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Transmitting with no load is a very different thing depending on the length of coax connected to the radio. An open circuit plus 1/4 wavelength of coax equals a short circuit. Any odd number of 1/4 wavelengths will look like a short. So the load seen by the transmitter can vary a great deal. Some lengths could possibly make the transmitter unstable causing it to oscillate at some other frequency. But this is somewhat less likely in newer radios where device parasitics are much lower today. But it's still possible. Note: 1/4 wave at 460MHz is about 5 inches. Remember that wavelengths are shorter in coax than in free air. You have to multiply by the velocity factor for the particular coax.... usually around 65-75%. When there is nothing connected to an HT it's likely to look like an open circuit since the transmitter circuits are likely very close to the connector. So this would be one of the safer no-load conditions. I suppose the worst case would be an apparent short circuit that may cause overcurrent but today's transistors are much more rugged than the ones of the 1970's. And, since your radio probably uses a switching power converter it's unlikely to provide enough current to cause any damage. Of course we are talking about hand held radios here. I would not key a transmitter intentionally into an unknown load but I would not worry about doing it unintentionally for a short period of time. It certainly can happen for a variety of reasons, like forgetting to replace the antenna after a car wash or something. Most legitimate radio designs would handle this fine. Designers are aware that this happens.

Ok, GMRS users, basement dwellers, truckers, GMRS lovers, and even Sad Hams! Submit your votes! I'll cast mine after I take a 10-100. ?

I have a 1941 Coronado LP record player/AM radio that still works, a testament to the use of tube construction and quality of manufacture. Granted it is only a receiver, but I have a much newer Courier 23 CB radio, tubes have not changed color (always transmit with an appropriate antenna) and only very light flaking on the chrome mess case. As you said, tubes were very forgiving.

Yeah, the 8000 is in a class of its own... with a mighty impressive price tag too...

I was out for one of my daily walks. My wife tried to reach me off and one for about 15 minutes. Hearing no response she gave up and went looking for me. She found me safe and sound with radio in hand still walking but asked why I did not respond. I apologized but informed her that I did not hear the calls over the radio. Despite the base radio being set correctly when I got home, no dice, no Tx. Turned out I was at fault. I had disconnected the antenna from the radio the night before doing some testing and apparently I had forgotten to reattach. At 50w the radio survived the periodic calls. Sure is a good thing I did not do that on the day I had her read the whole US constitution over the air while I checked coverage in our area for about an hour. Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

After posting to someone else's thread and realizing I hijacked his thread about scanning, I figured I'd start a new thread with cool "tips and tricks" that people have discovered with their new KG-1000G radios. Perhaps we can also use this thread as a "does anyone know how to..." for the KG-1000G. It will also be an interesting read for anyone considering this radio, since it will hopefully eventually contain a lot of detailed info about how specific features are implemented. I'll start with this one (cross-posted from the other thread - if someone can tell me how do delete that other post, I will be glad to do so!): Quickly adding a "privacy tone" that others are using on blister pack radios My Jeep and I were in a parade over the weekend for a couple of WWII vets that were celebrating birthdays (97 and 100!). The organizers were on GMRS/FRS HTs and I asked what channel they were on. "Channel 7 with privacy channel 35" he told me. Not knowing which brand radios they were using nor remembering off the top of my head which frequency corresponds to "privacy code 35" on most radios, I was able to use the Menu [41] "SC-CTC" option (which I've programmed to Key C) to "grab" their PL frequency and then save it to my radio on channel 7 within about 30 seconds. Super handy if you're needing to inter-operate with people on Motorola, Midland, or Cobra radios and using "privacy channels". Note: If you want to be able to RX and Tx with the tone, you need to also change the default setting for Menu [40] "SC-QT" from DECODER to ALL. Pretty neat feature that saved me the stress of having to manually look up possible tones and then program them via FPP while the parade was starting...

Wyoming has a lot of outdoor recreation and the SAR teams have found GMRS to be quite helpful because most people use it for group communication anyway. In case of an emergency, SAR teams can contact the victims on GMRS. Wyoming has a big push to publicize standardization of 307 (the area code for the WHOLE state) as the standard for the public to contact SAR in the field once an emergency is declared. They ask that the victims tune their GMRS/FRS to channel 3 and enter privacy code 7. The actual details are at https://hls.wyo.gov/307. Does it works? Check out this FB link https://www.facebook.com/103003218816456/posts/135907112192733/. In truth, this case was successful and was aided by the use of GMRS, although the victims apparently weren't aware of the 307 standard. My family and friends spend a lot of time in the back country. I always carry an Iridium GPS and, now that the state Homeland Security is encouraging use GMRS, I just got my license and a Wouxun 935G. Have you guys seen similar standards encouraged in your states?

