All Activity

@WSIK532 the entire process from setup and initial testing to the finalized range test and cleanup was about 2 hours. The actual tuning itself only takes a few minutes.

@marcspaz How long did it take to tune it?

Wait what? you doing a giveaway... Cool!

Well, define 'abandoned'. There are a number of towers that are owned by someone, all over the US that are not currently active, but are not by what I believe you are inferring, abandoned. Many are indeed owned by the major vertical real estate companies like Crown Castle or American Tower. Some are owned but private individuals or businesses that are not in the vertical real estate business, but do own the property a tower sits on. You are no doubt asking because you want to put up a repeater and think if you can find an abandoned tower, that you can just roll up in there and get to work putting up a repeater on it and no one will care. Well, good luck with that. First issue is there isn't a piece of property anywhere in the US that's not owned or claimed by someone else already. And if there is a tower on it, someone put that tower there. As a person that manages and maintains a tower. Like a real tower, not a 20 foot pipe on the end of my house, but a 240 foot microwave tower sitting on 1.3 acre's of land with a building. Here's what you face, IF you can find an abandoned tower or one that someone will allow you to have full access to. First is an electric bill. Because you simply are NOT going to find some rich benefactor that will not only allow you access to their tower, but pay your power bill as well. Second is the building condition. If it's truly abandoned, and unused, then it's not being maintained. So the roof will leak, the door may or may not even close. You may face it being full of animals, birds and lots of poop. Bird poop will give you an incurable disease. Don't remember what it's called, but look it up, it's a thing. So getting the building ready to put a repeater in might require a hazmat suit and respirator to just be in and out of the thing. And mold.... yeah, gonna be plenty of that too. Now, getting the power turned back on may well require permits, and civil engineering plans with PE stamps to obtain the permits. We had to do that too. More money. If the crack heads have been there stealing wire, then you are rewiring the building. Again, been there and done that. More money. Then there is the tower. What shape is it really in? Is it a guyed tower, or free standing? Is it rusted or in reasonable shape? Guyed towers will hide dangers. The anchor heads will rust just below the ground and you will not see that if you don't dig them up. Simply attempting to climb a tower with that issue may cause the tower to fall, with you on it. Then there is the base pier, the grouting and all that other stuff that since you are asking this question, you know nothing about. You don't posses the knowledge to even judge the structural integrity of the tower to begin with. This can create TWO issues. First is simple. If you are on the tower and it falls, you die. Second issue is you have someone else on the tower and it falls, they die, and you get sued by both the tower owner in front of 12 people that have equally no clue about a tower but know YOU were allowed to access it and it's down and someone died. And not only will the family of the dead guy be suing you, but so will the tower site owner to claim you were at fault, and responsible, but also to protect himself from that family from coming after him. Just depends on who gets to the court house first with the lawyers to file the suit. A friend told me once ' I can't afford free" and free towers typically very few can afford, and they don't figure that out until they have made some level of commitment to do something with a site that they have no business being involved with. But I will tell you this. There are NO FREE ABANDONED towers anywhere that you are gonna just walk into and put up a repeater at without significant cost. And remember that we haven't talked about repeaters, cable, antenna's or any of that yet.

@marcspaz Great Job! i know @LeoG will be excited!

I'm not going to try any unlocking I was just curious.

Mines says 5R-M8 GM-V02

Hey folks! For people looking for an affordable duplexer that works well, I may have a solution for you. For those of you who have been following the thread, you may be aware that our friend @LeoG had a problem with a duplexer in his B-Tech repeater. They exchanged it for him, but I offered to take a look at the duplexer, hoping that we could get a spare available, or a second for another machine. I have to say, I am impressed. The duplexer is a SGQ-450D. It is a traditional six cavity mobile duplexer, made in China, and the cost is about $115-$120. When I first got the duplexer, I connected it to a VNA. The unit looked like it was tuned perfectly, the notch and SWR were great... it was just on the wrong frequency, preventing it from working on GMRS. I connected it to a radio and a dummy load, checking both sets of filters, and it worked perfectly. The downfall with duplexers setup like the ones installed in the B-Tech repeaters isn't the duplexer itself, but rather the tuning. What companies do to make these wideband (and what I found with this duplexer), they tune the 3 receive cavities to slightly overlap instead of perfectly align. Also, the 3 transmit cavities to slightly overlap instead of perfectly align. What you end up with is about 500KHz-700KHz of filtering at about 45dB-50dB on each side, for a max of about 100dB of isolation. While not terrible, it leaves a lot of room for improvement, which is easily accomplished if you align all 3 cavities to work on the same frequency. @LeoG asked to have the duplexer aligned to 462.600/467.600. On the high side, I was able to get a minimum of -85dB notch centered at 462.600MHz. On the low side, I was able to get a minimum of -87.4dB notch centered at 467.600MHz. That is better than -172dB of isolation... almost double what the previous tune was. Here are the final tune-up results. Isolation = > -172dB Transmit SWR = 1.08:1 Receive SWR = 1.18:1 Loss due to SWR = 0.0064dB Total Insertion Loss is <1dB For a test, I hooked it up to my portable repeater while at my house. I got the same range as with my personal duplexer. For comparison, these specs are on par with my SinTech/Sinclair duplexer, which is priced 4 times higher than the SGQ-450D. The duplexer will be shipped back to Leo next week. I am looking forward to his real-world feedback after the tune-up. Below are a few images of the duplexer and the tuning results.

