All Activity

I have the 2x4 on my wife's rig on a mag mount. She likes how it looks. Works fine on GMRS as far as I can tell. We talked 30 miles from base to it with the KG-935G+ hand held no problem. She uses a scanner with it as well and it works great for both uses.

I run a Comet 2x4SR on my SxS and it works well for GMRS right out of the package. I get between 1.6 and 1.8 SWR for 467 MHz and 1.2 SWR for 462 MHz. SWR is also good for 2m and 70cm. And I tested the SWR while the SxS was parked inside my garage so I know it will be better when it is outside and away from the metal garage doors and tracks. I am going to add the spring kit to it.

Aint that the truth. I don't have very many radios but I've seen quite the interesting difference in the ones I have.

@WRKC935 Yep, Hollywood tends to only portray a small extreme example of group. Examples of how they portray groups: All CB operators are good old boy truck drivers. All Texans wear cowboy hats and boots and say "yeeha." And the list goes on. PS Yes, I know some people here are going to claim those two examples are accurate.

It will work just not well. It's just a really kinda compromised antenna. 2m-70cm and gmrs is a real big stretch, bandwidth wise. So the swr values I got it was close to 2.1-2.5 give or take swr on the gmrs repeater. Some got lower swr, but my ditch light mount where the antenna is located is a compromise location. So take it with a grain of salt. It heard gmrs better then my Larson 270. But the Larsen is up on the car. Why? Well the Larsen is extremely flexible and can/has taken a beating. Some con with the 2x4sr. One it is thick (how it gets its bandwidth), tall and stiff. The other con is the hinge (mine started to loosen up in about a months time) as well as I found water starting to go through to the coil. If you do get it expensive. The spring (Highly recommend it) adds cost and isn't included. Mine at least whacked everything. The thickness a benefit to bandwidth, made my antenna move way to much. It rocked the mount violently with every bump, one of the main reasons I went back to the Larsen. In short if you don't need to have 2m/70cm you are better off with a dedicated gmrs 5/8th over 5/8th antenna. Sorry for the long winded post. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk

It's not designed to be tuned, but it IS designed to have an SWR of 2:1 or less on GMRS. I have one and it sweeps at < 1.7:1 on 462 and 467. So should work out of the box on GMRS. It's a tall and ugly antenna though!

Has anyone tried tuning the Comet CA 2x4 SR Dual band antenna for use on Gmrs ?? It's advertised with a bandwidth of 20mhz. so theoretically it should work. Just looking for anyone's results ?

All good points. The repeater would be at a location away from my home so if there's a problem I'd need to drive there. All I can do is try it and see how it goes.

There is something else that I believe contributes to the GMRS interest exceeding the interest in Ham radio. That's the persona of HAM. Ham radio in at least some instances has been portrayed as nerdy. It's connected to big towers in the yard with big antenna's on top of them. Have you ever even seen GMRS portrayed in a TV show or film? If it's radio related, it's always ham. It's some desk full of radios typically with the operator being some level of eccentric, or otherwise odd socially. Since GMRS isn't put on display in any fashion, people don't understand it, and therefore don't believe it's going to make other people think they are some mad scientist if they get involved with it.

Good point ! I didn't think about inverting the dcs tones.

I have the same ht.....when I got it, channel 15 would not transmit (no matter what I did in chirp) I was sent a firmware update that made everything work. I never tried to program alternate channel configs until I read this thread. I just tried programming an alternate ctcss input for (rptr 2). Radioditty uv5g on chirp and it worked just fine.......I still have the zip file of that firmware upgrade. Enter the channel frequency , set duplex to "+" and offset to 5.0, uploaded to the ht and it works fine. Now I'm playing with the GM21 - I don't think I have a use for 999 memory channels though.

As I recall that has to do with Menu 29: DSPCHANNEL being set to CH, instead of either FREQ or NAME. Push the FUN button to enter the Menu Mode and use the V/M button as UP and MAIN button as DOWN to go to Menu: 29. When you are at Menu: 29, use the UP and DOWN arrow keys to go through the 3 different selections (CH, FREQ and NAME) and pick either FREQ or NAME as you desire and then Push the FUN button to exit out of Menu Mode. V/M should now toggle between VFO and Memory (Channel) modes now.

As I recall that is a problem with version 1 of the CPS software and version 2.06 fixes that.

The BTECH GMRS Pro does not do APRS but has an APRS-like capability to send position information over the HT app. I originally bought one hoping it would be compatible with my Garmin RINO and was disappointed it was not. Admittedly I never ended up looking into it further using Rattlegram or something like that to decipher the different formats being sent.

@WRTZ750 I understand the initial question was about keeping tones private. My question is have you already assessed that it needs to be where you are? What I mean is larger city areas seem to be locations that have more of the bad element however where I am the repeaters don’t really get used that much. Most are open and the owners are glad that people make use of them when they do. Even some that require request seem to use common travel tones and I think they just want to know who’s using them. Of course your mileage may vary depending on location and people.

This ^^^

Alright great! Glad we could help. The quality control on inexpensive gear can be hit or miss. Good luck!

I used a unit of my friends, just plugged his into my cables. Worked great, no noise, no popping sounds. Returning tomorrow for refund. Thank you for the suggestions !

You could do a test. Get an adapter for the hand held to the antenna in the truck. if the the problem is still there with the hand held then it is the antenna or cable, if it is gone then the radio is likely defective.

What’s the difference whether the repeater is powered off or jammed? The end result is exactly the same. The only way to prevent it is to not have a repeater.

They need the tones to key up the repeater but they do not need to key up the repeater to jam it.

See that's where my lack of experience shows. I thought they'd need the tones to key up the repeater & jam it. I guess that's where the wifi switch can kill the repeater if someone tries jamming it. Maybe I'm expecting the worse out of people but still like to know how to counteract these things if they happen. Thx for all the shared experience here.

If by "private" you mean, "no one else can use the repeater" (or at least "someone needs the non-standard tone to use the repeater"), sure. If by "private" you actually mean PRIVATE, like no one else can hear you, that's absolutely not the case. Anyone listening to the repeater with squelch tones turned off can hear everything. But you knew that, right? Keep in mind that someone doesn't need your secret tone to jam your repeater, either.

Thanks for the internal photos Lscott. Wow, look at that delightful full sized metal shield. No wonder these radios radiate well, they have a huge "ground plane" for the whip. I stand by my statement that if one puts a true and efficient (read low loss, not steel but rather copper) whip on this radio it will radiate very well indeed.

Thanks for the input. This looks interesting. It seems that Menus 16 and 16 have only On or Off choices. I'll play with them to see what they do. I now have a second RA25 on the way which will go in our UTV. So I'll have two identical radios to see how they behave with these settings talking to each other.