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Why anybody would need a justification from others to do what he/she wants to do? If GMRS is a hobby to you, great! It is not to me, but why would you care how I use the service? You only care about how YOU use it. Do whatever you want, while being a good neighbor to other users. It's a free country.

Welcome to the forum. I hope you get everything you want here. There’s a lot to learn and different people learn differently. I greatly enjoyed studying and taking the ham tests but I also enjoy being able to communicate with my family without all of them having to study and take a test. GMRS and Ham Radio can be complementary to each other without requiring a person to choose a side. Thanks for your service.

OK, I tried not to do it, but it's every day in groups of Facebook *and* reddit now: "GMRS is not a hobby" "GMRS is only for talking to your family and friends" "There are no GMRS groups to join. You should just take the test and be a ham."

Welcome to this site, there is a lot of good information here and people willing to help. I am a novice my self and many have given me solid advice (not my preferred brand is better than the other brands) that has made the GMRS useful to me as a hobby. Enjoy!

He's speaking the truth, and being a veteran myself I understand and respect his plain speaking. I'm a ham myself, and came to GMRS because of the sad hams. Sent from my SM-T860 using Tapatalk

Ham jargon for conversation or "contact". Stems from Morse Code / CW abbreviations that were carried over to voice communications.

I think I would just put a repeater in at my house and walk around with my HT before I spent money on a combiner. Then it won't matter what room I am in, if I'm in any room at all.

I always like the one where the guy is being an internet professor, and you later find out he's been licensed for 6 months and knew about radio for 7. I don't try to be a know it all, I rarely even give advice, but I will if I see some moron giving bad advice and misleading someone. I've been licensed since you had to give a lat/long and pick a frequency to have a repeater.

I stand by my original comment: "Those people..."

Yeah i agree.... listened to hams for a gazillion years and always the same year after year they just move around to the different repeaters. The extra knowledge to me doesn't seem as special as full time hams make it out too be. First year solders know just as much as a tech or general in the basic radio stuff they get and well its just not that special and they come of as haughty and self righteous. Course all that than non sense is to be ignored is true but i think intelligently correcting might go further I think many years of doing nothing but ignoring empowers it but that's just my opinion...

@axorlov Yes, "Its not a hobby" is certainly not the same as it "wasn't intended to be as a hobby". but then anyone can make a hobby out of anything, as its been stated countless times. Exactly, you certainly don't need to be looking for anyone's approval, or be popular to do whatever you want/need to do, provided its all within the law. Again, the same applies to "intended use". GMRS was intended to "talk to family, friends, or any other GMRS license holder" in the beginning, but nowadays, given the fact that FRS is open to anyone, you can talk to anyone. GMRS is, nowadays, CB on UHF... but that is a different story for another day. G.

Thanks for the update Marc. I want to grab a 575 also to play with but can't justify the cost when my 275 works fine and where I need more power the APX does the trick ! ?

So, I never provided an update on my situation. I did some serious testing and I discovered that the noise issues I am having are directly related to my Jeep. I have been driving with my roof and doors off all season. The noise issues I have been experiencing are 100% due to some obscure airflow while the Gladiator is stripped down, causing static electromagnetic interference, and just with one antenna location. If I switch to my secondary antenna mount in the rear of the pickup bed or if the roof and doors are on, I have zero issues. That said and after experiencing a tad bit of frustration due to no fault of the gear, I will still contend that the top two over the counter mobile GMRS radios are the KG-1000G and the Midland MXT500. The MXT575 seems decent, too, but I have only experienced it from using one installed in another persons Jeep. Though, the MXT575 doesn't have a Compander feature (I don't see it in the manual or menus), which isn't a must, but it is a nice feature for Midland to Midland communications when both have the feature.

