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Thanks for the antenna type update. Little big for mobile use. Also rather expensive too. I haven't noticed hardly any MURS traffic by me. Anyway by the time you feed in the legal limit of 2 watts, no one uses their modified 50 watt 2M rig do they, and get maybe 1 to 1.5 watts at the antenna it still isn't going to go far.

Has anyone done any research on what the new tariffs will be on imports for two-way radio equipment? The "de minimis" $800 exception on imports is set to end on 8/29/2025. The import code for radio/TV/Sound equipment seems to be HTS Code 85256011. However I can't seem to find any up to date reliable info on what the tariffs are. In fact some sites claim there is an exception, zero tax. Since this seems to change almost daily it's hard to track down any info that is usable. If there is an exception then it going to be business as usual. Otherwise might have to change "CCR", cheap Chinese radios, to "ECR", expensive Chinese radios.

Do a search on YouTube for VNASaver. There are a bunch of videos on how to use it and have you up and running in under 10 minutes.

I'll have to look up NanoVNA Saver. Also, I know ground plane plays a big part in the efficiency of the antenna and it hit or miss with an HT. I just wanted to get an idea of where each antennas "sweet spots" were so I'd have a better idea of which one to use for what. Plus I think it'd be a fun video for my channel.

Comet GP-6NC dual band GMRS/MURS. SWR is as close to perfect out of the box as you can get on GMRS, pretty dang good on 70cm, decent on 2m but sucks on MURS (151.8MHz and 154.6MHz) - what it advertised for but still usable. I'd rather have 2m than MURS anyway.

What antenna was this? The results look VERY good! This is my 20 plus year old Comet Dual band SWR scan. They don't make this model any more. They should. I have one new in the green shipping sleeve. Look at the top center photo, the green sleeve on the left side. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/469-antenna-collectionjpg/ https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/471-mobile-mount-with-antenna-rear-view/?context=new This is why I really hate to give it up. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/282-ca-2x4mb-scansjpg/?context=new

Hey everyone. Is anyone aware of any GMRS clubs in the SE PA (specifically Bucks County) area? I'm not having much luck finding any, or any local repeaters that I can hit (outside of a very powerful one that seems to belong to LEARN - I won't poke that bear...). The closest club I see listed here on the site is Berks, which isn't that close to me. Thanks!

I would go ahead and try it! Even if the results are a bit "screwy" there is some benefit if comparing different antennas on the same test setup.

Did that include an 80 foot tower and concrete footing? Along with the coax to reach the antenna on top, and the antenna? I paid $1500 for my Btech RPT 50 which included the duplexer and can use any of the 8 pair whenever I feel like it.

This! Nano VNASaver is just so much easier to use and gets you more easily viewed results.

I usually do a sweep of 430MHz to 470MHz (70cm and GMRS) and 140MHz to 155MHz (2m and MURS), the bands I'm most interested in and document it with VNASaver. I've never actually used the interface on the VNA itself (small screen, bad eyes) when I can use the computer to do it all on a 27" monitor.

I've got a Hytera purchased from retired school district equipment on Ebay for cheap.. About a year ago their was tons of this on the market as schools and cities went digital. In fact, one of them out of the two i purchased was brand new in the box.. My investment for the RightSide repeater including duplexer and antenna is less than 2K and right now if i sell the spare that i have i can actually make more on it than what i paid for both.. This repeater even has a controller built in.. In my mind, spending 7K for a repeater, with good equipment available on the used market is ludicrous. But hey,, each their own.

I would get it. If nothing else the parts can be scavenged. That looks a lot like the Comet dual band Antenna I have which works very well. It also looks like they have a pretty long length of coax that might be worthless for GMRS but usable for lower frequencies.

When I tried testing HT antennas that was basically my experience too. There are far too many variables to control for to get good results. As a general observation I found the VHF testing is very hit or miss. Generally the antennas are a helical design, thus far shorter than a 1/4 wave. There is way insufficient area for an effective ground using the radio chassis only, they really need to be held in the hand. The antennas are "tuned" to take that into account. Whereas the UHF antennas are close to a real 1/4 wave and the metal chassis of the larger HT's come closer to a minimum size ground plane. I had fair luck testing them with a small sheet metal plate to simulate the ground plane. Many of the older HT's used hybrid power amp sections. I had downloaded some datasheets to see what the spec's are. The surprising thing I saw was the max SWR rating. Some were as high as 20:1! M67798LRA.pdf M68732H.pdf

By the time I get done with mine it'll be $7K not including my labor.

Helps that you're up on a small hill too.

^That's where I'm probably going to go with it. Thanks.

This is a thankless task with handheld antennas. There's way too much interaction with the HT and your body to do any real-world analysis. I set up a test rig for this, but decided that it wasn't worthwhile testing antennas beyond a "probably good / probably fake" check on their factory tuning. My setup is a 36" diameter aluminum disc with a hole in the center with a mating SMA-M connector and 25' of RG316 coax. The disc is supported off the (concrete) floor with three 3" Teflon cubes (which I had laying around). These components are inside a shielded, un-powered building. The other end of the coax runs through a building penetration to a NanoVNA H4. The NanoVNA is connected to a laptop PC via a USB cable with ferrites at each end, and the laptop PC is running on battery power to avoid coupling AC line noise into the NanoVNA or antenna line. This gives me nice, repeatable readings which have little to no relevance in the real world.

Your repeater works pretty decent. I was hitting it pretty strong from 605 for a ways last month.

I got my NanoVNA H2 in today and was planning on doing a video on antenna swril with the antennas I have. I'd originally planned on doing a 401 node sweep of from 120MHz to 470MHz then see where each antenna worked best between that range. Now I'm thinking I should break each range up by Band(2M, 1.25M, MURS, 70cm, and GMRS)to get more accurate readings. Does that sound about right? I'm curious to see which antennas are more limited to some frequencies and which word on a broader spectrum. Should be a fun experiment and make for an interesting video.

I got my repeater up for under $1k .. Not the biggest/best in the area but it has about 900sq miles of coverage.

You can get a decent repeater going for 2k.

You got ten grand?

Received the radio today and enjoying it so far! CPS and Chirp Windows 11 (via UTM virtual machine) wasn’t recognizing my old programming cable right away so figured I’d try Chirp on Mac. There’s actually good support for this radio’s features including the channel banks and just saw that support for the v0.44 firmware changes just got merged into Chirp too so should be in the next release.

If swr is halfway decent it will work just fine... i have been operating a 25w anytone 778uv base setup(just upgraded to 50w anytone 5888uv, which seems to output about 42w on gmrs) off a "bingfu" 30" mobile dual band antenna literally electrical taped to a piece of conduit with a radial ground plane, and can operate a repeater 22 miles away on a daily basis, on a $30 antenna showing approximately a 1.9-2.2swr on gmrs frequencies.... and i can hit the repeater better than someone right up the road from me also running 50w, thru a commercial 6' comet for gmrs, with a 1.4 swr across the repeater band.... All that said, TLDR..... get the free antenna and see what it can do.... worst that can happen is the FREE amtenna doesnt work well, and you end up padsing it along to someone else who can use it....