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Yes, Sir... I had a few 50x1 and a couple of 50x2. They were all trash. The one that lasted the longest only had a few hours on it... died in less than 14 calendar days. The one that broke the quickest only ran for exactly 1 transmission and then smoked on the second key-up. Basically DOA. The crazy part is, their handhelds are pretty awesome. Especially their amateur radios, like the UV5 and the F8HP. I know many people have good luck with the mobiles, but there would have to be a massive improvement before I ever consider buying another one. My personal opinion, the two best new over the counter radios are the Wouxun KG-1000g the Midland MXT500. I have owned both and they are both rock stars. Very durable and plenty of power. Audio is fantastic on both, too. It comes down to if you are a 'bells and whistles' kind of person and you are technical, Go with the KG-1000g. If you just want simple and works out of the box with minimal knowledge/work, the MXT500 is the way to go. Also, the MXT500 is dust and water proof. Buy once, cry one... don't let the price scare you. Having to buy 2 or 3 radios due to buying junk is way more expensive and time consuming.

It depends on a lot of things. A mobile duplexer, or the little duplexer that comes in the RT97, yes, you will need the isolation. The notch is pretty big and may not be specific enough to provide isolation between repeaters. On sites that have multiple same band repeaters, some have combiners, some have duplexers & combiners to get enough isolation.

Well, then, I guess I'll just have to become a paid subscriber....this site is VERY useful for me. Now I have a little star on my profile icon. Thanks Rich, this is a site that gets more useful every day.

I usually do a single wrap of electrical tape over the exposed threads to keep them clean, wrap the whole thing in linerless splicing tape (3M 130), then wrap that with electrical tape (3M Super 33). I'll wrap from bottom to top in exterior connections - same way you'd shingle a roof, for the same reasons. Have never had an issue with it - Type N connectors are better than PL259 not just for loss, but they're technically weatherproof as well (although I wouldn't trust them by themselves).

A lot of Hams, many won’t publicly admit it, have their VHF/UHF Ham rigs with the MARS/CAP mod for the same reason. Oh, on VHF some have the marine channels programmed in too.

I’ve never found them useful. With a radio hanging on the belt the wrist strap has a nasty habit of catching on crap as you walk close by things then rips the radio off your belt.

No wrist straps for me. It's either on my belt or a side pocket on my backpack with a speaker microphone.

So, first question is why upgrade? This is not a Windows upgrade. Have you read through the release notes of the 20.01.01 firmware to see if ANY of the changes effect conventional analog and P25 operations of the radio. Second is you have to possess a flash key in order to apply the firmware upgrade in order for it to happen. The XTS / XTL family of radios were different in this regard from the APX radios that are now the standard. APX radios will directly upgrade without a flash key. The threat to doing irreversible damage to your radio is a VERY REAL possibility. You are rewriting the software that operates the radio. And while a failure of a cable getting kicked loose or a power failure with a computer would mean that you just boot from the media and attempt to reinstall the latest version of Windows or whatever having a similar failure with your radio during a copy operation will leave the radio in a state that by anyone outside of Motorola, unrecoverable. And in case you somehow feel I don't know what I am talking about, we sent a significant number of radios to Motorola during rebanding (probably 200 of the 15000 we upgraded). And since that was a supported platform at the time, they would fix them. You can't send that radio to Motorola any more, they will simply drop a letter in the box saying the model is no longer supported and charge you a fee to do so plus return shipping. Again, I work for a Motorola shop, Been through this a number of times. Lastly, I am not 100% sure you can go from 17 to 20 directly. At least not safely. You may need to goto 18 first before making that jump to 20. Also, you need to understand that a firmware upgrade will NOT add functionality to the radio. The flashcode of the radio sets the functionality and options in the radio, not the firmware version. Changing the options requires a different type of flash key that is also NLA from Motorola.

Hey all. I am in the process of adding repeaters in the valley area. So far we have one up in Palmer. It's not got the coverage I was expecting yet, but when the weather improves we will be fixing it up some. It's on Ch 29, 467.7000 and tone is 141.3. I will be putting up two more repeaters, one in mid valley and one on the west end, later this year as the weather and access conditions improve. Please be respectful of its use as there is already one user group (Golden Eagle) in Palmer that is accessing that repeater. If you plan to access it, just drop me a request and I am good with it. Much appreciated. I am a commercially licensed radio tech and had my own business a long time ago. Now I have a very different career so this is just a thing. I am not a Ham and have no need to get that license, just a guy with a lot of knowledge and experience who didn't want it to go to waste anymore. As I get geared back up, I will get more into this stuff. The repeaters are refurbed Motorola GR 1225s.

