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Sometime in a previous life my employer was contracted to do specialzed maintenance at cell locations. One service call for no signal from the equipment invovled in our contract turned out to be the fact that the cell tower primary owner forgot to pay the electric bill and the meter had been pulled. The tower stayed on line an additional 30 hours then the generator fuel tank went dry. All cell towers are subject to random mistakes as such.

In my area not all agencies have moved to P25 and there is still a lot for a kid to listen to. I still use a BC245XLT from time to time. I bought it on eBay a couple years ago, since 245XLT is no longer state of the art, it can be had cheap

The published bandwidth for the 1486 is 10 MHz. The Tram 1485 has 5dBd gain with a 20 MHz bandwidth and is pretuned to 460 MHz.

Whoa, I grew up Rochester. My best friend was a police officer back in the late 90s, he then went to fly choppers for the state police. Small world.

I have one of them. When I went to work as one of the first civilian dispatchers for the Rochester NY Police Department, they required us to get them. It’s interesting that an RP license holder is authorized to operate, repair, and maintain several types of radio stations, no specific tech requirements. However most employers require a GROL.

Well, truth is nobody really knows for sure what will happen if an EMP strikes... but we can say that some bad shiatz will go down... Like WRKC935 said (thank you, btw), just have several spare radios stored inside ammo boxes should be good, also water is highly effective at dealing with EMP type of affects. And I'll reiterate this once more: "WATER" IS the most important element in survival, without water we cease to function rather quickly... Good point on threats, WRKC935, I was afraid to bring that up since it could derail this into a gun thread... and we all know this is not ar15.com... but yes, I totally agree, and my belief on that is that you need to have enough deterrent to deal with small threats for a very, very long time. G.

I liked it so much I bought 2! Like the form factor, and sensitivity is good. A lot of bang for the buck, scanning speed is decently fast, 300 channel memory.

More power usually means better coverage in the areas you can already reach. From my experience the amount of area you can cover is increased by less than 5%. Antenna selection and placement usually mean much more than increasing the ERP. There are really 3 power measurements needed to get a true picture of your potential coverage. You need to measure the RF output into a dummy load first then through the antenna feed line and finally, using a field strength meter the actual signal from the antenna. The measurement of the feed line is because line losses published are averages based on samples produced. Your actual loss will probably be higher than the published figures because of adding the connectors.

I believe the rules state 50w maximum. For a base with a good antenna and feedline 5w is more than enough. I have a StationMaster fed with 1/2" Heliax at 50' and I get out just fine. As for an amp, just use what you have as there's going to be no noticeable difference between the two power levels. Invest your time and money into a good antenna system.

Recently bought a combination package of Radioddity DB20-G mobile with a GM-30 handheld GMRS radios. Both work as expected, as described but with terrible manuals, the need to download software from the Radioddity website, and get the correct drivers for the programming cable. However, the DB20-G does actually put out 20 Watts, as checked with both a Bird/Thruline wattmeter and a Surecom dual band wattmeter. The GM-30 is very similar to many other Chinese made handheld radios of the past decade, and looks a lot like my Anytone 878 handheld. However, the DB20-G fits perfectly in an old Honda Civic dash cubby hole, looks like it came with the car. A Tram dual band antenna went on the trunk. The TYT, Anytone,Radioddity radios appear to work well. I may do as a previous poster mentioned, and buy more DB20-G radios for use in other vehicles, and as base radios where I do not want a larger power supply and Motorola CDM or XPR series mobile dominating the desk space.