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1. I have a coupon 2. Whoever answers 3. Deep-dish pepperoni and a side of garlic knots I've been training for this my whole life.

I'll chime in and say I agree with Spaz, I truly believe amateur radio is better overall in an emergency. That being said, it does completely depend on what level of emergency you are talking about. There are a few notes that are pretty darn important: 1) Create a plan, or multiple plans for different scenarios. On-the-fly planning well not be sufficient when something goes sideways. 2) Vet your equipment. Just like any other equipment, you have to know how to use it, and use it effectively. Practice makes perfect. 3) Be active in your choice of communications. That could mean the neighborhood watch on FRS/GMRS, ARES, or just even the local ham group. You can bet that there is a 3000% better chance of your distress call being answered if they recognize your name/call than some random person coming out of the woodwork. You will also then know what is monitored by others frequently and where the activity is. 4) It is ok to separate your family communications plan from your external aid communications plan. 5) Your equipment does you no good sitting on a shelf at home. You will likely be at work, or out somewhere away from home when it all falls apart. Then you will have to make due with what you have on you, in your car, or in a pack. Are you prepared for that? 6) Redundancy isn't necessary, but isn't a bad idea.

No. We all have to get along like grownups, which not-surprisingly, can sometimes be difficult so usually the bigger repeater wins.

Split tones are pretty good indication of a CLOSED repeater. And of course some radios will not support the split tones. I would go with a single PL tone, and I would be looking hard at 141.3 which is the 'traveler tone'. But I would program up a radio and try bringing up any local repeaters with that configuration prior to reprogramming the repeater.

I'm not sure of speaker placement on the Ranger, but I've seen a few options on the F150 that might work for you: 1) If there is a center channel speaker in the dash above the infotainment system, disconnect it and use it as the speaker for your radio. Can be seen here: 2) Get a remote speaker and place it behind the infotainment system, within the dash. This can be seen here: http://i.imgur.com/ZiKiesy.jpg?1

Only if the guy with the bigger repeater is an a-hole. Because real men will accept that someone else was there first and chance frequency. Like the Johnstown625 repeater becoming the Johnstown 600 repeater. To the actual question. There isn't a coordinating body like there is for commercial and amateur radio. The individual repeater owners are expected to work together to coordinate their repeater pairs to minimize interference with other users. This can be difficult as there is no standing database that has ALL the GMRS repeaters in it. There are a number of them on here, and quite a few on RepeaterBook.com but neither database has everything. My advice is to listen with an outdoor antenna with a radio or scanner programmed with NO PL or DCS in it so you will hear ANY transmissions. If you find a busy repeater, then that's not the pair to be using. If you hear some traffic but it seems to be off in the distance it might work if you are going to setup a limited coverage system. But you are going to need a quiet frequency if you are putting up a repeater with a large coverage footprint. When putting up a big system, and there are no quite pairs, try locating the owner of one of the small systems and see if they are willing to forgo having a repeater and instead just use yours. And if you are putting up a large coverage repeater, make it OPEN for all users. You are 'consuming' a resource when you put up a repeater. That being one of the 8 pairs that we have available to put repeaters on. If you are locking down 100 square miles with your repeater, no one else can use it, so don't be 'that guy' and not share the repeater.

