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Your GMRS license is your authorization to own and operate a repeater. Monitoring all 462 and 467 main frequencies for awhile is a good idea to check to see if any channels may be in use for other repeaters.

Welcome to GMRS world. The tower stuff is a challenge and can be a handshake deal to a lease with a million dollar insurance policy. All depends on how hard you look. One thing I have noticed since I moved to the south is the amount of buildings with an old tower out back with no antenna or a damaged antenna on them. Alot of old car repair places, tractor supply and manufacturing buildings have them. Back home we found a warehouse that had multiple antennas on the roof. I was able to manage an agreement with the owner to use the UHF antenna for GMRS in trade for cleaning up the radio room and helping with some small projects. It worked well until he sold the building. The biggest issue with any tower owner is going to be access. The other thing many look for is done right work. Not saying it needs to be a $10,000 repeater but don't show up with 2 baofengs in a tupperware container. When doing the install use common sense and do what you can to make it correct. Proper cable, connectors, grounding is all key to a good working unit and a good looking unit. Another location I had one I was responsible for my own power. $35.00 a month i could do split between some buddies. I wouldn't even try to talk to American Tower or an of the big tower folks unless you have a few grand a month to burn a hole. Look for those like above.

Corey, the reason I'd like to play with solid-state filters is to push the state of the art forward. Cavities are perfectly serviceable, and I intend to use them in my first repeater. However, at some point I'd like to build a truck-mounted transportable repeater, and it doesn't have room for a 19" equipment rack. That means compromises in order to achieve acceptable performance and flexibility. Complexity gets me great performance - imagine a hydrogen balloon carrying the antenna, tethered to the truck bed by some G-line - but drives up the cost something fierce. It'd be a fun project, though, when I'm independently wealthy. In the meanwhile, I shall content myself with only a modest improvement in antenna height. Also, if I ever ended up with a lunchbox repeater like that, I'd be using an external linear amp to give it some respectable power output... ideally also a lunchbox form factor with an internal backup power supply. Berkinet, I've looked at tiny fifty-watt duplexers on Amazon (about fifty bucks) that would easily fit in a single-DIN car mounting. I suspect that's what the lunchbox repeater is using. Alas, cars these days don't tend to have any DIN mounts, let alone extras. I just can't afford the equipment to tune them myself, and I'm not sanguine about what I've heard about thermal drift on these things' calibration. In a perfect world, there'd be community repeaters I could borrow everywhere I go, but most of the time I'm somewhere where I can't reach 'em, though at home I can sometimes barely hear the two in the region. Jones, I do want an eight-channel repeater, and I want it cheap. Not for me, but for the future of our hobby and the service as a whole. If everybody could drop no more than $500 on a repeater and a cute little chimney-top tower, suburbia will be blanketed in community repeaters, and the utility and value of having a radio increases exponentially. Cost, complexity, and colocation will kill budding hobbyists' ambitions, and in the same way you say "just use simplex" hams tell me "just use a cellphone". I'd prefer not to be beholden to people whose business model includes AI-driven ad tracking and selling personal information; the competition will ultimately limit their options for screwing their customers over. If people put wi-fi on those community repeaters' cute little towers, many people could get by without any cell plan at all. I don't want to be the underutilized slice of UHF that gets sold to AT&T next... best way to avoid that, in my opinion, is to increase traffic and use until cell phone companies will look at the spectrum, sigh, and realize that even if they did buy it they'd never in their wildest dreams of enforcement success be able to stop all the people with walkie talkies from causing constant 5G blackouts, and won't be tempted to lobby for this. That's why I want an eight-channel repeater. Not for me, but for everybody.

I've been running multiple 900mhz repeaters for years. It is a great band. Similar to 440mhz but with sharper nulls etc... The trick is finding clear input and output freqs...my machines are on odd splits because of that but since everyone is on commercial radios it doesnt matter. Motorola GTX and MCS2000 are my preference. KENWOOD TK-981 my other preference. For at home base antennas comet makes a really well performing fiberglass vertical. LMR-400 or better is damn near mandatory. Thats my 2cents. FYI nyc based.

The M1225 series radios are good, if you have a way to program them as they need an older computer to program them. I personally use Kenwood TK880's which have software readily available online and will work on modern computers. They are first responder grade which means integrity & reliability are there, and not as expensive as the 1225's normally cost.

A tip on reading the advice regarding radio suggestions. There is a tendency for ham operators to be more willing to use commercial and/or used equipment. On the other hand, those who started with GMRS or came from CB tend to prefer turn-key purpose made gear. Neither is better or worse than the other. But, depending on your needs and abilities, there might be a difference to you. You check under the avatar to see if a member lists a ham license. Most, but not all, hams do. Personally, I like Motorola equipment and the M1225 is a fine radio. But, consider the info under my avatar. YMMV And, +1 on bluemax49ers for your programming cable needs.