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I live in a bit of a unique geographic location. Basically a fish bowl, as I joke about to some. It's a large lake with mountains surrounding the lake. Only way in or out is over a mountain pass. A good portion of the county is national forest or BLM land. The past 5-7 years has been rough, as we have experienced devastating wild fires pretty much every summer. As a result of this, some amateur radio operators have developed alert nets in and around the surrounding mountain areas. This alert net has recently included GMRS. a small group of Hams have established repeaters on various mountain top regions of the county. Being new to the radio hobby, and GMRS, I have developed a working relationship with some fellow Hams, who are also GMRS operators, and have added an alert net for a portion of the county for coverage. We hold a net once a week to develop awareness and practice coms. During the summer months we monitor the county for smoke and fire alerts. It has come in handy a few times over the past few years. We also get PSPS outages during the fire season, so cell tower operations can be spotty, so having GMRS and Ham for backup has be invaluable. Not everyone wants to spend the time or money getting a Ham or GMRS license, so organizing a neighborhood and handing out cheap FRS radios has been helpful. They organize neighborhood groups, then have the non-licensed users on FRS relay check in's to a group leader that is licensed, who then can relay that via the repeaters. It's a good exercise, and brings neighborhood folks closer together as an effective team.

Something I was thinking about with regard to Line A... 90% of the US population lives on the the US borders and coast lines. ~79,633,000 people live on the northern border. That means that Line A has the potential to impact communications for more than 24% of the people in the lower 48 states. As much as I like the idea of picking a channel, a channel other than 20 to avoid conflict with potential ORI type repeaters, a solution that potentially excludes almost one quarter of the population doesn't seem like a solution at all, IMHO. In fact, I would be more prone to encourage people to use 20 over 19, since many repeaters have light traffic and operators are supposed to be mindful of not causing interference as part of their license agreement, anyway. I don't know the right answer. Just thinking.

Have you looked at the FT818? https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/ysu-ft-818

LOL... Point taken. The total population in and around the Line A is significant, for sure. I don't know if call signs start with any other letter than W, but per the FCC there are only 126,153 GMRS licenses that start with W. Seems about right since there are 842,408 actively licensed Amateurs, and ham radio is much more popular.

The problem with allowing 50 watts on 1-7 is that each of these interstitial frequencies actually overlaps and shares bandwidth with two adjacent main GMRS frequencies. If you start operating 50 watts on these you are going to interfere with the two adjacent main frequencies, so now you adversely affect two frequencies instead of just one. If we did go down that route it would then become mandatory that we switch from wide-band to narrowband. Current usable distances and audio quality would suffer as a result…but also inevitable. Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

I know we all like things free, but I have no problem with even the current $70/10-year license fee, so long as that fee is being used for the constructive benefit of the radio community. Paying for the purpose of ‘covering adminstrative costs of issuing a license’ makes no sense. Paying for enforcement efforts, authoring of technical criteria, organizing the bands and the administration of efforts that end up benefiting the masses are appropriate and should be expected. I agree that the GMRS license is a good personal value since it does cover you and your immediate family members. However, I do not however see how GMRS is ‘gonna be better than the ham’ unless the sole comparison is the average number of body’s covered per license. Ham radio exists for public service and to provide the spectrum for the technically inclined to experiment and innovate. GMRS is for short-distance local communications with family and friends. A ham license affords the user much greater chunks of spectrum and virtually no bounds in terms of what technology can be used, including technology the user develops themselves. That is not going to happen and should not happen on GMRS. As a GMRS user you expect to buy equipment, turn it on and it just works. I agree that the pandemic has perhaps caused more to get their GMRS license. But I suspect that is the case for amateur license as well. I obtained my first GMRS license 15-20 years ago. I finally obtained by ham license during the pandemic. While I have not looked up the numbers, I suspect both services have seen an increase in licenses during this period. As far as increasing the power from 50 to 100 watts (3dB). I truly do not see the practical upside to such a minuscule increase, and downsides if it was increased substantially more. Given that GMRS is already line-of-sight communications and takes very low power to go long unobstructed distances, and given that 3dB is lost very quickly through a sequence of obstacles, the benefit of the added power is really negligible. However if it was increased substantially, up from 50 to say 1000 or more, the effect on existing services operating on adjacent frequencies could suffer. The FCC has a fine balancing act to perform when it carves up the spectrum and establishes the technical criteria for each service. Even a bigger challenge when some new technology comes along that has different RF requirements. Just one man’s opinion. Regards, Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

All of the city of Seattle and north of it are above Line A. That may be about 4 million people or more. Metro Detroit is also above it. That's another 4 million. Lansing Michigan is also. It's metro population is about half a million. So, probably 10 million people live above Line A. That's probably 100 GMRS licenses. ? Edited to add more cities that lie above Line A: Ann Arbor, MI, Flint, MI, Duluth, MN, Cleveland, OH, Toledo, OH, Erie, PA, Syracuse, NY, Buffalo, NY, and Rochester, NY.

Just for accuracy, the letter V is dit dit dit dah. The way you wrote it out is a J.

No, I am not saying that 79 million people live above Line A. They would be packed ridiculously tight. What I am saying is, the total population of the northern states that Line A is present in, per the Census Bureau, is about 79,633,000+. That is enough people whom driving to or north of Line A is a distinct possibility, that they should be considered in a standardization proposal.