Your emergency might not be my emergency, and vice versa. Just have a communication plan for your emergency. If it is to organize community to clear the road from the landslide with FRS, so be it. If to order pizza from Lubbock Texas, more power to you. Just plan ahead, and be realistic with the expectations. And do some training too. Just like with any other communication plan, have an answer to three questions: 1) what do I want to say; 2) who do I want to talk to; 3) what do I need from them/what can I do for them. For example, we had (still have) a fairly detailed plan between me, wife and kids about what to do if major earthquake hits. Radio comms is a part of this plan, but not a major part. It is rather "nice if it works" sort of thing. Our house is on one side of the dangerous fault, while mine and wife's office on the other side of this fault and also a mountain ridge. I always maintained that I need 48 hours max to get back to the house in any circumstance. During this 48 hours, stay calm, save water, save batteries, and adhere to Radio-3-3-3. If I'm not there in 2 days, assume I never will be there, and act accordingly. Of course, there are more details, I do not want to bore you with. Like, for example, reserve frequencies and alternate time slots in case of interference or whatever. We did our regular training while we were camping, hiking, being around. Now kids are young adults and of course think that parents are super uncool, but trained skills will not disappear. Couple of years ago, when some major fires were burning around our community in California, and we were sitting for a few days without electricity, cell service and internet, it was handy to use battery-powered laptop and battery-powered FT-817 and Winlink to maintain email exchange with my elderly parents, so they know that we are fine and have plenty of canned food, stoked on water and have a full tank in a car, should we need to dash out. The experience and equipment I have from the SOTA and other -OTA activation helped.

You can do it now. I would just add a note in the description with it's current "test" status. You can update the listing as often and as much as you'd like.

Come on. All that "training" is voluntary at best. As a kid when the interest was there, I was so excited that I scoured all the books, talked with Gordon West at the fairground, and sat for some classes. Obviously, I was in school so doing all that studying was second nature, but I was going to be top of the class dammit! When I finally took the test, even then, I knew I had wasted my time. I could have passed that test months earlier after flipping through the question pool. Hell, it's multiple choice just like school, I stood a good chance just guessing! Since all the licensing is online now, that "training" could be accomplished with a couple pages of rules, and clicking "I Agree" then "Submit Payment". I know that not everyone is as likeable, friendly, outgoing, or modest as I am, but that sounds like a community outreach problem to me. Do you have a CERT team nearby? I always encourage people to find time to do it even if they don't want to join - the training is comprehensive, hands on, and free. It's especially good because it emphasizes that in a significant enough situation, relying on national guard, police, fire, or EMS (I'll put ham radio in here, just to torment Marc) is not an option, because they aren't coming. I remember during a debrief, the example along the lines of (paraphrasing), 'If the event is large enough, San Diego won't care if Palm Springs is on fire'. Yes, they will send manpower, tankers, ladder trucks, and whatever else, but the fires at home will be put out first. I think it's important for people to realize that while our public safety network is robust and capable the majority of time, it's also fragile and limited in extreme situations. Maybe I'm just getting old and paranoid, but it feels like situations that test the limits are happening with greater frequency these days, as opposed to just a few years ago. Anyway, If I were in your shoes, I would talk to neighbors. Maybe grab a couple bubble pack radios to give away.

Well I have to say, I don't bash any service of radio. Ham radio as a whole has a lot to offer. Its some of the people that are into it that make issues, or in some cases, dont exist in emergency situations. When I first got licensed as a ham back in the 90's the following things really intrigued me and I tried so hard to get into them - Emergency communication, VHF/UHF radio work (all modes and different things involved), building antennas for on the go type situations, maintaining a portable station where I could be out in the middle of nowhere and still operate, Skywarn, and many other things associated with off grid/emergency type communications. In the end all I got was "are you going to upgrade your license and join us on HF?" I even got the ol chuckle from those in public safety when mentioning how ham radio had a whole emergency communications aspect to it. What am I supposed to take all that as? It doesn't seem as though anyone really cares about ham radio or its ability in disaster situations. Maybe its the area I live in. Up here in the northeast most just rely on the national guard if something hit the fan, and now where I live in Maine, most people already live prepared for an emergency (which almost never happens) so no one really seems to care about communication. They all have cell phones. I know in other parts of the country, Ham Radio is used heavily in many types of emergencies, so I may be spouting my mouth off about only my little area. Going by what I have observed with my own eyes and ears, it honestly scares me if I relied fully on Ham radio for emergency communication. How I have seen Ham radio used in other areas of the country during the slightest of emergencies vs. how its been used in areas I have lived is a big difference. The lack of enthusiasm for the emergency communication aspect in addition to many other things is what caused me to take a back seat with Ham Radio. I still keep my equipment and license just in case and I still do experimenting on my own but I leave it as "It's there in case I need it". I still like to be prepared just in case.

