricane season. Tick, tick, tick...

Hi! I did the password reset a couple of days ago with no change. I run Android with Chrome as my browser. For whatever reason, the home page problem persisted until earlier this morning. Now all is well. I appreciate all of the suggestions and help!

I participate in the local severe weather net on one of the amateur radio repeaters in my area. I don't chase storms, but I do report on them. There's no technical reason why it shouldn't work on GMRS, but there's no long-standing tradition of it, so you'd have to develop a network of spotters from the ground up. To get a very significant net, you'd have to have access to a repeater with good coverage. Simplex would work fine for intra-group communication, but a good "footprint" will require a repeater. As noted, you'd have to have someone with the ability to report to the National Weather Service because the advantage of a radio-based weather network is its immediacy -- reports are in real time as the action happens. Even if you don't have access to NWS, one or more local emergency service agencies might find it helpful. You'd have to ask them. A deputy sheriff operates a GMRS repeater I can reach in the county just south of me, and although he doesn't formally run a weather net to the best of my knowledge, if I hear of severe weather headed that way, I'll put out a warning on it. If he doesn't want me to do that, he'll say so. For the most part, GMRS is a service people use at a predetermined time with a predetermined group of people for a predetermined purpose, and AFAIK, there aren't a lot of people just constantly monitoring it as with ham bands. I don't know how you would get the word out to the GMRS community at large to "tune in" during severe weather. It may take quite a while for people to find out. If you had a repeater with some reach, people could even listen with FRS radios if they knew about it.