As some of you may know, we have been trying to get myGMRS integrated into CHIRP, a popular open-source radio programming software created by Dan Smith, for several years now. I finally heard back from Dan in December and shared our API (Application Programming Interface) resources to him and test credentials for the website. Given that this was a new feature and a big convenience to users, we wanted to offer it as a perk to Premium Members of the website who support our efforts to be the go-to GMRS community. Dan expressed concerns about having any paid services such as RadioReference.com in his application, because developers would be unable to test unless they had a membership at the website. We agreed to table the discussion until we had a solution for developers to test the myGMRS integration, and he implemented the new feature into CHIRP-next, the next generation of the CHIRP application. Dan released a version of CHIRP-next on December 24th with myGMRS integrated into it. Yesterday, I sent Dan an email letting him know what changes to expect to the API once I require accounts to have a Premium Membership to download repeaters through CHIRP, so he had time to make the required changes to show the appropriate error message rather than a cryptic "Got error code 403 from server" message. Long story short and omitting the gory details, Dan decided it was best to completely remove the myGMRS integration that he had finally added, rather than work with us on how to reach an amicable agreement that makes everyone happy. We offered several solutions to provide developers with Premium Membership so they could test the feature, eliminating the concern from Dan. We are surprised by this but respect his wishes, even though it hurts the GMRS community which utilizes his product for GMRS and/or Amateur Radio. Understandably, I know many people will wonder why this wasn't just a free feature and that be the end of it. However, myGMRS is a small business and it needs to be profitable to survive. myGMRS is a one-person operation (not withstanding all the amazing members who contribute the repeater listings and forum posts) and it takes considerable resources to just to keep the lights on with there being so many users. Since the founding of RepeaterFinder, LLC, the corporate entity behind myGMRS, I have not taken a salary. We intentionally minimize the number of advertisements we show because we hate ads too, but they alone don't cover the cost of running the website for nearly 50,000 users. Very few members have been kind enough to support us by subscribing to a Premium membership, so we're always looking for new perks to add for Premium Members to draw more people to sign up. To those who do support us, I sincerely thank you! If you'd like to utilize the myGMRS lookup feature and are a Premium Member, you can download the last working version of CHIRP-next from 01/09/2023 here: https://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_next/next-20230109/ If you receive "Got error code 403 from server" when trying to authenticate to myGMRS, it means you do not have an active subscription and you can subscribe by going here: https://mygmrs.com/profile/subscriptions You can see the commit notes from Dan regarding the removal here: https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/repository/github/revisions/12301814e238458766f1f7bf06476b39a4e3ab93 Here's the original ticket tracking the feature request: https://chirp.danplanet.com/issues/9169 Thank you for understanding!

Post pics of your GMRS (or even Ham...) setup! Some people have goofy setups, some have over the top amazing ones. I have friends who told me mine looks a little off haha. I have a bit more equipment now including an antenna i built on top of the house (sits above the chimney). Show your Base (or mobile) stations!

You might try taking off the receive tone. Maybe they don't use it, or it's not the correct one. Just a shot in the dark. And no, you're not an idiot.

DX Engineering has a video on Youtube which shows how to weatherproof connectors. I have also attached their PDF. I used both of these resources which really helped me. weatherproofingcoax-techtip.pdf

This is what I set it to. It seems to work better than the standard settings. I may tweek them more later on.

They can but they need to license a business channel. Otehrwise everyone needs a license. No way around it.

I use the kit. #m tape around cable and connectors, then Buytel Tape then 3M on the outside of this. I try to use 2" on final wrap but have used 3/4 3m when i ran out of 2"

Even if they have 2 antenna's they can desense each other. I had 2 GR1225 at the site I have SAR stuff at. Both were on UHF antenna with a flatpack style duplexer (Sinclair) and I still have almost 20db desnese when RPT 1 would key up testing RTP2 desense test. The antenna's were almost 10' apart. This is when I changed out to a receive multicoupler and TX combiner (and Quantars) using the same 2 antenna's. I can't imagine the RT97 is better than that.

