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I have tested with the SWR meter for the Nagoya and the Aubree 18" Inch. The results are about the same. I just like the Aubree better because I can fold it up, and its more sturdy. 1.03 for the Nagoya and 1.02 for the Aubree The performance is close enough that its a matter of preference at this point. This is strictly on GMRS freqs.

This video purportedly show a Ukrainian drone picking up a Russian handheld that was dropped. Personally I have my doubts, only because with all the Russians who have been killed in Ukraine, the Ukrainians probably don’t need to do this, but I don’t really know. It’s fun to think that this might have happened, anyway. Steve

you were too fast for me,?

Check page 52 and 53 of the manual. It sounds like you are sending the ANI code. Menu 16 to turn off

Look in the manual for ANI tones. Disable them if they’re turned on.

i have taken off the rx tone and i then could hear traffic. thank you all for the helpful info

Could be R-168 too. It is part of encrypted "Aquaduct" system, and in this case picking it might worth the trouble. Here is ad for sale with pictures, ad says that this radio was captured in Donetsk region and has a very secure password: 0000 https://reibert.info/lots/radiostancija-r-168-0-5um-akveduk-spec-svjaz.956129/

Can't see what kind of radio it is, just saw it from the backside. They likely would try to recover any radio they spot. If it's a military grade or commercial it could be a digital type and mostly likely using encryption. They would be interested if the later was the case due to any encryption keys. The radio might have been lost before it could be killed and the keys wiped. Of course the last possibility is it's a "plant" left there hoping it would be recovered. Then it could be traced or used to supply false information to the Ukrainians.

Your idea might have some merit. Doing the manual editing in Excel might be easier than flipping through various windows in the programming software. Reimporting the data also has a nasty habit of wiping out the zone names I’ve assigned and resetting some options back to their defaults. I have to renter all that again by hand.

DB20G isnt bad for the money, makes a good ammo can radio.

I 100% agree. Now, mind you I cheat. I have repeaters that are on both DMR-MARC and BrandMeister in my area. So I have multiple radios that are programmed for both systems. I have control of those radios via either tone remote (14 channel and one zone) MotoBridge, which has full zone/ channel control and TRBO-Vui / Radio Pro that also has full access to channel / zone programming. The TRBO-Vui is what I use with the Solo client on my phone to access those radios. Only have two currently configured for that. The VHF is all ham, the UHF is ham / commercial / GMRS. So that covers all the bases. The MotoBridge just switches zones, and has two radios for VHF and two for UHF, so I can get either system from either radio. I haven't seen or done anything with DMR Plus yet, But I do have an MTR3000 that I am currently running on 442.775 analog only. That repeater may get switched to DMR Plus if there is a reason to serve that system up locally. Most of what I do with it is monitor 3139 (Ohio TG) and the weather TG in Ohio. I don't see the programming being as much difficult as just plain tedious. But, I write code plugs for TRBO radios about twice a month at work for new installs, so I sort of have that down. I am looking at setting up my own RM server for TRBO since I have so many TRBO radios that I am managing for my own use. We have one at work, but I don't know how they would feel if I was sticking a bunch of my stuff on the company server.

I was going to say “Jinx, padlock!”

So really, BTech should have designed all their radios to use the same cable. I’m in agreement with you there.

I wouldn't mind if it were the same cable as for all my other radios, but it's completely different cable that requires an adapter cable to program it. Same for all the accessories that I have for other BTECH/Baofeng radios -- have to use the adapter cable with GMRSPRO

That's true, that's true. Baofengs are notoriously slow scanners, but if you kind of know where to scan, you can save a few hryvnias and spend them on some Khortysta Platinum for an after-action bunker celebration.

Or an even cheaper Baofeng radio. ?

