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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.

For a while there, IIRC, a lot of Midlands just *were* narrowband without an option to correct / change that. Were the rest of the group to set theirs to narrowband it would have likely corrected the issue.

Cable can detract from the best antenna. It’s guaranteed you’ll have too much attenuation with 50’ of rg8. LMR400 won’t hurt you so much. It’s possible to get a cheap antenna with decent gain. I would get the LMR 400 and shop for a decent inexpensive antenna with gain figures you want. N connectors shouldn’t cost much more and they are more water resistant than UHF connectors, but if you do a good job of waterproofing you can get by with UHF connectors. The losses through uhf or sma vs N connectors aren’t enough to worry about.

This is true. Out my window I have an MXTA26 antenna on a Midland magnetic mount, on a sheet of steel sitting on top of a window air conditioner. Fortunately it's not in a place where anyone would see it, because it does look janky. But it works fairly well, and the whole thing is antenna (70), mag mount (40), adapter (10), sheet of metal (had in the garage): $120. I really doubt you could do a base-station antenna installation with LMR400 for less. And with this, I have no problem hitting a repeater 64 miles away with a handheld hooked up to the antenna.

I agree with @dosw keeping it under $100 is going to be a challenge. I did a test recently using a j-pole antenna that i purchased online for ~$39 using both RG8X (~$40) vs. LMR 400 (~$130). It was very surprising to me the difference in power loss between the two cables. If you could put you budget closer to $150 it gives you a few more options. Alternatively, the mag base options from Midland work pretty well for a budget of just under $100 if you could use a ground plane.

This is a very useful calculator. You can try different types of coax along with different antennas. One thing to remember is that antenna manufacturers list gain in dBi while that calculator uses dBd. Subtract 2.15 from the dBi to get dBd. RG8 will have 67% loss per 100 feet and LMR400 has 48% loss per 100 feet. I know LMR 400 and equivalent coax is more expensive but it is worth the extra cost over RG8 for UHF/GMRS use.

That sounds more like they were both set to narrow and the other radios were set to wide.

Found a combination that works using the Tidradios. I’m not sure what was done differently other than using the H3 radios and trying a different frequency and the connection box. Even with the duplexer they’re putting out about 3W out of the duplexer to the mag base antenna. As a test I put the Boafeng in the exact same configuration. I could only get them to work on the .600 pair. But they were pushing closer to 5W out.

I haven't personally experienced it, but I have known two people who had issues with their radios having poor transmit audio when talking to other brands but not to their own radios of the same brand. Maybe they're just a little bit off frequency? They were both using inexpensive Chinese radios, which are known to suffer from spotty quality control. I have several inexpensive Chinese radios and haven't experienced it, so obviously it's not a universal phenomenon.

My repeater is set to wideband mode, as is standard for most repeaters. All my HTs and the QYT mobile have two bandwidth modes: narrowband (NFM) and wideband (FM). However, the TYTs and the AnyTone have three modes: narrowband (NFM), wideband (WFM), and FM which I guess is something in between. Both CHIRP and the CPS default to "FM" which has worked just fine until now. All the 2 meter, 70 centimeter, and GMRS repeaters I've tried except mine work with the mode set to FM, and TBH I had forgotten there was a third setting. While I was updating the firmware and rechecking all the settings on the repeater yesterday, I remembered about the three mode settings. I set the "mode" for my repeater channel on the TH-7900 to WFM and it works just fine. However, when I set the mode on the AnyTone to WFM, it doesn't connect to the repeater just like the TYT when it was set to FM. I can only guess the three machines have slightly different definitions of "wideband" and you have to find the one that will enable the given radio/repeater combination to communicate. It's almost as if TYT and AnyTone outsmarted themselves with their multiple options. The Retevis RT97L seems perfectly happy taking input from either mode, so at least I have that going for me.

I personally have experienced this "incompatibility" if you can call it that. They were with Midland GMRS GXT740 radios, probably 2012ish manufactured. While they communicated with the other GMRS radios in our group, the audio sounded...bad...low and more background noise....on both TX and RX when communicating with any other branded GMRS radios (meaning I sounded bad to others using non-midland radios and they sounded bad to me on my Midland) Midland to Midland was fine. Yes, they are now old and they still sound bad when comm'ing with my Wouxuns or Kenwood

Does LMR400 plus a $70 antenna and a resonable mount break the budget? I guess staying below 100 is a pretty tight constraint. Be aware that you will probably want an antenna designed for "base station" use. A mobile antenna likes a vehicle body beneath it, whereas base station antennas usually have radials included with them. Anyway, here's the very useful cable loss calculator: https://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/ With this calculator you can experiment with different antenna gains and cable types to see what meets your needs. At 50 feet, you're going to want decent cable.

Dup'd

The only other thing I can think of is the duplexer is not tuned correctly on either side and the protective limiter circuit and the transmit radio is stopping it from transmitting so it doesn't break. You are going to need a VNA at a minimum to test. At this point I don't trust the duplexer. I'll kick some thoughts around, but without being right in front of it it's going to be hard to troubleshoot from this point.

I'm now leaning more to a connector problem (either the direct wire or the connector box (shown in a prev post)) coupled with a possible duplexer problem. I've swapped btwn 2 cords and the connector box, all combinations of 6 different radios (from 2 different man'f), high side/low side connections on the duplexer, antenna combinations, frequency pairs, etc. I can still get a receive and transmit using either the cords or the connector box (this box only works with H3's) when not connected to the duplexer. Using the connector box, the transmit radio does key up on today's trials but it doesn't stay in transmit long enough to actually say anything. I am still open to new thoughts or ideas and will give it some more thought over the weekend. I don't have an issue hooking things up and doing some basic troubleshooting, but I'm out of my element and don't have the tools to troubleshoot much further.