Now you've done it! lol I have the Tera GMRS/MURS that was sold that way a few years ago. I have tested them between MURS and GMRS and generally have the programed for GMRS. I did have one channel set up for MURS for testing purposed, though technically it isn't proper. I may set them up for MURS for those times my wife is using one. She isn't good about identifying while using GMRS, and with MURS it isn't an issue. I found little difference in range between the two services with these radios, in my type of usage.

Dave: I was just reading the text notes that accompanies the firmware update for version 20210403 and it mentions that it: "Fix bug of 141.3/146.2/250.3 tones." Perhaps that was the problem and you need a firmware update. I might try it myself and take a ride back out to Camarillo Grade and see if I can hear the output of Santa Ynez. The Zip file attached below contains both 20210403 and 20210615 firmware upgrades. Radioddity_GM-30_Firmware 20210615 & Software_V2.06_20210615.zip

No never tried that in Florida, as I did not know of any foreign elements there at the time that crossed my path. But, I did monitor foreign military emergency medical organizations at Volk Field Wisconsin doing exactly what you describe. Huge exercise with medical units from all over the world, and needing lots of radio and satcom support. Many of us saw it as an emissions intelligence collection exercise, at least for us technical types.

This is the way

There are different types and levels of encryption. How much of that is operational with other radios and manufactures?

I emailed BTECH a few weeks ago and asked if they would be updating the GMRS-50X1 to include adding more channels for GMRS and they said they would be releasing the new update (new radio I presume, ie. 2nd GEN) in the 1st quarter 2023.

You can put 2 repeaters at a site with proper combining and filtering. Its done every day in the LMR/Public Safety world. We have 3 UHF SAR repeaters at one tower site. Receive goes thru a Receive Multi coupler and TX thru a Transmit Combiner. None of it was cheap. I know another person on this forum has 2 or 3 at his site on GMRS with combiners. Theoretically you could use 2 RT97 and 2 Antenna's on top and bottom frequencies but I suspect some desence would happen just with RF that close. Guess it depends on how much separation on antenna's you could do.

The not being able to add any tx channels is, imo, the biggest con. You get the preprogrammed 30, and that's it, currently. That said, they made changes to allow a few additional tx channels with the Gmrsv2 handheld (which used to be similarly locked down) and i stumbled across grant docs for a gmrs 50v2 in the FCC database, so that may be changing. Mine also didn't hold up well; minimal transmit time in the 2 years I've had it (maybe an hour or two total) and power on high drops almost immediately, from 48 watts and not stabilizing til 25 watts. I've also found no way to unlock it, regardless the "emergency". If I remember right, @marcspazhad a couple acting up on him as well. The decently wide receive across 136-174 and 400-512 is a nice plus, as is the quad watch if you want to use it for scanning duty. The display is also a big jump ahead of the 4 lines of the 25x2 and 50x2 ham radios. It's also chirp programmable. If you can live with the restrictions, it's not a horrible radio to live with. Longevity is kind of a crapshoot though. At this point, it wouldn't be my first choice. I'd either go the anytone/radioddity/retevis triplets if I didn't need a full 50 watts, or save my pennies for the wouxun kg1000g if I did. Edit: found a blip of old thread. Marc has a couple other threads on theb50x1, initial impressions and features. https://forums.mygmrs.com/topic/3528-got-my-new-mxt500-not-impressed/?do=findComment&comment=34743&_rid=2738

I’m wondering if you even need two antennas. You would already have duplexers on both repeaters; maybe you can combine the feedline from the duplexers with a diplexer.

Hi Terry, Even if you look at a Bridgecom, when I asked, the answer is no also. But I have a thought the others can beat me down about. What if you placed 2 antennas, and 2 repeaters and both ends of the freq range and diff PL's far enough apart? As the Retivis Is sealed does it matter where mounted other than power source / lightning? Does that not fix the issue at a less cost than a towers monthly cost?

Whaaaat? Midland has never rebranded another manufacturer's gear to sell under it's own name....right? ?

