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Me personally, I think the restrictions of type certified radios for free/public (not business or government) is completely stupid. I feel like most people don't know what is what and can easily end up breaking the rules by mistake. The truth is, I believe that while most ham radios are pretty cheap in quality, they are way better than any new part 95 product on the market today. Many of them are more than capable of performing inside the restrictions of GMRS. People should be allow to use them. That said, if someone is using one for GMRS, I couldn't care less, but I wouldn't go on the internet putting in writing that you are doing it and if someone asks me for advice in the forum, there's going to be a "by the book" response from me.

This has already been tried and rejected. See: http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-turns-away-petition-to-allow-hams-to-operate-non-certificated-transmitters-on-gmrs BTW, it has been previously suggested in this thread that price/cost is a factor in certified vs. ham equipment. I am not really sure that is true. It is hard to make a comparison since there are not many HAM single band UHF radios. But, for a rough comparison... GMRS - Midland MXT400 $250 Midland MXT115 & MXT275 $150 Btech 50X1 $200 HAM - ALINCO DR-435TMKIII $230 YAESU FTM-3207DR $169 So, I'd say while the GMRS radios are a bit more expensive, the price difference is not very significant and could well be accounted for by multiple factors like, lower demand, and certification costs. Also, you have to be careful to distinguish between radios manufactured for the ham radio market by vendors like Kenwood, ICOM, Yaesu, etc. and the low end radios labeled as "ham radios" because they are simply uncertified in any service. These include most of the CCRs

Receiver pre-amps are NOT magic. In many cases, they'll actually make a system worse. Signal needs to be greater than noise. The benefit of a pre-amp is in raising the strength of the desired signal above the noise floor. If you raise the noise floor at the same time that you're raising the signal, you've done nothing to improve the Signal to Noise ratio. You need to have proper front end filtering in place before you even consider a pre-amp. If you're using a 'flat pack' compact mobile duplexer, you're not doing yourself any good to add a pre-amp. If you've already spent the money to hang a quality antenna that's up above the tree line, and you're running a high quality bandpass/band reject duplexer, you might see some improvement by adding a pre-amp. Might. We have no idea what your system is currently, or how it's performing. Do you have the tools and knowledge to measure receive sensitivity of your repeater? Do you have the tools and knowledge to measure de-sense?

100%agreed on this, with both you and Cleveland. I haven't found a better resource for gmrs (and general radio) info, hands down. There IS a sub on Reddit (r/gmrs), but it doesn't even come close to this site (though I think there are a few users on both, myself included).