I feel sorry for them if they are reduced to using cheap Chinese radios in war time. You are literally betting your life on a $25 radio that will likely fail the first time you drop it on a hard surface. It's as sad as these guys at the following link too. https://radiofreeq.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/militia-radio-frequencies/

Here's a video from a few months ago discussing the sinking of the Moskva by Ukraine. From the 57 second mark, check out the Baofeng UV-5R. In other news, I've seen images and video over the years of various combatants on Middle East battlefields with mag-mount CB antennas on their Toyota battle trucks. Russian warship 'Moskva' sinks in Black Sea: What does it mean? | DW News - YouTube

You may need to do a model if the metal structures are a 1/4 wavelength or larger in size in the immediate area of the antenna. Things like roofs, hoods and so on can affect the radiation pattern. Those structures are approximated using a grid of wires in the model. This is an old model I did looking at the radiation pattern for a 2 meter horizontal loop antenna using a magnet mount on the roof of my old Jeep. I wanted to see if the 18 inch mast they sell with the magnet mount was sufficiently high for good performance. Doesn't look very good. Both photos have the same exact 3D orientation. As you can see there are two main areas of high signal radiation. One is mostly directed skywards, useless. The second in in a horizontal plane, which is where you want it. Because the roof is a rectangle the horizontal part is not symmetrical, more signal in the direction of more metal in the roof.

The more height your antenna has, the further your range. If you get your antenna up about 30’ you should get some decent range.

With 5 watt HTs standing on the roof of our 1 story houses about 8 miles away... simplex worked great! When I stood in the right spot anyways. Some picket fencing depending on where I was on the roof. A better base antenna and a touch more power should help. Thanks all for the tips.

I’ve seen “YouTube reports” that both sides have adopted Baofeng radios when needed. I wouldn’t be surprised. And, yes, Ham Radio 2.0 had a YouTube video with a representative from the Polish Amateur Radio Club where they were actively soliciting support for Ukraine. I don’t remember the details, but it’s an easy video to find.

That might not be as funny as it sounds. I did read months back that people were buying up cheap radios to send to the Ukrainians. Whose to say the Russians aren't using CCR's. Since they seem to be getting more and more warm and fuzzy with the Chinese you might be right.?

I sure can’t tell. I was kind of hoping to see a “Pofung” label. ?

If it is then this is the brochure for it. https://www.motorolasolutions.com/content/dam/msi/docs/EA_Collaterals/ENGLISH/MOTOTRBO/Portables/DP4000_DataSheet_ENG_lor.pdf

You cannot accurately measure the SWR of an HT antenna with that setup. When you hold an HT in your hand and push the PTT button, the radio and your body are providing the ground plane for the antenna. Laying the HT on a table and inserting a power meter between it and the antenna removes the ground plane. You can measure *power* in that configuration, but the SWR readings aren't accurate. More reading here:

CSRAGMRS has this statement pertaining to the use of their equipment: *We do not allow the use of any DTMF or end of transmission tones otherwise known as a Roger Beep(RB). Seems redundant to use a, "Roger Beep" on a repeater in my opinion if you get used to listening to the repeater operation. I forgot to say too, that you might search the Repeater Map here and open the information box to see if the owner states a restriction on actually using the repeater with a RB. Just a suggestion as it seems to me that stipulation would have come with your approval to use the equipment. Just a newbie trying to help....

Yes. That happened immediately. Couldn’t even open my web browser.

Have run into this. It won't even load https sites when I've messed with the date.

It can absolutely work - it's a poor man's way of combining transmitters, but you will need isolators (that you should have anyways) on both transmitters (to prevent spurs) and adequate frequency separation (70cm and GMRS is more than fine) to notch the other transmitters out. Seen it, done it, and would do it again in the right circumstances. Basically you have two complete, normal, and perfectly conventional BpBr filtered repeater setups, one on 70cm, one on GMRS, you can then use a flatpack (notch/reject-only) as a splitter to notch the GMRS transmit out of the 70cm pass on the flatpack, and vice versa for the GMRS side (Notch out 70cm transmit). You will have extra loss from the flat pack (about a dB, if not less since the separation is large), but it's not massive. Feedline becomes even more important as you now have twice the power making noise on the coax, I'm assuming a 500 ft run has heliax already. Also keep in mind your reject duplexer will need to be rated for the sum of transmitter power. There will also be receiver losses, but the band pass filtering on the BpBr duplexers should be minimizing that to be almost negligable. Nothing complicated about it, just an extra bit of math and an extra component to tune.

