All Activity

Neat! Probably a bit of both, plus a dash of luck.

I have traveled and spent time camping all over the place. The only place i have encountered 70CM tropospheric ducting is right here in the Indian Wells Valley or the foot of the Sierras. And the traffic i was picking up was coming form Southern California, just a mere 140miles south. Although i tried a couple times, i never was able to make a contact with someone 'ducting' in but their conversions were coming in like there were sitting next to me.

I do tropospheric ducting with GMRS. Just takes the right conditions. And I've never really gotten huge distances. Just impossible connections. Where I am and where I connected has a huge mountain in between that makes it impossible to have any sense of LOS. It's only about 70 miles and it only happens in the summer. And it's only happened once this summer and I'm not sure if it's conditions or from me going from a 7.2dBi to a 9.8dBi gain antenna. There was one night were I was able to connect and talk with several people with my HT and they said it was R9. Very unlikely unless you live in SoCal....

IIRC both are primarily line of sight so performance should be roughly the same, especially with HTs. You can take advantage of troposheric ducting with 11m/CB for the occasional long distance connection (whereas UHF just punches through the atmosphere) but you can't rely on that for regular communications.

just don't spill it on ya

you have a point.. my shirt was looking out for for me

and you didn't spill coffee on your shirt reading it.. you're lucky

two violators don't make a right

Hey just like GMRS!

Uh... unless I'm mistaken this is not correct. AM CB will talks more fars than FM, no? As to @LeoG's question as to what is the difference? FM is a little cleaner, sounds a little warmer. But nobody, en masse, is talking on it so unless it's you and someone else you plan to have comms with, there's no need to get one. I have one. It stays on AM band 24/7.

I'm really wrestling with what, in this thread, is the most odd and simultaneously impressive. The fact that the OP has been a member of this site for 4 years and has only just now chosen to post or the fact that his first post is literally a letter to POTUS. I applaud the energy you expended on what is almost certainly a wasted effort.

We had someone doing that on our 2m and GMRS repeaters a few months back. The person would play sirens and a police scanner. What made it worse is the person did it during our nets. Saying anything just made it worse. So we just started to ignore the ID10T and he stopped after a bit. We also had a drunk that we sent a certified letter to stating he is no longer welcomed on our repeater. He stopped after receiving the letter. We still don't know if he was the one playing the sirens and police scanner over the repeaters.

Hopefully you didn't get any coffee on your keyboard and monitor or phone.

One of the local linked repeaters near me has been in almost constant chaos the last few days from somebody playing music on the repeater/network. Don't know what is worse - the person causing the interference or the folks wining about it but it's a fun battle to listen to.

Donny - " Wait, didn't I appoint someone to the FCC ?

President's agenda today: Zoom call with Putin Zoom call with Zalenski Status update on painting the fence black Hurricane hitting the eastern seaboard Tanning spray Touch up the quaffe Redistrict Texas and California voting. Say something to offend the vocal minority. (800 other things) (200 more things) Listen to an update on what letters to the president rose to the level of making it into the report (he's on the treadmill at the same time though) This letter didn't make honorable mention

He's our boy.

and sending a letter to the President? Talk about going 'over heads'

Damit... I need to change my shirt.. I spilt coffee all over my fresh clean shirt.. Damit... To early for this

If you want to ask the FCC a question ask them to make a slew of repeater only channels so they don't interfere with simplex. And make sure they add them up or down, not in between.

Do owners of these radios call themselves H8ers?

I've read that it was so the manufacturers could sell the same units in the US and Europe. That may be true because the CB I bought a few months ago has a way to set it to different regions.

I'm afraid I have to jump on the "only 8 repeater pairs" bandwagon. In my area, there aren't a whole of repeaters and mostly they don't get a lot of traffic, but when they do, they tie up their associated simplex channel. Amateur radio has exponentially more bandwidth to play with, so that's not a significant issue.

We do not need linked GMRS repeaters for all the reasons everyone stated. A local repeater with lots of traffic can make the corresponding simplex channel pretty useless even with tones set. Even if you have tones seen on your radio, others without tones can still hear you. I can give a good example of this. The local nursing home decided to start using hand held radios on Channel 17 - 462.600 MHz. Our GMRS repeater uses the repeater channel 17 - input 467.600 MHz and output 462.600 MHz. Now I was the only one hearing the nursing home since it is only about 400 yards away from me. But the nursing home was hearing ALL traffic on the repeater. So we pretty much made the simplex channel 17 useless for the nursing home. It did not take long for the nursing home to switch to a different channel. The only time I can possibly see a need to link GMRS repeaters is during an emergency. But that won't do any good if the internet is down. Your best bet is to get your amateur general license so that you can use all of the HF bands for long distance communication. Linked 2m and 70cm repeaters are no guarantee during an emergency since they still use the internet. On a side note but still related. There has been a lot of tropospheric ducting lately causing band openings on GMRS. Over the last week or so I have been hearing quite a few GMRS repeaters on the same channel with the same tones as our GMRS repeater. Just because I can hear the other repeaters doesn't mean that they will hear me but this does cause a lot of traffic on the repeater channel that I would normally not hear.

Opportunity for the manufactures to sell more radios with "New Features" for more money.