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I try to be honest with people. This gentleman has come to us saying he has no radio background and so I gave him an honest answer that would work for his business, as well as some of the pros and cons of using GMRS for business operations. If you read my comment over you will see that I say "If your ok with some interference, GMRS could work,...GMRS would allow family to talk through a repeater" I'm sorry if it frustrates people (Including you) to tell them the truth of things which could save them a headache in the long run.

Yep, crank up the volume control to listed to the NB operator, then get blasted out of the room when the next person to transmit is WB...

Speaking of morse code, when my late father went to take his General Class ham exam, he utterly failed 13 word per minute (WPM) required. This by the way after having informed the FCC examiner that he'd spent his naval enlistment prior to and during WWII as a radio operator. The examiner asked him "How the hell did you fail to get clear copy?" My dad replied, "your machine is sending far too slow for me to copy. I don't hear letters, I hear words. Can you turn up the speed?" The examiner replied that their machine could only send a maximum of about 40 WPM. "I'm not really supposed to do this, but since you had to drive from Ft. Myers down here to the Miami Field Office to take the test, I am going to make an exception. My dad smiled and replied "Thank you very much. That's still only about half my usual speed, but I can probably copy that well enough to pass. Fortunately for my dad's already bruised ego, he passed with 100% clear copy.

Note that on an FM or Phase modulated radio all transmissions are analog. Digital data is actually represented by the presence or absence of an audible or sub-audible tone. IIRC 131.4hz is used for DCS. If the signal frequency is not stable, the DCS sub-tone will also vary, making detection of the bitstream difficult or impossible.

Well, I'm pretty new to GMRS, but perhaps my limited experience can help. Before you invest, I'd suggest you conduct something of a test. Bear in mind I just talked through my first GMRS repeater Friday night (awesome as heck to punch a solid signal a good distance across state lines, by the way), so everyone else's advice here should carry more weight than mine. Is your house (where you mentioned putting the repeater) on a hill or high enough in elevation to see most of your property? GMRS is almost exclusively line of sight. If you can see all of your property from where you're putting the repeater antenna it's a great, low-cost solution (in theory). So it becomes a question of whether you can get the repeater antenna high enough to "see." Even then will likely experience blind spots on the house-side of deep valleys or behind ridges. If there's a big hill behind your home/repeater location, odds are very good you won't hear anyone directly behind it, regardless of power. Trees compromise the signal, but not as much as I expected in my flatland full of crazy-high pine forests. I doubt very much they'll be a huge problem in the distances you described, but I'll defer to the more experienced folks here on that topic. Try an experiment with the FRS radios you mentioned, but bear in mind those blister-pack radios are terrible. Have one person stay at your house with one of the units on, roughly where you think a repeater antenna would be best, and take a second radio to different areas on your ranch. Try to make solid contact as you drive/hike around. FRS and GMRS frequencies are close, so it'll provide a baseline from which to decide. A high repeater antenna will improve things exponentially on GMRS. The person holding your "base" radio on the front porch, at mouth level.....well, it doesn't reflect what they'd receive if they were perched on the roof, obviously. Plus, you can use more power on GMRS. Just a thought, and I think CB's problematic for a working ranch. The noise is fatiguing for most people—generated by the atmosphere periodically pushing distant signals in, jerks joyriding their microphones as they drive by and other interference. You can squelch most of it away, but doing so can clip important calls. MURS is nice and I use it, but good luck finding certified radios to survive the rigors of your line of work. And without repeater capability (which I think are banned on MURS), it probably isn't the solution. After a decade of search & rescue work I'm accustomed to standing on boulders and truck tailgates to punch a signal thru on frequencies close to MURS, but my family can't stand the gymnastics sometimes required for relatively low-powered VHF (very high frequency) handheld work at distance.

Should be lower case: sudo reboot

Kidphc. Although, as usual, your technological description is accurate, I think you got the question backwards. He was asking if he is listening without PL will he hear everything. And the answer to that is yes.