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Run 4 watts.

Tone Mode should be Tone for a PL tone. Tone is for the tone into the repeater, the tone you should change that to what they gave you.

they will be 25" apart. and ya might as well run 4 watts. never got anyone to come back to me over 6 miles away anyway.

Depends on the exact settings, but typically: CHIRP Repeater List by tweiss3, on Flickr Chirp Repeater Detail copy by tweiss3, on Flickr Skip is only if you don't want to scan that specific repeater channel.

CQ CQ CQ DX NJ

All this BS about phonetic alphabets is funny in a tragic way. I remember many years ago before the FCC redid call signs listening to what was then (and probably still is) one of the largest networks doing roll call. One of the stations did have a brain fart on their id and announced to the net they would be forever more known a KL7BJW - Kilo Lima 7 Baldy's Junk Wagon. Needless to say, that is how the station was known from then until it went silent as Baldy''s Junk Wagon or just asking if Baldy was on the air.

Must be a local thing. Listening to our local club nets they are pretty laid back. Last night there was only about 5 of the 35 check-ins that used the phonetic alphabet. I wouldn't worry about it on GMRS, and if a ham guy can hear you well enough to complain about the phonetic alphabet you use, well, your message got across anyways.

This reply is in response to the OP question ... Here’s another perspective ... I tested and passed my Tech license in Nov 2017. Prior to that, I went to a local Ham club meetings in hopes of meeting and interacting with other Hams. After an introduction to the group, there was little interaction and discussion, I felt invisible. I attended meetings for three months and finally just stopped going. I had a BaoFung radio which was a pain to figure out but I finally got it working. The local repeater was silent ... I’d sign on as monitoring and listen to the repeater call sign. Crickets. I got the big C, retired, and put the radio in a box for two years because I had other priorities. It was like starting over but I did a lot of reading and decided to give it a try again. I ditched the BF and got a Yaesu FT-70 and found a much more useable handheld. I was in Arizona now and again attempted to get things going. Current situation did not allow face to face meetings, and I did get logged into a club net meeting ... much better response, actually had my first conversation with another Ham while I switchEd antennas and checked the response. After that, crickets on the local repeater, so I scanned the spectrum and listened to the local aircraft traffic pattern and other freqs with activity. I blundered on to the the local GMRS repeater by accident. I found an active group of users and just listened ... after a month or so of listening, I decided to get my GMRS license and do what I wanted to do on the radio in the first place - communicate with people and family in my area. I didn’t have an interest in building or tweeking or exploring technical opportunities ... I wanted to turn it on and talk. I wanted to communicate and my experience was limited or no communication on the amateur bands. GMRS did that for me. Ham was just a no show ... my face to face interactions with my first Ham club didn’t help. So, this is another perspective on Amateur vs. GMRS ... BTW, I’m still an ARRL member but not sure why at this point.

We used a variation of the police phonetic alphabet: Adam, Baker, Charlie, etc. But I always told my students that they weren’t wrong to substitute another easily understandable word if they had a minor brain fart in the middle of a transmission Better to deliver the message smoothly without stumbling given the high volume of traffic our people dealt with all day long. And don’t get me started on EMCOMM, ARES, RACES, etc. The cockeyed notion that hams are the only saviors in case of disaster just doesn’t cut it any more. Very few of them have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to operate under real emergency circumstances. You don’t develop that with weekly check-in net. You develop it with hundreds of hours of training and then thousands of hours real, continuous operations. I’ve held a tech ticket for a few years now, but am not really accepted by the locals. At a public event, one of them popped up on a public safety channel using his ham call. I told the club president to get him off the channel and that if he did that again, I would have him escorted from the event. I think you understand my position. Like I said, in GMRS land we’re kinda laid-back about these things.