Ive said it in the past. I run the 275 in both my Jeeps and the 115 in my parents vehicles. Also had a 115 in my Motorhome we just sold. I have yet to find issues with any of the radios. With that said I run good NMO mounts and 1/4 wave antenna's on all of them, except my mothers Renegade. We have a Larsen glass mount on that. They work great on my repeater. 99% of my traffic is simplex when traveling for Jeep events or camping. When at a camp ground I had my repeater in the MH and would use sometimes. Even when traveling up and down the east coast I have yet to find a repeater I could not access that I wanted to. I guess its all on what you expectations are . I find the ease of use and basic controls a plus especially for my parents who are in the 70's. Been doing GMRS for a long time and other than my public safety gear all my GMRS stuff is Midland for the purpose above. Simple. Reasonably priced. If your in an area where you are bouncing all over repeaters and split tones and such I guess they aren't the best option but I find many worry about that when its not really an issue. YMMV

It's because GMRS licenses are tied to an individual, not to a location. You could be a GMRS License holder in one state, and then have a repeater located in another state, and the FCC would have no idea where your repeater is located. You could also be the License holder, and your sister who lives 2 states away could be the actual user, or her kids. There's sometimes little correlation between the License, the user, and the location with GMRS. If you do want to find out who your local GMRS peeps might be, then yeah just search for ZA within your town/zipcode. Please realize that many of the License names listed might not be actively using GMRS radios, and would probably rather NOT be contacted.

I think what you are looking for is what many companies used back in the day and probably still use today. It requires one radio with what they called Remote bases or remotes stations. The picture shown here is called an extended local remote. The draw back is that you cannot generally change the channel in your situation but if you are looking to monitor one repeater or simplex channel, this is about the closest I can come to what you are looking to do. I worked for a newspaper company when I was younger and they had these spread throughout the building for their radio. To the best of my knowledge, they require one radio, not two.

If you are wanting to have two or more radios on a single antenna you are out of luck..... you need two antenna's one for transmit and one fore receive... If you are willing to run 2 antenna's you can run a control station combiner that allows you to run as many radios as it has ports. 4 is usually the minimum but 8 is more common and they can be expanded to 32 ports which is the largest I have seen. With tow antenna's. Now the pricing isn't for the faint of heart, typically about a grand per port on the smaller ones and can get down to 500 per port on the larger units. Plus of course the two antenna's required. Signal loss though these is pretty high as well. Looking at 6 dB both directions. SO a 50 watt radio will have 12.5 watts out, but it's typical to turn the radios down to 20 watts so you are looking at 5 watts out. Incoming signal is also 6dB down so you need to be fairly close to the repeaters you are talking to.

No, no, no. You just have to flash your hambadge then they'll know you outrank them and must stand down.

Welcome to GMRS; I think you'll like what it will do for you. I'm a long-time ham myself and I've seen what you've seen; I simply decided to ignore it all and just did what I wanted to do. Anyway, you'll find some good people here that will be happy to help you out if you have any questions. I'm still somewhat new myself, and I always defer to those who definitely have more experience. Looking forward to seeing you on the threads! Warren, WRPC505 / WQ1C

I do as well, and they inspired me to give it a shot and see if I liked it or not. Well, due to space constraints I decided to go the minimalistic route and bought the Xiegu G90; actually, it was two of them but both crapped out on me...didn't want to try a third time. Liked the QRP way of life, so now I'm REALLY digging into QRP and QRPp, which is definitely the Pixie. Once the SW-3C arrives I can begin to have some fun. Antennas are the Wolf River Coils SB 1000 Mega TIA with the 213" whip and an EFHW at about 35' in length but will probably lengthen. And yes, my wife approves!

Sounds like it might be fun, if I could ever get the hang of CW and truly learn it. I know quite a few people that do really well QRP CW.

I agree. Like I said before though, it's only to experiment and play with until my SW-3C arrives and then I'll seriously get after it. But I will play with the Pixie from time to time and see what I can do with it (or not); it may even tag along (along with the SW-3C) with me to a local park for a couple of hours. Amateur Radio at its core is about experimentation; that is definitely what I will be doing. If I don't make a contact, I'm not going to fuss over it. If I do, it's what I would call a "plus day."

I cut off all the miscellaneous connectors on my 12 volt equipment, replaced with 'power pole'. Eliminates a lot of aggravation.