There is a groups of 3 or four of us that use it. The linked repeater has some traffic on it but not a lot. Need to find a better resting talk group to park it on to drum up additional traffic. IN addition to my VHF liinked repeater, there are two more VHF two UHF and one or two 900 Mhz repeaters that are on the air in the greater Columbus area. There is also a significant system over on Dayton Ohio that gets some use. I am considering having a discussion with that group and connecting a repeater to that system. Due to the way it's linked, the repeater could be any band I desired. Again, if there is gonna be activity on it, I am all for it and I believe it will draw people in that want to talk. I have three GMRS repeaters on the tower right now. The 600 which is linked to the MidWest system gets hundreds of PTT's a day. The 675 machine gets some traffic, and the 725 is pretty much silent. Just like the hoards of ham repeaters around here. We get some DMR traffic from other area's but almost none locally. Far as the radios. I didn't discuss the boxes of CDM's I have since they are not digital. Or any of the Hytera or other stuff. But I have a BUNCH of gear. My stuff in general stops at 900Mhz but I am looking at getting into satellite comms and may well be looking to add 1.2 and 2.4 Ghz stuff for that endeavor at some point. I will add this. Most of the P25 gear I have has some level of encryption on it. Not that I use that normally, but in certain situations, OPSEC becomes a thing. Haven't gone as far as getting FHSS radios yet, but I wouldn't turn them down if the right deal presented it self. And there may or may not be a repeater on the air that is mixed mode but hasn't got a normal NAC in it that will pass secure traffic if the need was to arise. It may or may not be connected to a large battery bank as well that will have solar and possibly wind generation charging ability later this year. Wife is NOT a radio operator, but there will be a radio in her vehicle that might possibly have the ability to utilize such a system. And there is currently a portable radio and charger kit in that vehicle that might have that ability. And again. Operating digital radio with encryption on ham or GMRS is illegal. But operating it on a commercial frequency, is legit if the license has the correct emission designation on it. Working on that too.

Far as what I have. Number of (5 or 6) VHF XTS2500's with P25 Couple UHF XTS2500's on UHF With P25 XTS2500 on 900 with P25 XTS5000 VHF and UHF P25 Several XTL5000's on UHF P25 Couple XTL5000's on VHF including a High power unit. P25 XTL2500 on 900Mhz P25 APX 7500 on VHF P25 APX 8500 all band on VHF/UHF P25 Several Astro Spectra's both mid and high power with P25 Icom ID-5100 D-Star radio. Still in the box. Have never powered it up. Two VHF Quantars (one on the air) connected to the p25.link system on P25. Repeater is multimode and runs on Analog as well Couple UHF Quantars.... need to convert from R-1 to R-2 to put on ham and GMRS. Few MTR3000's that are DMR able, but not programmed for it currently. One on ham the other is one of the three GMRS repeaters. Four XPR8400's that are UHF waiting for repair (board swap) due to bad finals. One will become a GMRS linked repeater once repaired. Large number of UHF XPR6550's that are programmed for ham DMR, GMRS and some Itinerant UHF's freqs for tower work. Two 6 slot chargers full plus a number of others. XPR 6300 on 900 Few XPR6550's that are VHF one of those MMDVM hot spot things. Unknown number of XPR4550 UHF and VHF radios that are console resources. Not sure of number right now, have four sitting here right now and at least 12 more at the tower. I do some DMR on Ham. Do a bit of P25 on ham VHF. Working on conversions for UHF and moving a couple 800 Quantars to 900. Talked on D-Star once. No wires, fusion, NXDN, or other digital.

It means they need to turn off their radio for a few minutes and go outside and get some sunshine.

You're likely to do well going with a commercial grade radio. They are designed to withstand hard use and function in harsh RF environments. There are a lot of quality used ones on the market. The programming can be a bit more involved but you also gain flexibility that many of the cheaper Chinese radios lack. Some of them have Part 95 certification, required for GMRS, in addition to Part 90 so there is no issue with questions about the legality of using them on GMRS.

I told you yesterday in another post to leave the firmware at 17. There is no functional reason to move it to 20 unless your dealing with P25 simulcast with Geo-Primes. I have seen MSI shops brick a XTL pretty quickly when done wrong. Is there a specific reason you think you need to upgrade the radio ?

Another quick note. Having a later version of CPS and programming an earlier firmware is NOT going to cause any issues. I do it all the time and have never had issue unless the firmware is REALLY old, like version 5 and before using CPS20.05.01 which I believe is the latest version that was available.

this may be a first, but I agree with Mr WRKC935 - Unless you really know what you are doing and more importantly WHY you are doing it, I would recommend not taking the risk of upgrading the radio. Source: I own several XTL5000s, XTS5000s and XTS2500s - i've never put any through an upgrade because its too risky and I have too many friends that ended up with very expensive bricks - and they dont even know why they did it.

