Leaderboard

I'm not an old Ham... but if you're talking to someone over the internet, that isn't radio, in my opinion. The whole point is to use airways to talk. If you are using the internet, you may as well be on a computer or smartphone. I especially feel this way about people using their smart phone to get into a group and they aren't even on a radio. If 2 people are using their smartphone to talk to each other though a Fusion or WiresX web app, how the heck is that Ham radio? If that counts, anyone who talks on a cell phone may as well consider themselves a Ham. LOL

For a small part of the path to the repeater... that's it. That's not real contact. I had someone bragging to me about a 2m C4FM contact to an operator in Japan over a digital group and he logged it as a JP contact in his log. I told him to give me a break. If using my radio to go 2.5 miles to an internet-linked repeater and digital chatroom counts as a JP contact, I may as well just call a random person in Japan on the phone and count that as a JP contact, too.

Agree that the end-users are actually responsible, but spending time with any one of them to educate / change behavior may not be worth the time. What often happens is that the radios usually ship with the offending frequencies - and they ship hundreds or thousands of these. So the key is to head it off at the supply point. The FCC *will* start sending letters and making phone calls when your information is well-researched and credible.

You don’t even need sheet metal. Window screen material (aluminum or other Electrically conductive), chicken wire, or similar works just fine as long as you insure proper grounding at the NMO mount point. I’ve even had good luck using aluminum HVAC tape to create ground plane on the underside of non-conductive roofs. I prefer to use 3/8” thick surface NMO mounts when dealing with fiberglass or similar materials.

I am bidding on a job right now. The customer is asking for a radio network to cover a huge campus with a 10 mile radius from the main site. They specifically asked for CB radio for several base stations and more than a dozen mobile units. We did a radio path evaluation and a live site survey to show them why CB was a bad choice for their area. We covered the entire campus with 2 watts on commercial UHF mobile radios, with no less than 5/5 signal reports. We also covered the main facility of 1,000+ acres with 1 watt on UHF handheld radios, with no less than a 59 signal report. All the same tests with CB radio, we had signals as low as 3/2 across the main facility and 100% signal loss after 1.5 miles from that location. CB can be fantastic in some cases, where UHF failed. This is mostly noticed in areas with low parasitic noise levels, such as out in the country and rural areas. On more than a few occasions, I lost my UHF connection to someone after 2.5 miles, but could reach them for 25+ miles on the CB. Because there is no such thing as a perfect, Jack of all radios, I end up with 3 radios in my truck... Ham, GMRS and CB.

I hear DTMF tones all over Nebraska on MURS. I looked into it a year ago, and found out that several farms in the area use MURS for a remote monitoring and telemetry system for their crop irrigation systems and water wells. There is also at least one company making MURS remote alarm systems for farm buildings and gates. MURS is legal for all of those kinds of things, so that's likely what you're hearing. Most people using MURS for these types of operations do not even know what frequency or band they are using. All they know is that they purchased this wireless thing that lets them know back home when someone opens the pasture gate, and they have another wireless thing that tells them how many gallons per minute the pump is flowing.