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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.

Here's what it looks like on my GM-30 with no programming....fresh from the factory if you will...

Good eye!

Thank you Sshannon. I believe you're correct. I think my radio is just fine.

How do you plan on doing that?

Thank you for your response WSAK691. I agree that nothing is wrong with the radio. I however am no expert.

It doesn’t matter that one is DCS and the other is CTCSS. In either case squelch is opened up and audio from any present signal is reproduced.

I somehow got my 779uv stuck in channel mode. When I press V/M I just hear a denial beep. I know I did something wrong in the menu. I can't factory restore because I misplaced my cable. Does anyone have a solution?

The CTCSS and DCS only serve the purpose of "breaking things open". Both the repeaters and your radio. Once they have, traffic flows. Nothing is wrong with anything, aside from the poor coordination of the parties running those repeaters. We have a couple of repeaters doing that to eachother in my area as well. I think that the root of the problem is that when the FCC laid out the band plan for GMRS with the 8 repeater pairs, they didn't expect people to go "full ham radio club" and put things on towers that get out forever. So in some regions it's getting to be problematic.

I had every intention of offering the mia culpa. More information came to light and I've decided to sit tight.

Actually, I said dang hard instead of impossible so as to leave myself an out because I know some fool will spend the rest of today, all day tomorrow, and probably well into the weekend trying to find some American-made radio just to prove me wrong, and he probably would find some obscure used radio like a BK on Ebay that someone hacked. You know who those people are, you rail on them all the time.

Yes. I just got the Baofeng GM-15 Pro software installed and started using it so I don't know a lot yet but so far, so good. I did notice that some of the TX frequencies on the DIY channels are not correct. I haven't tried to contact Baofeng about it yet. Edit: Just noticed the one I posted is wrong.

And change the tones from time to time.

I think you are correct Sshannon. What I really wanted to know however was if my radio was acting incorrectly by allowing these frequencies to cross each other like that. I've been told that because one has DCS and one has CTCSS that that should not happen. What do you think? By the way, I do believe at least one or two pairs are open near here.