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I've been using LMR400 on my repeater for over a year-and-a-half and it has been plenty "good enough" for me and everyone in the several hundred square miles that the repeater covers. Is it as good as a multi-thousand dollar commercial-grade repeater installation? NO Will the coax last forever? NO Does it work? YES Be wary of "some people" that love spending other people's money.

TNRonin, Youre getting good advice from radio professionals about the best antennas and feed line. That’s great if you really want the best. If that’s the case simply ignore the rest of this post. If you’re still reading you might be a hobbyist who’s just interested in “good enough“ and the financial savings that implies. You already have LM400 feedline. I think you already have a J-pole. A short run of LM400 will have nearly no discernible incremental losses compared to hardline. Just make sure you seal the connectors against moisture. A better antenna will make a difference, but how much is that worth to you? Hook up what you have and try it. It won’t cost you anything but your time and I guarantee you’ll learn from the experience. Then, if it doesn’t work like you want, you can always try a different antenna (or perhaps raising the j-pole). You can always upgrade the feed line as well. I would hate to see your enjoyment of the hobby diminished because you’ve been convinced that what you have isn’t good enough when the actual incremental improvement is only measurable to professionals. Don’t let the best stand in the way of the good enough. Lots of people use LM400 and j-poles with inexpensive repeaters and do just fine. In the end elevation and location are the most important factors and all the money you have cannot overcome that.

About 1/3 the way down the page are adapters for SMA to PL/SO-259 connectors. Tower Electronics Online Wholesale Catalog - Page One (pl-259.com)

@MichaelLAX Thanks for the input! I've been really pleased with every bit of Radioddity equipment I've interacted with (and now owned!) and they generally sit in a nice price-to-review area, as far as I can tell. It'll definitely be on the short list when I look at buying. Sorry to hear about your bike!

You don't work for Radioddity, do you? You're gonna get me in trouble with the wife, my Amazon cart is getting really heavy.

Those steps will also tell you the version of the firmware installed.

They may be ctcss (aka PL) tones or dcs (aka DPL) tones, depending on the repeater. If it's a number with a decimal, that's ctcss. If it's a 3 digit number, usually followed by a N or I, that's DCS.

Yes. CTCSS or DCS/DPL are the Input and Output tone you need in your subscriber.

Went back through the links, and compared to my Amazon history; the second is the one I bought from, the description does mention being 95e certified (though the title is inconsistent, I know), and the FCC id does check out with a 95e grant. In theory, theyre only shipping locked down versions to the States...in reality, one of the two wasn't locked down as it should have been. Which..I bought one of the two to be a ham radio anyway, so they saved me a step.

It all went downhill when the phone company stopped charging .25 cents / minute for long distance phone calls... nationwide "local" calls. The monster approaching in Stranger Things is the Information Age threatening to destroy Edenic ignorance. Mesh radio protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy / Internet of Things will increase surveillance of everything. Dune's OCB: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I am going to throw some knockoff LMR400 (KMR400) I have laying around on my RT97. This will be an outdoors installation. Just to see what happens. There are all these posts saying not to use it for theoretical reasons but I have yet to find a post where one did use it and came back with real world results. I have been using RG400...and that has been fine but I wanna try the LMR for the heck of it.

Yeah, wall thickness is more about structural integrity than RF emission. If you look up 'skin effect' you will find that UHF rides right on the face of an antenna, not through the whole element. And the depth it rides in is far smaller than anything you are gonna find to make an antenna out of so I wouldn't be concerned with that. Now it was mentioned about the diameter of the antenna elements and how bigger diameters have a wider bandwidth. This IS important and can throw off the design a bit. So be aware of that.

I don't think Sad Ham means what you think it means. Alex isn't a sad ham... he's a decent guy and so is Randy. The thing is Randy @OffRoaderX has been correct with most of his statements and he has some pretty solid opinions that I haven't really been able to rebut. However, Randy (or at least his online personality) also doesn't care if your feelings are hurt by the truth or his opinions, and that upsets some people... which I find THAT ironic! LoL

It might require tweaking the dimensions some to return to the desired band tuning.

The wall thickness doesn't matter for RF performance. It is a factor for the mechanical strength. However the larger diameter of the conductor will make a noticeable difference in the bandwidth of the antenna. The larger diameter will result is a low SWR over a wider range of frequencies.

An increase in outside diameter does result in slightly greater bandwidth (a wider band of low SWR). I doubt it’ll make a huge difference though.