I don’t believe that the the Nagoya is outperforming the Comet but I certainly acknowledge and accept what you are experiencing. RF is a weird animal. What experience did you have when you used an HT while up on your roof and communicated with the subject repeater? What experience did you have when using your Nagoya antenna up on the roof at or near the same location as the Comet or the former slim jim? A quick little story that occurred in the last 7 days. There is a 675 repeater in Wyoming, a suburb north of Cincinnati. It is used for the city-wide GMRS net weekly. I am on the fringe of that repeater and seldom participate because of poor signal quality in and out from my location. It is around 22 miles NW of me. Recently I was scanning the band, including scanning of repeater input frequencies, and suddenly I was listening to one side of a conversation from a guy actively using a different city repeater. Knowing him and what repeater he was on I reached out to him to ask his current location. He was about 3-5 miles further away in the same general direction as that 675 repeater; he was using his 50w mobile radio in the vehicle. I only heard him on input frequency for about a minute. What that suggested to me was that there were fewer obstructions between his antenna and mine for that mile or so stretch of roadway he was traveling than there is between the 675 repeater and me. The point of this being, location can be everything, even when that location is seems counter intuitive. Since you know what the Nagoya performance is in the garage, what is like when it is located where the Comet is? Same? Better? Worse? Then a logical thing to ask is, what is the Comets performance in the garage when located at the location where the Nagoya works well? Assuming all else is equal (same radio, same coax, same physical location, same SWR) the Comet should result in a stronger signal into the your radio, and into the repeater from your radio, from most locations where you compare the two antennas against one another. So ask yourself, what is technically different, if anything, other than location? Isn’t radio fun? Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

Part of metric is how much performance do you get for the money spent. A lower spec'd radio might be a better deal if the price is right. Of course for some people price is not a consideration. But I did read a few posts where some comments were made about the cost of one or more models.

As has been said, with an open load (no antenna), most radios will be fine. However as OldRadioGuy noted, having the line unterminated (no Antenna/Load) at the magical 1/4 wave (or odd multiples thereof) it is 'more likely' to damage the radio, as the end of an open 1/4 wave of coax appears as a short to RF. Also, I keep seeing people say things about tube radios and the no or bad antenna scenario. However, the vast majority of old tube rigs could tolerate some pretty bad loads. Sure, some could fail, but most just turned funny colors and got hot. That said, doing that repeatedly or for long periods of time did tend to weaken a tube, and eventually cause it to fail prematurely. Tubes in general, were very forgiving.

You won't transmit very far, but until the output stage/output transistors overheat, it shouldn't hurt a thing. With old tube gear and maybe output transformers, I have no idea.

So, one of the reasons I leave a meter inline actually came true yesterday, on my Ham gear. I was using my VHF radio with a 200w amp. I have a Watt/VSWR meter between the radio and the amp and another between the amp and the antenna. With no warning and with zero indication other than the meter, my output power on my amplifier shot up to well over 300w, running about 70% more power than designed. What likely happened is, there may be a cold/broken solder joint on a ground circuit for the final stage power regulator. Instead of nuking my amp and possibly having a fire at my desk by continuing to use the amp (because without the meters I wouldn't have known), the meters helped me catch the problem immediately. So now, instead of an $800 loss for the amp and potential untold damage to my home... I most likely will fix my amp for free. Sometime we are prioritizing the wrong potential losses.

In hilly places like VT repeaters are necessary to get much range. So HAM is going to get you much better service than GMRS unless you happen to be in an area with a GMRS repeater..... which is unlikely. See repeaterbook.com for listings of HAM repeaters in your areas of interest. Also, with HAM you have other freq. choices that can be very helpful. VT is very wooded and snow gets on the trees which tends to eat up higher frequencies. So 2 meters or 144 MHz can be a better alternative. GMRS is great for reaching your fishing buddies or other nearby but longer ranges are very dependent on repeaters. I have GMRS because my wife and fishing buddies can't use HAM radio. So it has its place. I lived in NH for some of my HAM years and (30 years ago) repeaters were quite good. I was often able to reach people with 5W and a mag mount. There were "ham-fests" in VT and more hams than you'd think. I expect that there are still some HAM clubs around VT. This is the best way to get started. Today the issue can be finding a live person on the repeater. But if something was "going on" I'm sure there would be lots of hams on there. Vince

This has been a topic on many forums both radio and SAR for a few months. Some say Wyoming picked 307 because of the area code "307". For SAR in NY we don't recommend a channel. If we know what channel they are on we will monitor but other than FRS radios very few have a GMRS license. in 20 years I think only one guy had a FRS radio with him. Most have cell phones that dont realize when they get in the woods dont work or their battery dies.

