Leaderboard

I think you may be confusing a drip loop for a common-mode choke. If you have a proper antenna, with a true unbalanced feed point, you do not need a choke at the antenna. Those are only required if you have one of those cheap ham-type J-poles, or other balanced feed antenna. If you do need a choke on your antenna, do NOT make it by coiling 1/2" line. Leave the 1/2" straight up to the base of the antenna, and use a 3-foot jumper of RG-8x, RG-58u, or similar small coax to make your coil, which should be 4 or 5 turns about 6 inches in diameter. You can also make a common mode choke by taking a foot-long jumper of RG-213 or LMR-400 and put ferrite clamp-on chokes all the way from one end to the other. Again, on most decent commercial antennas, this is not needed. A drip-loop is simply a low-point in the coax right before it comes into your building, so that rain running down the coax will drip off onto the ground, rather than get funneled into your house. This is not even needed in all installations, as sometimes the coax is not running down a tower, but rather across a roof, under a soffit, or into a conduit. Short jumpers at each end aren't going to hurt you much. As Lscott posted, use type "N" connectors where-ever possible for lowest loss.

We have two of the B-Tech GMRS V1 units and 2 MXT400's and 2 MXT 115's. The main concern some have is that the Midland units are narrow band only, but this has been OK for personal use. Most GMRS repeaters appear to be wide bandwidth, One time I tried using the Midland "compander" and that helped the receiving station with my modulation, but then their modulation to me was more distorted. The B-Tech units can work with wide or narrow. I have ordered a couple of Wouxun 805G HT's as I wanted to try them out. If they had been available earlier I would not have purchased the B-Techs because of the quality control issues with B-Tech, the fact you can not talk to anyone on the phone, and the fact that back up batter packs are AAA. The Wouxun are repurposed KG-UVD1P's and locked down to meet Part 95E rules and use AA batteries. They are also 4 watts while the B-Techs, which used to be 4 or 5 watts, have been reduced to 2 watts. The difference in power can be useful in some situations, but antennas and line of sight is the most important. There are some helpful youtube videos, although one has to be careful because of a fair amount of misinformation. I tend to make comments on those videos and in a nice way, try and make appropriate corrections or explanations. GMRS can be iffy for a contact since there are not many who monitor for calls for help. I am probably an exception in my area but I have a reasonably high gain antenna and high location on our farm and being retired helps. I can talk to folks using FRS HTs for many miles away (10 or so in some cases if they are close to the ridge). When I have rarely tried a repeater, I have chatted a few times when I actually did not expect anyone to be there.

toggle on the show offline and outdated repeaters to see them all

It's like being angry at the guards for catching your kids playing around on Area 51's land. "How dare you scare my kids that were breaking the rules?! I want to speak to your manager!"