Welcome to the forum! Congrats on the perfect first post. Look everybody, another trooper from the NotaSingleclue Brigade.

It sounds like your computer is incorrectly trying to open the compressed (.zip or .rar) file with Adobe. Try to manually open the file with your Unzipping program, or look up how to change the association between whatever file type it is and Adobe. Also - for clarification - you dont need "the driver", you need the programming software.

Bought the DB-20G mobile with a GM-30 handheld combo.....that GM-30 is the one wish I had not spent money on. It is a decent radio, but already having considerably better radios, to include those also made in China (Anyton 878) as well as Motorola, Harris, and other radios made in the United States (some Motorola is still made in Chicago, as is Harris), that GM-30 is a little too basic for my likes. I gave it away to a neighbor that wanted to get into GMRS, and seems to like it a lot. So, all was not lost. My issue with it was that it was only UHF, just did not fit my larger hands well, and had very tinny audio. Neighbor uses it, but has also bought nicer and more expensive radios since.

yah... About that......

Do what I did: Send them to @lougasp61to use at his New Jersey Homeless organization. Non-Profit Needs HT donations

I haven’t disliked any of them. Each one taught me something and I still own them all.

The chances of getting the FCC to grant more exclusive frequencies for GMRS are next to zero. We’re lucky they don’t take some away to use for Part 90 users. We’re far better off petitioning the FCC to allow digital voice modes on GMRS. The cheap FRS radios would stay the same, limited power, no repeater access and narrow band FM only. There is a thread I started on the topic 1 or 2 months back. In one of my posts there is an attached file outlining the idea.

According to the FCC Enforcement Database, since 2012, there are no ramifications. Unintended consequences include more "pure" spectrum-use since virtually every LMR radio is better designed and has far less spurious output than pretty-much any consumer GMRS radio on the market.

And deservedly so!

I think the reason people care is because they paid and someone else didn't. It's just a matter of them feeling that if they are keeping the rules, why is nobody else? Yes, hall monitor mentality. I've thought about it. I paid my $35. I hear no call signs being uttered except for when there is a net in operation, or people working a repeater. And I do mean none. Nobody. Never. I never hear another person using a call sign on the GMRS / FRS frequencies except in formal nets or repeater use. Even some nets aren't identifying with call signs. There's nothing that can be accomplished by being grumpy about it. There are tens of thousands of GMRS or FRS radios that have been sold in the past few years within a 25 mile radius of me... of any of us. Maybe more than tens of thousands. One or two grumps are not going to stem the tide. Not even a few hundred. Remember the Internet around 1993-1994? It was well behaved (or at least conformed to a consensus standard). Spam was almost unheard of. Then ever fall a new set of students would get their school-issued accounts, and Usenet would blow up with stupidity for awhile until they were flamed into submission or departure from the medium. And then everything changed: The Internet became popular. AOL started sending out hundreds of million of CDs. There were news stories on the Internet. Books. Magazines. Globally the world was racing to get online. And these newcomers had no idea about, or no interest in stodgy convention. The net-police could flame all they wanted, but there was no stemming the tide of dumbing-down of the Net. All was not lost. It turns out that the Internet became a whole lot more useful when there were droves of people using it. It expanded into use-cases none of the old guard could have dreamed of. And of the unwashed masses? They're fine, it turns out. The real issue is the fraudsters, scammers, and hackers. So enforcement focuses in those areas. All this to say, there's really no point for an end user trying to enforce a policy that not even those who made the policy have any interest in enforcing. Let the FCC spend its time dealing with truly awful abuses, and leave the blister-pack kiddies and hard working businesses alone unless they're really, really causing harm.

It doesnt matter, and only the hall-monitors care - as you can see very clearly in this and other online forums..

It helps a bit due to the added contrast, but doesn't totally solve the problem. That will have to wait for an OLED screen in a future version.

Does it actually display their call sign? Just curious.....if there is something to this. At any rate, reading replies to my comment has educated me a bit and I see that MDC is likely used in important ways.

Everyone in our GMRS group uses MDC so we know who is talking and/or what radio they are on.

Sorry I use it on all my radios so I know which radio is being used. Each radio has its unique ID. With many users on a repeater its nice to keep track of who just called. JMHO

Staff Memo - The subject of this thread is important enough, for newly licensed user reference, to pin it to the top of this posting area.