Full disclosure - I've never had a Retevis repeater on the bench to test it out. Judging by the price point (and the design of their portables) it's probably based on a simple Direct Conversion receiver, which are sensitive, but prone to overload. I'd agree that for a simple "quick and dirty" low elevation repeater, it probably does the job for a majority of users looking for their own specific solution. The Retevis is at least less than the cost of a good used MTR2000. I'd really ask anyone looking at a Bridgecom or building their own Woxoun repeater out of 2 mobiles to stop and check out the alternatives available. You really can end up with more for less, if you consider used Part 90 gear. And, that used Part 90 stuff has a resale value when you're done with it. Something you won't really see with used Bridgecom equipment.

I'm new to this board myself, and welcome. Lots to learn, and good teachers to boot on the board. Sent from my SM-T860 using Tapatalk

World peace is possible if we just keep hammering home the fact that these are not separate groups.

Based on my subjective and nerdy calculations, there are a little over 10,000 licensed GMRS users that are affected by this, which works out to about 7% of the United States licensed GMRS users. I say we (the 93%) use channel 19 anyway hahaha

The new MTX275 is wide band - check my posts in this thread -

I am not sure I understand the point of this thread: Either get an $35 GMRS license for you and your family and use a $100 DB-20G mobile (or some more expensive inferior Midland mobile) or use an FRS HT! What’s the debate?

From part 95.531 - permissible uses: (c) GMRS stations. FRS units normally communicate with other FRS units, but may also be used to communicate with General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) stations.

Agreeing that technician license is all that is needed. At Field Day this year we had a amateur member focused on communicating CW with the ISS. He had a nice setup. In consisted of a dual band ICOM radio, a homemade circular polarized Yagi mounted on top of heavy duty camera stand. Club members took turns (including myself) tracking the ISS across the sky while using a satellite tracking app on an android. There was loads of traffic to be heard. Michael WRHS965 KE8PLM

So, something new that I am extremely disappointed about with my MXT500. When I got this radio, I did not bother doing any real testing of the receiver for noise rejection, filtering and selectivity. And today I don't need to because I know it sucks. The receiver is so bad, that I may send this back to Midland for repair and then sell it, because it's not reliable and therefore not usable. I went offloading this weekend and opted to use my MXT500 because it is water and dust resistant and my other radios are not. I used the radio for about 14 hours a day for 3 days, out in the mountains of PA. This was the first time I used the radio for more than a few minutes for testing and getting familiar with the radio. On the first day, after having the radio on for about 30 minutes, a few people I don't know started chatting on a close-in repeater. The repeater is close enough to me that I receive its signal well enough that there is zero noise/static in the signal. After just 3 minutes of hearing the chatter, the receiver started cutting in and out. Not the audio, but the actual receiver would flutter as I watched the signal meter and hear the audio just go away and comeback rapidly. I turned on my handheld, just to confirm it wasn't the repeater or interference and the handheld was receiving the conversion perfectly. This issue persisted over the entire 3 days. If a conversion went on for more than a few minutes, the receiver went to crap. To make things even worse, it started raining on the second day and it rained all day. The whole time my headlights were on, we could hear a distinct crackle and interference with the receiver. Also, every time the windshield wipers moved, you could hear the wipers motor in the receiver. On top if that, my Jeep was completely off and a buddy pulled along side me to talk, and I could hear HIS windshield wiper motor on my radio. This is not a wiring issue with my Jeep. It is not an issue with filters on my power lines or my antenna cable. I simply unplugged my existing amateur radio equipment and plugged the MXT500 into the existing power and antenna system. None of my other gear has any issues on these connections. Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, listen to this... I was talking to someone at their home, on my local repeater while driving around last night (just dealing with the noise and receiver flutter] and I needed to jump out of the Jeep and run in a store. The repeater is about 25 miles from my neighborhood. So, I hoped out and grabbed my handheld so I could keep chatting while walking around in the store. The guy I was talking to asked me if I made any adjustments to my radio. I said "I just got out of the truck and switched to my handheld". I thought he was going to give me a bad report, but instead he said that may handheld radio had a better signal into the repeater and the audio was much much better. When I got back outside, I confirmed the Midland was in wideband and on full power. I'm so disappointed that the transmit signal of the Midland and the receiver quality or so bad. I mean, my quality into the repeater was better with a 5w HT while inside a building from 25 miles away... my heart sunk even more. I know you can't see it, but im making my sad face.