Well, it just so happens..... I have BOTH the 5000's in 3 bands and the 2500's in 3 bands. The one 5K is an 800 system radio and the equivalent 2500 is 900 and used for ham Durability is about the same. Price is similar. I like my 5K's because I have an XTVA in my van which allows me to drop any of the three radios in and have a handheld control head and external speaker. I have a multiband commercial antenna on it so it works with all three bands. Programming is no harder than setting up a CCR Baofeng, due to their almost hostile software. The 5K's are a bit larger and heavier than the 2500's but I run a fire rig (shoulder strap and leather case) with a commander mike (has volume and channel control on the mike. Not sure that the commander mike will work with the 2500's but I have never tried. If you are a system owner / operator on the network, the one nice thing with either of the radios is you can program 'phone numbers' into the radio. Now actual phone numbers on GMRS with a phone patch is a no no... But setting up the node DTMF commands so you can connect and disconnect to the different main nodes is nice. You just select the command you what and push the PTT. The radio will send the command string and your node will do it's thing. Accessories is another thing that commercial radios have that the CCR's and ham stuff lack. I have bank chargers that my radios set in. I can charge 6 radios or batteries at a time. Never seen that with a Baofeng. And the overall quality if so much better with the commercial stuff, and the apex of that is the 5K's for their manufactured window of time. Of course they have been phased out and replaced with the APX radios and those are a whole different animal. But they are seriously expensive. I have less invested in all my 2500's and 5000's than a single APX 7000 costs. The other thing with the programming is the files are portable. You can read your radio, email me or someone with my skill set your 'codeplug' (programming file) and I can edit it and setup the radio how you ask for it to be done and then I email it back. This is helpful when learning to program and not knowing exactly what you are doing. Just some thoughts to consider.

That’s a good point, but if that were the problem you should see it in the SWR and the reflected power. Assuming the SWR meter is reasonably accurate neither of those are seem to be an issue. This simply looks like the Rt97 has a very low output power. He needs to contact Retevis.

I see you have it all worked out but as far as wide band goes I have another option. You can use the International version of the programming software to allow you to program in wideband channels. That is what I do. Granted I have only used it on EVX-530 and VX230/260 series radios. I also found that communication errors between the radio and computer were vastly reduced when I bought the OEM FIF-12 programming cable.

USB voltage is 5VDC while the radio runs on 7.4VDC so the USB will not directly charge the radio or run it.

I am new to the whole GMRS radio thing and have been finding some conflicting information on the internet. My setup: Midland MXT275 with MXTA25 ghost antenna connected with provided coax cable. The antenna is mounted an antenna bracket that attached to a load bar on a aluminum truck bed cap. The bottom of the antenna sits about 2 inches above the roof of the bed cap. On channels 1 to 7 SWR of 1.46 and 2.1 on channels 16 to 22. So my questions are Will that aluminum roof make a good enough ground plane? If so does the antenna need to be mounted directly to it or is sitting an inch or 2 above it ok? Don't really want to drill holes in the roof. The mounting bracket is painted and I have had people tell me I need to remove the paint where the antenna attaches and also to run a grounding strap from the mount to the vehicle chassis ground, is this really the case? About the only thing everyone agreed on is that the MXA25 is not a great antenna, any recommendation for something to replace that with that is not too tall and will fit on the existing NMO mount?

I have had this idea running around in my head for awhile and I am wondering if it has any merit or not. I call this idea LOTA, Locals of the Air, and it is a rip off of POTA and SOTA. Both POTA and SOTA for all intensive purposes are HF activities. I was wondering is something similar could not be done for 2m, 70 cm, and GMRS. I am thinking just like POTA their would be hunters and activators using only simplex. The difference would be activators could use any public location, such as city parks, county parks, ball diamonds, etc. The one add-on that you could do with LOTA is adding a fox hunt category to it besides the normal POTA style activity. Before I actually did anything with it, I wanted to get some people's opinions if it. Thanks