Alt-Printscreen will allow you to capture screenshots without having to take pictures with your phone.

You are misunderstanding me. I have no problem using my ID or requiring an ID on a service which requires licensing. What I’m saying is that when you are transmitting at the lower FRS power levels on one of the frequencies that an FRS radio is allowed to transmit on, nothing is accomplished by requiring a call sign if they’re using a GMRS radio but not if they’re using an FRS radio. Nobody listening can possibly discern which type of radio they’re using.

DCS is transmitted at a rate of 134.4 bits/s. The DCS waveform directly modulates the FM carrier, with a logic 1 represented by a positive carrier shift and a logic 0 represented by a negative carrier shift. The FM deviation is about the same as CTCSS/PL. The DCS waveform's edge rates are carefully controlled to limit harmonic content to avoid generating audible harmonics. A DCS word consists of a 23 bit cyclic Golay code with 12 bit codeword (23,12) formed from the 12 least significant bits. The 11 most significant bits are error correcting code bits generated by the Golay algorithm from the 12 codeword bits. The 12 bit codeword consists of a fixed Octal 4 (100 binary) plus the 3 Octal digits that you can program. A DCS word plays out backwards over the air due to the least significant bit being transmitted first. A DCS word is sent repeatedly as a continuous low baud rate data stream. DCS/DPL has a specific turn-off code or reverse burst at the end of a transmission which resembles a 134.4Hz sine wave. In radio systems with a mix of CTCSS/PL and DCS/DPL usage, it is recommended to avoid using a CTCSS/PL tone of 136.5Hz due to the DCS/DPL kerchunk problem caused by the 134.4Hz DCS reverse burst. The time required to reliably decode DCS is slightly longer than CTCSS and is about 350ms or less. CTCSS typically decodes in about 250ms or less. When decoding DCS on very weak signals, the DCS decode threshold can be as much as 2 dB worse than CTCSS. From an end user perspective, these differences are way down in the noise (LOL) and it's hard to tell any difference. The average end user probably won't notice any difference in DCS/DPL vs. CTCSS/PL performance. DCS has its own set of issues to deal with. The long high and low bit times of the NRZ data can cause problems with baseline wander and cause decode problems. Distortion in the transmitted DCS waveform itself can cause decoding problems in the receiver. DCS is also sensitive to frequency errors in the transmitter and receiver. A signal transmitted with DCS received a few kHz off-frequency in the receiver impresses a DC offset on the recovered DCS waveform which causes the decoder to see a step function instead of the DCS data. This causes very slow decoding or failure to decode. Good low frequency response down to about 3 Hz in the modulator in the transmitter and in the discriminator output in the receiver are necessary for reliable DCS operation. IIRC phase modulated systems have trouble with DCS. True FM modulated systems tend to work better. Motorola trademarked the Digital Private Line (DPL) name. Other manufacturers have to call it something else. Digital Coded Squelch (DCS) is the generic name. You'll see mixed usage of the two names as I have used them above. If it's not a Motorola radio, it's not DPL. It's DCS instead even though it's exactly the same thing as DPL. Motorola originally implemented 83 DPL codes and manufacturers have expanded the set of codes to 104 codes. Motorola's 83 DPL codes have been implemented by all manufacturers but not all manufacturers have implemented the full set of 104 codes. Motorola's original set of 83 DPL codes have been fully vetted and are known to work well. Some of the extra codes making up the set of 104 codes may not work as well. YMMV. I've also heard DPL sometimes referred to as "Definitely Prevents Losers". LOL. I successfully thwarted a GMRS repeater jammer years ago with DCS/DPL so the jammer couldn't key my repeater. The jammer didn't have a clue about DCS/DPL nor did he have DCS/DPL capability in his antiquated equipment and only had CTCSS/PL. The jammer eventually gave up. This trick won't work anymore given that practically all manufacturers now offer DCS capability in their radios. DCS information: https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/DCS http://onfreq.com/syntorx/dcs.html http://www.repeater-builder.com/tech-info/ctcss/ctcss-overview.html