Repeater to repeater yes. Repeater to a phone app, not so much. Motorola's WAVE will do it but only for MOTOTRBO repeaters running in digital. There are other commercial solutions, I can think of several, none are cheap. I was referencing phone linking. But, the systems that link phones to repeaters are the same systems that link repeaters to other repeaters in analog.

All my contacts with customer support for Tidradio have been positive. They've never told me no we won't replace it. And they've never asked for the old one to be returned.

Wait and save up some more money. $100 isn't going to get you a quality setup. It'll be more satisfying if you start off with a nice setup instead of replacing it a few time and buying the same thing more than once. I would start with an antenna with a 7.2dBi gain and some LMR400. Find out what it costs and save up for it. You'll also need a chimney mount or roof mount which is going to add to the price tag. Along with minor things like cable clips, water proofing, tools for installation etc. If you are insistent on getting something up now then go with some sort of a mobile antenna. Even something small mounted up high is going to be better than something inside the house on a lower floor.

Why would you have to pay the tariff on a warranty replacement? Contact customer support. If they want money tell them no.

I am high where I am. 20 feet of Bolton 600 and a Laird 4607 works for me. Sweet setup. Mouser has the best prices on the TE connectivity antennas. The Bolton LMR600 equivalent is inexpensive and durable. Install and enjoy.

Feedline and antenna then radio. If you need a high antenna then mast/tower height enters the equation. Lowest loss feedline and a high antenna = great results. A great radio is icing on the cake.

Did you buy the PLUS tdh3? Wondering if they’ve fixed this no wattage on the new version

Try doing a reset and booting the radio in unlocked mode. Use chirp to program a paste and copy gmrs channel list, and modify as you need. Then see if your radio registers on the meter. If not, download new firmware, inside the firmware file is another folder called tdh3 boost or power boost or something to that affect. Turn all values to 255. See if you are good. If so, go back and set channels 8 through 14 to a value of 20 which seems to be around .5/.8 watts on my radio. Good luck. These TidRaidos imo are piles of steaming dog poo. Don’t forget to turn the duplex off in programming if you put any frequencies in that you are not privileged to operate on! But in the end if you don’t enjoy pulling your hair out return the TID RADIOS for anything I mean anything else!!

The original UV-5G or the new UV-5G Plus? If it's the UV-5G Plus, it is the same hardware as the UV-5RH and you can flash 5RH firmware to it to turn it into an amateur radio. There's no known firmware file to flash back to a 5G Plus, so this is a one-way trip out of GMRS land. If you press and hold the [8] key while turning on, both a 5G Plus and a 5RH will say "5RH" at the top, some version, and one of "GMRS", "General" or "Part 97" on the bottom. The UV-5RM will say "5RHBK" at the top. AFAIK, switching General / Part 97 is a "magic salute" on these, except for the 5G Plus which seems to have custom firmware that ignores that.

I run The New JC 700 near the intersection of Kennedy (no relation) and Montgomery. You should be able to find it with search by location. Right now I'm making do with a simple antenna at a lower elevation than I'd like - I had an antenna on order, but the Commscope -> Andrew transition being a complete disaster with prices more than tripling and commercial customers being quoted 4-5 months lead time for standard models. You can read more at https://www.glaver.org/TheNewJC700 which has a link back to my repeater sign-up page here.

I have had two H3's for a year now. Never had any problems with transmit power on either. But I have also NEVER charged them using the cradle charger... and always charge the batteries while they are disconnected from the radios. (I bought an extra battery for each radio and charge them off radio and swap in the fully charged battery. )

Welcome!

I realize that’s several things different. To make sure it wasn’t an anomaly I took it all apart and reassembled and it worked again. There is an appreciable delay in the transmit (a couple of seconds) but if you wait it out it does work. Another change was in the transmission time. With the connector box cable there must be something that recognizes transmission. If you aren’t talking it stops transmission. Almost like a VOX on the radio would work. I think that was also throwing me off before. So for now, I have all the working components with the main parts being the duplexer (tuned for multiple pairs) and the two H3 radios connected using the connector box cable. I was hoping to get closer to the RT97S power >5W but with the H3 HTs it seems like 3W is going to be the top end.

Yeah, one of three of my TD-H3's doesn't register any power on the SW-33+ I've debated contacting their customer support, but with my luck I'd pay an import tariff and get another lemon.

That's certainly possible. I didn't examine the radios myself, but both owners insisted they had checked that.

Just wanted to say hello and drop my first post!

Yes, I'm doing that as we speak, due to me going down south in a couple of weeks.