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Facebook Marketplace a danger zone.. A guy selling items from his home, giving one of his buyers his home address found out the hard way.. Apparently he friended a buyer one day, telling the friendly buyer all about him and his wife's upcoming two week cruise. The guy came home to a ransacked empty home. The buyers breadcrumbs on Facebook were fake.. Never caught

Agreed. One of the ranch’s we work with run them. Super easy to use, super cheap. They have like 50of them. They do the job and work with the ranch repeater. The only issue is only one channel to monitor so I can’t use simplex and monitor the repeater. But I always bring my own dual watch radio anyway. .

I know how to, most crooks will not worry about traveling too far and most done know what ham or gmrs is. let alone if they hear callsign very few know how to look up a call sign

This is my opinion. The BF-888s by Baofeng makes for a handy GMRS HT. Paired with a Nagoya NA-701G antenna, I have found RX and TX to be quite clear. It's 16 channels can be programmed via CHIRP. It has 5 watts of power, so I set up 15 of its channels to GMRS 1-7 and 15-22. The 16th channel can be set up to whatever you like or left blank. When scanning is enabled through CHIRP, channel 16 becomes your scanner. The radio is super lightweight, which I find ideal for carrying on my belt. It's very inexpensive. The last 2 pack with charging docks that I purchased was $19.99. So, accidents are not very heartbreaking. In fact, the Nagoya 701g antenna is only a dollar cheaper than the 2 pack of these radios. Are there better radios out there? Absolutely. Is this radio part 95? Absolutely not. But with the proper programming, one can stay within all the other "rules". There are no fancy screens and buttons. Just a knob for volume, and a knob to select channel. The voice prompt lets you know what channel you're on. This is an ideal option for helping family members that are not tech savvy get into GMRS with very little to confuse them. I just wanted to give my personal review of what I think is a great little budget HT. It has become my everyday carry for home and work. May the haters now commence their hate speeches.

I think you’re asking how to lookup a licensee’s address. Is that correct?

Back in the 90s, and individual spent 3 years in a federal prision and had to pay a $10,000 fine and write an I'm sorry letter for transmitting obscenities on police freqs. The investigation to his dirty deeds started after a series of him transmitting with obscenities and when he was admonished on the air and he replied "Go "F" yourself. After he was identified as the possible suspect and while he was under surveillance, and he was caught in the act while on a transit bus. Subsequently, he was arrested and was prosecuted in a Federal Court with State charges also pending. Also, a search warrant was obtained to search his residence.

Ok since I work in a prison, I'll ask the experts lol Most said what's ham, and gmrs how would I get there address from letters and numbers. One said if there over two hours away it's not worth the time to try it because what if someone is home or what if there poorer than me it would be a waste of time. No, I didn't ask them but after 18 years I've talked to a few about crime shows so serval ideas have come up.

Talk about spoon feeding. Some one went to the trouble of posting the manual and you still couldn’t be bothered to read it? What is wrong with people.

Ok but that’s not a picture of the 210freeway I know every single inch of the 210. So what is it and why is this a post?

Well, according to the manual that @WRUE951 posted a couple comments above, it’s #28.

I haven't heard of hacking a digital system but like anything else, it's possible. But i think much more difficult for the average person with Digital when you consider hacking ' eavesdropping

Sounds like the violator had better be VERY careful in his response letter to the FCC. Should probably send them a pic of the radio with a bullet hole through it, LOL.

Thanks! Just to ask, does anyone know which Baofeng CTCSS code number is 162.2 Hz?

I thought perhaps since OP didn’t specify GMRS repeaters in their statement (I fully acknowledge that’s likely what they were talking about). it would be worth mentioning ham repeaters as well. Which according to Repeater Book there are 1,707 Texas repeaters in the database. Add the 112 GMRS repeaters or 263 if you count stale and offline repeaters listed here, and all the repeaters that are not listed here it would be safe to say Texas has a significant number of repeaters. Hopefully OP finds this encouraging and if there are no repeaters in their area because like it was mentioned it’s a big place, do as @OffRoaderX often says you can be the pillar of your community and add one. He has an affiliate link bellow for you.

The all digital systems are at more risk than the old systems IMO, and in more of a catastrophic way. My Son works in MD and there entire digital system was hacked and shut down. Never was an issue with the old system. Wasted so much money going to digital to only end up not even being able to go old school because everything was removed. I think they would have preferred a random interference.

yup, it's not illegal to 'program'. rather illegal to transmit on an unauthorized frequency.

"illegally programmed" is...certainly a hell of a phrase to use.

Good info here. Thanks. Chirp really is your friend with this radio. I would add for someone new to remember that the programming for the RA87 has a left and right side. Cut and paste makes it nice going from side to side if you want to duplicate things. I’ll use Chirp to set one side for local channels and repeaters and set up the other for travel repeaters.

I say an intentional act. Cities Counties, etc selling off old radios decommision them and clean of all programing. The guy admitted to tuning into a police frequency and also menat he had to tune in the correct PL tones. A few years ago the same thing happened in our community. After about two days a squad of Hams assisting the cops were able to zero in on the offender. The FCC in this case was notified after they nailed the guy and according to the news accounts, the FCC handled the problem.. Now days with Public Safety going all digital its almost impossible to breach their systems.

The things that could be better on the 5RM: It's a little on the large size, particularly when compared to the tiny UV5R. It doesn't have a squelch knob as higher end models often have. It's not weatherproof, but it's so cheap it probably doesn't really matter. It doesn't allow for dividing the 999 channels into scan-banks, as some higher end models allow. The lowest power setting is about 2.2w, which exceeds the power limits of some bands it wasn't explicitly designed to work with (GMRS channels 8-14 are max 0.5w. MURS is max 2.0w). Of course it's not made for those frequencies; it's a ham radio. But people often do use it for those bands. The display is rather hard to read in bright daylight. Some of the menus and secondary functions of the number-pad buttons are counter-intuitive or even mislabeled. However, for approximately $30, it's the best radio I'm aware of. Models that are substantially better tend to cost substantially more. It's my most frequently used handheld.

Yeah but some of us enjoy helping others out.

He probably had no clue it would transmit an authentication code and he was trying to use it as a scanner. or not?

This bubbled up on my local feed today. I am not sure if this was an honest error or if this dude was legit trying to get into the law enforcement system, but the FCC only sent a no-no letter. Part of me thinks that if it was an honest error and the person was just trying to repurpose the radio, that's fine... don't do it again. Another part of me is thinking "he admitted to putting the radio on that frequency himself, which implies some nefarious behavior and he should get more than a warning." Anyway, just a reminder to try not to cause interference when you are attempting to repurpose those older LMR Part 90 radios. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-410850A1.pdf Snip of text...