Leaderboard

Fine, I'll do it. I'm just saying, you aren't living until you used an amateur cross-band repeater to connect a MURS handheld to a GMRS repeater.... allegedly.... Now we see who has a sense of humor. LoL

The hood location will compromise your range. The better place was on the roof. I had a roof rack mount on my old Jeep. The cable ran down the side of the rear hatch opening. I used some duck tape to hold the cable in place along the opening and then ran the cable through at the bottom with a “drip leg”. The hatch door covered up the tape so you can’t see it. That way any rain would run down the cable and not get through the hatch seal.

Very unlikely. If one wants VHF access use MURS. Want HF access use 11M CB radio. Want more channels, power, repeaters and bands get a Ham license. That's going to be their logical response.

What does “duty cycle” mean? I bring up duty cycle every time I hear somebody talking about making a repeater out of cheap Chinese mobiles and worse any type of handhelds. Duty cycle is the maximum time an amplifier may transmit within a five minute interval, expressed as a percentage, to avoid overheating. Suppose a mobile amplifier is rated at 30% duty cycle. This means that it may transmit for no longer than 1.5 minutes and must remain off for not less than 3.5 minutes. Some people forget that a repeater is transmitting for 2 or more people, duty cycle will be reached quickly if you get into conversation. More people in the conversation just amplifies the issue. Once a radio reaches it's thermal design limits it will no longer be able to adequately cool the output transistors. Even if a radio is not hot to the touch the transistors are, in part because of the inefficient transfer of heat to the units housing or internal heat sink. The longer you exceed the duty cycle the more heat builds on the transistors, surrounding electronics and heat sink effecting it's ability to remain on frequency without spurious emissions. Exceed duty cycle long enough and you will need a new transmitter or radio. I have tested a few Baofang and TYT radios on my service monitor without great results. All of the radios started deviating outside of the allotted channel bandwidth after simulated conversation at 50% duty cycle, the longer I allowed this the worse if got. Testing was done using an Aeroflex 2975 IFR recently back from the calibration lab. GMRS is a tiny sliver of spectrum surrounded by the commercial land mobile part 90 service. It is important that any repeaters that are built or re-purposed are held to the highest standards and operated as to not cause any interference inside or outside of our allocated spectrum. I wont get into the part 90/95 debate but i do stand firm that non certified import equipment has no place on GMRS.

I was using a magnetic mount atop the rear of the roof for a while. But the way the cable was ran, every time I opened/closed the rear hatch, it was rubbing up on it and crimping it. I didn't like that, so I purchased this new mount and cable for the hood.

Agreed the PSRG system works extremely well in the Seattle area. Worth taking a look at.

So, is it a good location? Sure, but up high on the lift gate will work better.

I've used a matching loop like what you find on the Cushcraft Ringo antennas with excellent results on every 5/8 wave I built. Extremely easy to build and tune.

The expected behavior is, if the transmitting radio is on narrow and the receiving radio is on wide, than the voice will sound quiet and possibly static-filled. It will also sound tinny due to how the audio filters are tuned. Where the processor normally pulls audio for bass, there is no voice to sample. This is because, best case, only half of the receivers channel space is occupied with data. The rest is noise. In the opposite case, if the transmitting radio is on wide and the receiving radio is on narrow, than the voice will sound overly loud, possibly distorted and possibly have a lot of bass. This is because only half of the transmitter's signal is being heard on the receive side, making is sound over-modulated and the audio segment where he treble is sampled is missing. Based on that understanding, mismatching bandwidth should not cause a variation, starting out loud and shifting quiet. Its either loud and bassy or quiet and tinny, depending on which side of the mismatched bandwidth setting you're on.

From this page: https://www.miklor.com/UV82/UV82-MenuDef.php R-TONE Repeater Tone - Used to activate those repeaters requiring a specific audible tone to be transmitted for access. - Sending tone requires first pressing the PTT, then pressing the [F] key. This is not to be confused with a sub-audible CTCSS or DCS code.

I’ve been licensed on GMRS for roughly 15 years and on other bands for many years before that. In early September, 2022, I was accessing a GMRS repeater in Southern California that has been licensed and operational for over 30 years. Each time I keyed our repeater, there was a heterodyne on the output that blocked our communications. It took a while to diagnose the problem. With the help of other repeater users, we determined that a new repeater had recently gone on the air. But, unlike every other repeater on this shared frequency, this new one was not following the industry best practice of filtering and protecting its own input receiver with a CTCSS (PL) tone. That meant that when anyone tried to use any local repeater on that frequency pair, this new repeater intercepted their PL-encoded input signals (against the sender’s intentions) and broadcast their messages over its own output transmitter, thus misdirecting messages intended for other repeaters. This created an unwanted heterodyne between two repeaters that degraded everyone’s communications. Then, this new repeater owner accused us of jamming their repeater, which is an odd form of reverse logic. They were jamming their own repeater by not implementing a selective PL tone filter on their own receiver. They were effectively sabotaging themselves and blaming everyone else. We’ll keep the name of that new GMRS club and repeater owner private and confidential. It seems that these are very nice young people with good intentions to provide communications capabilities to the general public. We totally support their mission. We think everybody should have the opportunity to use GMRS for personal communications and emergency preparedness. We’ve tried to become their friends by reaching out to them, but they have ignored our offers of technical assistance and refuse to even communicate with us to resolve this. All we are asking is that these new people respect the fact that there are legacy repeaters that have been on the same frequency for 30 years or more. We are merely requesting that they comply with Part 95 guidelines to share the frequency in a way that does not inhibit other users from continuing their ongoing use of older legacy repeaters. There could be several different technical solutions here. One of which is to adopt the common standard practice of implementing a selective PL tone filter on their repeater receiver, so that they do not intercept and re-transmit traffic that is intended for other repeaters — not intended for their repeater. Does this seem like a fair and reasonable request? We can all be friends and share these frequencies if we simply configure our repeaters correctly using common industry standards. When emergency communications are needed, we all need to be ready to operate efficiently and cooperatively. And we all should work professionally with mutual respect as colleagues and friends at all times. * * * * *

I sent this to the team. This may be the way we go. Thanks for the link.

I have a friend who is on that system and who has good results.

https://web.psrg.org/psrg-voting-system/ Here is something I stumbled across on the ham side of the table, that seems to provide a good description of what's going on behind the scenes and the gear they're using..don't know if it's any help

It really depends on how those “channels“ are configured. A channel can refer to any combination of frequency and receive tone, so it’s possible to have numerous channels on the same frequency. Look and see what frequency GMRS-16 and RPT-1 receive on. I bet they’re the same and you have no tone set for one of them. If not, then maybe the problem MichaelLAX described is right.

You wouldn't believe how many dummies do that.

Does anyone have an approved and official list of the equipment that can be used to commit or facilitaed criminal acts? I want to do things correctly. Asking for a friend