My first GMRS radio... My current GMRS radio... G.

Quality Control and Manufacturing Tolerance. I know of a corporate site that bought many different Midland products to support work and office operations in two buildings that take up about one square city block. They noticed the same thing, and boxed up the radios that did not work as well as others. Many of these were Midland T7x series handhelds, and we had to break the fixed antenna off to test them with Aeroflex and Hewlett Packard/Agilent Technologies test equipment. Their performance was all over the place. Receive sensitivity and selectivity was anywhere from about 0.27uV to 0.50 ish uV (most being toward the 0.50 uV end of the scale).....for UHF 0.35uV is considered "good" by many. In your case, there could be other issues as well, being mobile radios, as the antenna connectors could be better/worse, bends in the coax and the center conductor to sheathing/ground, quality of coax, ground plane around antenna. Lots of factors. Even power from the vehicles could impact range, power output, and radio function. You can take piles of Midland MXT275 radios, place them into the same make, model, and year of vehicle, and still get some variance based on many factors. The more of those factors that are the same, the easier it is to narrow down. A co-worker of mine, installs Motorola XTL1500 mobiles into Chevy Suburbans, same make, model year, and places the antennas int he same location. He still has some variation in function, but much less deviation due to manufacturing tolerances and quality control. A thousand dollar radio is usually built better than one that costs only a few hundred. Couple that with better coax, a quality antenna, and install it with attention to detail, and it will outperform a cheaper model. Likewise, two different installs of the same equipment can have variations based upon that installation. Are the coax connectors soldered or crimped, is the ground braid even around the connectors, are there any tight bends or twists, is there a coil of extra antenna cable at either or both ends (radio and antenna if applicable), what is the output power to the radio (12v -13.8 VDC), was the radio made at the end of a shift, where was it made, etc.

After reading through this thread, it sounds as though you're trying to use the USB-C charging cable that comes with the GM30. That cable can only be use for charging. For programming, you'll need a USB cable that connect to the audio connectors on the side. I use the cable below with the GM30 and lots of other radios. It will create a new virtual com port that you can see in Device Manager. I don't think I needed any additional drivers for Windows 10 and it works on my Mac as well. BTECH PC03 FTDI Genuine USB Programming Cable for BTECH, BaoFeng UV-5R BF-F8HP UV-82HP BF-888S, and Kenwood Radios

Same here. And the reality is if I really want to talk to someone and don't hear anyone, with only 8 high power channels, I can call for a contact on every channel in 2 minutes, and that's allowing 10 seconds or more per channel for someone to reply to me before I spin the dial. Like I said, I'm not against the users agreeing to standardize among themselves... but I'm not holding my breath. Especially since ORI died off, and the was the closest to "coordination" I have seen on this service.

With only 22 channels available for me I just scan them all. I even do that at home. If I hear something interesting I stop the scan. It helps if the radio scans reasonably fast too. Some of the Chinese radios are really SLOW while scanning, if that matters to you. That might be one thing to check before laying out your money.

Then you have the local PD's officers and detectives using modified Ham radios while doing surveillance operations. They operate on non licensed police frequencies for the above reasons, the criminals don't know which frequencies are being used, thus likely aren't monitoring, and the detectives can switch in seconds. Many years ago I was siting with a ground of friends for dinner at a local restaurant. I saw two uniformed police officers enter and sit down. Both had their Motorola brick radios and switched on. One of the officers had an easily identified Yeasu FT-50 sitting on the table as well. I seriously doubt he was playing Ham Radio while on break. Was the radio modified? Don't know. But it got me researching and discovered it wasn't that uncommon for the police to use "free-banded" Ham radios for "private" communications that aren't monitored by dispatch.

I read your other post about getting hundreds of HT's out to the communities, the 5 area repeaters and the great action/communications plan. That is a winning combo. I wish more communities would follow your lead. Fantastic.

How about channel 2 for motorcycles; 4 for cars, SUVs, and pickups (or what the truckers call "4 wheelers"); 10 for three-axle box vans; and 18 for your typical 18-wheeler? Perhaps even channel 1 for unicycles...

