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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.

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.