Leaderboard

Thanks for info! I'm on the interstate about 7-8 hours a week, and I scan GMRS, FRS, and MURS but have never heard anyone who was a trucker. I really don't hear much of anything except kids on FRS.

Just to clarify my earlier post about flaggers, etc.. I was not questioning the legality of anything, I was simply replying to another post about hearing "flaggers" and reporting what I hear and on which service.

Taking the lack of understanding of the rules out of the picture for a second... I think it's being discussed in GMRS groups because of channel sharing with FRS. I also think there is a lot of confusion due to the name "Family Radio Service". The name implies that it is for use by families, not businesses. Lets be honest... most people live by the concept of "when all else fails, read the directions." If purpose and rules are occasionally misinterpreted by the people trying to understand by reading them... you can imagine that people who don't, would be exponentially more confused. Just a thought anyway.

Im using a headache rack to mount antennas on my ford Superduty. The GMRS antenna is mounted on the top center of the rack. It is a unity gain (6") nmo mount on a 6"x6"x1/16 plate. Also on the headache rack are co-phase 4' firestick 5/8 wave antennas. They are 5'6" apart and mounted on plates 4 inches behind the rack. Both antennas are completely exposed to each other. The rack is bonded to the bed with 4 8ga stranded coper wires. The rack is also bonded to cab with 4 8ga stranded copper. I am also running a 30 mHz low filter on the system before it splits to co-phase. This brought swr down to 1.1.

Just an observation, I live near the junction of I-84 (major east/west) and I-5 (major north/south) Interstate highways. CB traffic is beginning to come back on I-84 which is across Columbia river from my house ( 4 miles and almost visible) I have only heard gmrs a couple of times but always on GMRS 18.(no call signs) CB is several an hour on ch 19, and ch 17. Again, just an observation.

My last trip cross country reinforced that CB is not anywhere near as popular as in the 70's and 80's. We still use them routinely while 4x4ing along with GMRS. I have had good luck and am very pleased with the Stryker SR-A 10 antenna which is a base loaded antenna. Outperformed the Wilson 5000 in my case. I can get 10 miles pretty easily with a legal CB, maybe because it is so dead around here. Around town here though the whip on the SR-A 10 which is the same as the Wilson 1000 & 5000 in length hit every drive through and tree hanging over the roads in my neighborhood and why I use the 36" short load whip. Although CB is not as busy as before I still find it useful while traveling cross country which we do every summer. Still trying to figure out the order and thinking I will center the CB antenna and then put the GMRS antenna halfway between the CB antenna and the rear of the cab of the truck. Think this will work out OK? Any reasons why I shouldn't?

at 138 miles apart I would say co-channel would be more of a given.

It seems to me the central challenge is to use the tower to mount a remote station in order to hit a GMRS repeater that is 138 miles from "my" mountain. ​In other words place a remote controlled station on the mountain top to talk to the remote repeater. The secondary issue is how to get from "home" to the local mountain top. For this task it seems you could just link the two stations using GMRS simplex. Technically this would be a remote controlled fixed station and subject to the 15 watt transmitter output power limit. The use of highly directional antennas would be ok since the limitation is on output power rather than ERP. Any of the 462/467 main (25kHz) main channels could be used. If you mount a repeater on the local mountain top you would just use standard linking procedures (depends on the repeater controllers you use) to tie the two together. Each repeater would then have two-inputs and would operate when either was active but only transmit on the link whenever the local input was active. You could use any 462 mHz or 467mHz main frequency. Though, 467 would probably work better to avoid desense from the local transmitter. You could also create a full-duplex link with each repeater listening to the other repeater's output (different channel pairs of course). But, that would require an additional duplexer and would probably be overkill in this application. If you do not install a repeater then you would need to create a remote-controlled base/fixed station on your local mountain top. You could then use GMRS or Wi-Fi for the link from your home to the remote-controlled station. However, A remote controlled station is already, in essence, a repeater so it is probably best to just build the local repeater and then add the linking, CAVEAT: This approach will work well in a rural or sparsely populated area. But, in an urban environment you might have occasional to continual co-channel interference.