I still hear some of these in some parts of the country. Usually Texas to Mississippi on the highways east to west. Often at truck stops, a few even brag about having linear amplifiers. Lots of people have had gear confiscated in that crowd, but often after being stopped for something else. In oil spill response related emergency communications, our truck drivers only got away with having scanners in the cab because of the nature of that division of the company, and towing mobile communications suites or related support trailers. State Patrol often wondered why these tractors had several Motorola mobiles (VHF, UHF, and 800MHz) and a VHF marine radio installed. Luckily, we had documentation that mentioned what was being transported and why, with FEMA documents to add credibility for the driver. Although, many drivers did not even know how to operate anything besides the AM 40 channel CB radio. In the ten years I was in that industry, there was only one truck driver that was fined for supposed unlicensed radio use, but then the ticket was thrown out in court. The ticket was based on the thought that one of those radios had to be an illegal 10m CB.

Press and hold the ‘Exit’ key until the lock icon appears. Press and hold again until the lock icon disappears. Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

tl:dr: Some CCRs are really bad clinkers while others work reasonably well. That's the same situation as anything coming out of China, though. They'll make anything you ask them to make at whatever price point you want it to meet. So read reviews and test reports on this (or any) radio. If they work alright and seem well built then don't worry about the architecture. Long answer: Don't get wrapped around the axle about SoC or similarly the terms direct conversion, direct sampling, SDR, hybrid, double conversion, heterodyne, etc. The words are thrown around indiscriminately. Basically a good radio is a good radio no matter its architecture while a bad radio will be bad regardless. The RDA1846 chip that most of these radios use can perform adequately if the design is sound otherwise. It's one particular frequency agile wideband RF chip but not the only by far. There's tons of them now, some that cover HF to SHF. One I'm familiar with is an Analog Devices part that can TX and RX on 2x2 MIMO from 70 MHz to 6 GHz. It's not something intended for cheap consumer HTs though. The chip is $300 alone and a drop-in SoM (System on a Module) is $1,600... You might generalize saying it's easier to make a straight superheterodyne radio that performs fine but is less expensive. Mostly it's reliability and build quality that suffers. After decades of engineering churn there's not much fat left to cut in the fundamental architecture to significantly improve performance so all you're left with is using cheaper components. So it won't last as long being tossed around but the actual RF performance is indistinguishable otherwise. But such a radio is inflexible and doesn't lend itself to adaption to something else. DSP techniques are still evolving and proprietary. So there's a lot more ways to screw up a direct conversion radio. Algorithms and firmware are where established companies (Motorola, Harris, Yaesu, Kenwood, whomever) can really distance themselves from competitors. Motorola is probably using direct conversion in the XPR7000 and EVX models and it works well. But then again no one other than Motorola knows really what is inside their ASICs to know for sure. But the guts don't matter, they aren't able to bend the laws of economics, physics or engineering. What matters is where the rubber meets the road - does it work or not? And if they can do it other companies can, too. In fact Harris builds most of the high performance, high reliability radios for the military and one portable example, the AN/PRC-152 (Falcon III), is a highly frequency nimble (covers 30-512 MHz and 762-870 MHz without gaps) 5 watt TX SDR that can do several analog and digital modes, some of which (like APCO-25, amongst other things) were added with a firmware upgrade after the radio was accepted and put into service. That sort of flexibility is why SDR is where it's at. The reason these CCRs proliferate is once a basic design is done they can adapt it to just about anything. That comes with up- and downsides. They can just make them faster and cheaper or they can add interesting form factors or features, whatever. And even heterodyne architecture have DSP, so the line isn't really that distinct to say this-or-that. If you're still interested after that diatribe you can start digging into the engineering behind various architectures and RF generally here: https://analog.intgckts.com/wireless-receiver-architectures/

The pros for me are: The build quality is great. I need a radio that is water resistant and dust resistant. I carried Motorola radios for the last 40 years in my jobs and the 905G feels almost as solid as those. The radio is simple to use. I have had a HAM license for decades and when searching for a GMRS radio I wanted something simple to use. Repeater ready. Very easy to use on repeaters. I like the channels groups and the ability to scan groups. CTCSS scan. A function I find useful that I didn't think I would use. Audio quality is very good. The cons: You can only add repeaters having the same tones into a group via the computer. I like that you can build other groups for repeaters, but, not from the radio end. I wish the screen would accommodate "Name" "Frequency", and "GMRS channel number" at once. I understand it would take a bigger screen and I will eventually learn the channel numbers. Coming from the HAM side I am just so used to it all being about the frequency. I have tried other GMRS radios of lesser price but the quality just wasn't there for me. I was going to get the 805G but when I saw they were going to come out with the 905G I waited and I am happy I did. Sean