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Cars and motorcycles do use dissimilar metals for fasteners and they also advise use of anti-seize. Also, dissimilar metals for fastening use does not promote the corrasion effect as much as it does when electrical current flows through the dissimilar metal.

I posted your quotes..

I've had this radio for about 2 years and it's a rock solid performer. Lots of compliments on how I sound from it. Functions very well, puts out full advertised wattage. Easily unlocked for full TX range to match the RX range (murs,marine vhf, gmrs,CB and more) on it using chirp. I've had zero issues with this radio and it gets used quite a bit. Yeah the 10m band is kinda useless without sideband unless your doing CB on it. Very nice radio and for what it does, it's pretty cheap compared to the mainstream HAM mobiles. My only complaint with it is the fan tends to make noise in cold weather. So you get in your truck and it's 10 degrees, the fan makes a bunch of racquet until the vehicle or radio warms up. The KG-1000G's do the same thing. The fan needs a redesign or different bearings or something. But it's never prevented it from working. The noise is short lived. That and I wish there was a setting like the 935H added over the UV8H to mute the secondary area while TX'ing on the main area.

Tsql is for a repeater that uses the same tones in and out

Right, and that's what I did. It was a little harder than I would have preferred because the masthead doesn't provide its own good ground plane, the forestay, backstay, and upper shrouds can actually influence the apparent ground plane in weird ways, too. A mobile antenna such as the Comet CA2X4SR would have been broad-band enough, but not compatible with the wonky ground plane 30 feet up the mast. I ended up with a base-station broad band dual-band antenna that provided acceptable SWR from 2m through GMRS, including Marine VHF. I don't remember the model I went with, but at this point it works nicely. I prefer keeping a dedicated Marine VHF radio, as they offer marine-specific features not found in amateur radios. So that rig will always be a Marine VHF / GMRS dual radio setup.

If you can find a single antenna that covers Marine VHF and GMRS then you would only need a single diplexer. It would be no different than how we have our 2m and 70cm repeaters setup.

Right, I've done one version of this on a sailboat; At first I considered putting one diplexer at the top of the mast, and one at the base, to allow a single LMR400 run up the mast to drive a dedicated marine VHF antenna, and a dedicated GMRS antenna. And then the one at the bottom to feed a dedicated Marine VHF radio, and dedicated GMRS radio. But then I ended up going with a broad band dual-band antenna at the top, eliminating the need for the top diplexer (and its associated signal loss), while still allowing two radios at the bottom. Inside a sailboat mast, space for coax is rather limited, and the weight of running two separate coax lines is also not desirable.

Diplexers work when using a single antenna with a radio with dual antenna connectors. The Icom IC-9700 is just on example. It has two coax connectors, one for VHF and one for UHF. Most guys will run a single dual band antenna to the radio using a diplexer. Or as Steve was asking, one can use a diplexer to connect two antennas to a single coax connector on the radio. We actually use dual band repeater antennas for our 2m and 70cm repeaters and a single hardline into the building. Then it goes through a diplexer to the two repeaters. That setup has been working great for years now.

Yeah, for that you'd either need one of those crazy looking antennas that supports quad bands (they often have a short vertical half-way up the main vertical, standing off about an inch), or a diplexer. I see the Diamond MX62M that has a 1.6MHz-56MHz branch, and a 76MHz-470MHz branch. That would be almost perfect. Then for antennas you would need a 2m/70cm, and a 10m/6m.

I wasn’t thinking about cross banding as much as having a dedicated antenna connection for the 10 meter antenna.

Good info. Thanks. I may have to give it a try next time I'm in less congested RF-space.

You do not need a diplexer or dual antennas on radios that have only one antenna connection and have cross band repeat functions. I use cross band repeat quite often on dual band radios. Just set Side A to the 2M frequency, usually a repeater, and then set Side B to a 70cm frequency that you want to use on your HT. Then go into the radio's menu and turn cross band repeat on.

Exactly this ^^^ The info was always there, it was just the reference to pages was incorrect in quite a few places if not all. I would just use a search on key words in the PDF to find relevant info to what I was looking for. I keep a PDF of all my manuals to reference and just replaced this one with the updated version. Shoutout to @dosw for passing along info of updated version.

Single. So if you are going to crossband with it I imagine you would feed an inexpensive diplexer. I don't know how successful crossband repeater mode would be with a single dual band antenna. Seems like that would be rather hard to test without a posse of people who can hit the repeater and listen while you tinker with settings. Another thing to mention: I'm not sure if this is standard, but the power cable on mine came with Anderson connectors on the end. It could be the previous owner installed them. But fortunately my PSU has an Anderson port, and I've installed one under the hood in my truck, as well.

Nice review, entertaining and informative. I apologize if I missed it (and I did go back and reread it), but does it have a single SO239 or one for each transceiver?

Retevis has updated the page numbers so that (reference to missing page 36) is now page number 16. Please see this update /visit their site to download the PDF for the latest revisions. Best Regards!

You're absolutely correct - UNLESS you're one of THOSE PEOPLE silly enough to have personalized plates with their hams call on it...then once again, 10 seconds is all it takes.

Absolutely. It's not as easy as doing a google search for a call sign. There is a bit of footwork involved and it's not possible in every state. But the biggest hole is the social media sites. People tend to have their personal info (name and location) on sites like Facebook and will then go on vacation and start posting pictures and videos of sandy beaches and sunsets for everyone to see while clearly being from Ohio, Indiana or any state without sandy beaches and drinks in coconuts. Point I am trying to make is that while, just like you stated, a simple Google search of a call sign will indeed get you the address and name of that person. Criminals have a number of ways to get that info. And they aren't going to be sitting in a room with a bunch of scanners listening to GMRS looking for someone to announce they are leaving town. The one that I always had an issue with was law enforcement running SSN and drives licenses over the air. Complete with car make, model and year. It's not hard to figure out that if someone is driving a newer Cadillac that you now have their DR number, address, name, DOB that they are a better target for identity theft than a guy in a 84 Reliant K-car.

I got mine today, and I used Chirp to upload the name and frequencies.

Thank you for taking the time to do a review. I'm sure it will be helpful for those considering the KG-U980P I have only used Wouxun GMRS certified mobile radios and they work well and are easy to program. I do have the quad band KG-Q10H hand held that covers 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, 6m out of the box. It is unlock able to work on MURS and GMRS. It works well and is the hand held I use most.

Thanks for this! I am sure a lot of people considering one of these will find it helpful.

Wow. Thats a load of useless info.

See, the key is to forget to enter your PTO until the day before you leave, and then nobody knows your plans! Managers hate this one simple trick! (It's me. I'm the manager... who still needs to submit a PTO request.) I'm not stoked about my callsign being publicly tied to my name and address, but that's mostly because I figured it would get immediately scraped and sold off to some less than scrupulous advertising firms. It also just feels weird, like handing everyone at the bar a copy of your drivers license, but those are the rules we agreed to play by, I guess.

Just got off the Retevis site, I have the current available manual. Chat no help.

Tanks!