No, I'm sorry.. That is not what I am trying to say. What I mean is, none of your measurements are in agreement with one another.. Therefore I do not trust the 40 W reading. I believe that either you need to calibrate your watt meter, your amp meter, your volt meter, some combination of the three or all three.

Those are interstitial channels that sit between the main high power repeater output channels. That has the potential to cause interference to them. The low power is intended to minimize it. For example channel 1, 462.5625 MHz, sits between channel 15, 462.5500 MHz, and channel 16, 462.5750 MHz. If you check the remaining channels 2-7 you'll see a similar situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mobile_Radio_Service

I signed up for the announcement that comes out in 10 days. Thanks @gman1971

@WROZ437... you are experiencing exactly what I would hope to avoid. Finding something other than 20 for "over the road simplex" would work much better in many cases. Maybe, there is no single channel as answer. OffRoaderX does have some entertaining content. Being a Jeep enthusiast, I love watching offroad videos.

The point of the FCC's Enforcement Authority is not policing whether or not the operator of a transmitter is validly licensed. The point is to warn against using radio transmissions during the commission of a crime: This Notice is clearly a product of the January 6 Insurrection at The Capitol, and now their subsequent prosecution for crimes up to, and including, seditious conspiracy

Yes, there is that pesky Line-A, and a Line-C too. There are people who have no experience with two way radios of any kind and likely have no idea what channel 19 is and what service. Using the same channel on GMRS as on CB only makes sense if you have knowledge of CB radio. That's likely why people are coming to this forum asking what is the GMRS road channel, they have little to no prior experience. Some have even suggested using channel 16, 4 x 4 = 16 because you're driving a 4-wheel drive, as a logical reason. By the way 16 is the VHF marine emergency call channel too. I'm sure others can cook up other "logical" reasons to pick a different channel.

I do have a go-kit radio that I use for hiking and doing parks on the air (6M,2M & 440 while in motion), but I also have EFHW in the bag, one for 40/20 only, and one that will do 10-80. For NVIS (which will get you closer contacts) anywhere around 10' above ground will work, but should be less than 30' in the air. That being said, I have worked Utah, Spain & England on 5W with a vertical on the car roof. The Elecraft are nice, but they are a bit pricy for a bag radio. I know quite a few guys that use them, but they are real points guys doing QPR on CW only. Depending on how you are planning on using it outside of emmcom, The 705 or FT818 will both be great. Both come with their own internal batteries, and can work with an external battery or power source. 705 will go up to 10W on external power, 818 only has 6W. 705 will require you get your own antenna for even 2m use, where the 818 can be used out of the box on 6m/2m/70cm with the included antenna. I have an 817 with a handful of accessories, and for what I paid for it as a used package, I have zero complaints, but if I were to buy another low power HF radio, it would be the 705. I still recommend it is a wonderful radio.

I screw the SW-33 meter (using SMA-F adapter) into the top of the HT then connect coax to the top of the meter.

incidentally, i have both the SW33 (the small inexpensive one) and the SW102 (the slightly larger, slightly more money, full display model). The SW33 did not come with a plate, though i don't think the enclosure being solid metal hurts...it DID include a 5 watt rated dummy load. The SW102 included the plate. I did a couple quick tests to see if RF affected the readings, though i used GMRS since i don't have anything approved for MURS. With both meters and my KG805g HT, I used channels RP21 (467.700 tx) and simplex ch 3 (462. something...the number slips my mind at this second). SW33 said 1.05 and 1.02, while the SW102 showed 1.0 for both. Then, I freed up some slack in the cable, and held the HT up within a foot of the antenna, and tested again with the SW33. Same 1.02 on Ch 3, RP21 actually dropped slightly, to 1.03. At least for UHF, it seems pretty unaffected...I can try to retest with a different handheld and VHF this weekend..will need to switch antennas and try messing with the ground plane and see if goes that bad.

The number one rule of emergency communications is, the command center should never be in the affected area. If you are in the affected area, you need to have a radio relay system established to get the message to the appropriate logistics or CnC staffer inside or outside the affected area, to send help. So, if you are outside the impacted area, get the person's name, what the emergency is, where they are (to the best they can say). Basically the 5 W's. And then you or someone right next to you calls 911 and relays that information. If you are in the affected area, you gather all of the aforementioned information and then relay it through whatever stations needed or direct to CnC, logistics, or whatever unit has been established to respond to the type of emergency being experienced. If you are at an event that is just starting, you will likely be relaying that information directly to Incident Command. Yes! Exactly! Both fantastic radios. I am partial to the Icom, but you can't go wrong with either.

No. Regardless of if you are using a dummy load or an antenna, there are 2 formulas used for calculating power, resistance, current and voltage. The first is Voltage / Current * Resistance. If you have any 2 of the 3, you can find the 1 unknown value. The second is Power / Voltage * Current. Again, if you have any 2 of the 3, you can find the 1 unknown value. We are going to use the second of the 2 formulas. We know you have 7.5 amps at 14.6vdc. We are going to multiply the two for a total of 109.5 watts of total consumed power by the radio. The transmitter has an efficiency rating of 55% (per the manufacturer, and a very common value). That means we are going to take 45% away from the 109.5w, being 109.5 * 0.55 = 60.225 watts out to the antenna or dummy load. If your meter is reading 40w, then either the watt meter is not correct or the measured voltage or current are not correct.

New Regulations for all of Part 95 can be found here at the US Government Publishing Office: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=72b61b708f0ce25ea78b21b0aed4e95b&node=47:5.0.1.1.5&rgn=div5