Well, yes and no. And the FCC actually did the main one when issuing licenses in the PS band that had the emission designator for DMR. And that is significantly limiting ERP to pull the coverage footprint of the transmitted signal into a reasonable distance. Part of the problems that were created by DMR was the old school mentality of repeater systems for communications. That was put it as high as possible and run as much ERP as was legal. That mentality is why VHF low band is all but abandoned today. That stuff went up with 500 watt amplifiers to cover one county and it actually covered 8 or 10 counties. Then when the atmospheric conditions were favorable, you were talking to Arizona From Ohio and of course, the interference issue became a real problem. So, can you take a bunch of guys that have a CB radio mentality getting into GMRS that is further pushed forward by the guys that are already using the service where a 1.5 to 1 antenna match is TOO high, even though it's a .18dB signal loss and has ZERO effect on performance, to run a repeater with reduced power? And of course the answer is no. Because the rules say 50 watts, and by God, I can run 50 watts so I will run 50 watts. And I am not picking on the GMRS crowd here, this was an issue with professional radio techs doing it the way they always had done it, so there is zero reasonable expectation that hobbyist's are gonna do it the way it would need to be done. The FCC reacted to the issue on the public safety spectrum due to a glut of complaints they were getting from agencies and commercial radio shops fighting the interference that started as some agencies moved to DMR from analog. At one point they would not issue a license to any PS agency with an either a ERP or transmitter power level of 10 watts. I can't remember which it was, probably transmitter power level. For those that don't understand ERP (Effective Radiated Power) that is the realized effective signal level of a repeater SYSTEM including the feed line and antenna. So a system with a 50 watt transmitter, a 3dB loss in the cable and a 3dB gain antenna is 50 watts. But that same transmitter and line with a 6dB gain antenna would be an ERP of 100 watts due to the additional 3dB of antenna gain. GMRS and HAM radio doesn't have an ERP regulation, GMRS transmitter power is regulated at 50 watts and ham of course for most bands is 1500 watts. But a ham or GMRS operator can build any amount of gain into an antenna (as long as there is no additional active amplification) and have any ERP that system can produce. Ham's use this methodology to bounce signals off the moon and back to earth with large antenna arrays that produce ERP's in the ten's of thousands of watts.

The 70cm is close enough to GMRS frequencies to get a good idea of performance. Many 70cm antennas can be used with out problem on GMRS. The Nagoya 771g will likely be a good choice. Smiley antenna has a good 465MHz antenna line that is equivalent or better than the Nagoya. I think the ABBREEs are more of a novelty/“Airsoft” antenna. They work, but I find signal stick, smiley and Nagoya to be better

Some hams have had to get very creative. Dipoles or end fed half waves hide along fascia boards or are disguised as Christmas lights. J-poles can be hidden behind hanging plants or in flagpoles. Tall trees can help hide many kinds of vertical wires. Fences help hide horizontal wires. If you can make an antenna, you can make an antenna that looks like something else!

That’s a really good point.

Put another way, when first testing a new radio into a repeater, especially by a Newbie, you want to eliminate as many permutations as possible so as to reduce the troubleshooting list, if you are unable to communicate with that repeater. Given that philosophy, there is no need to filter out other transmissions on that Channel while you are testing your first attempts to transmit into and receive replies from a new repeater. Once you know you can "hit" and receive from that Repeater, you can elect to change your reception tone to that of the repeater, especially if there are nearby GMRS' that like to use that same channel for simplex communications. In this way, you will only hear the Repeater and not those others. Me, I like to hear everybody, because it may be an interesting conversation, or clues to another repeater that I am unaware of. So I rarely include the receive Tone.

For the ones I've done, the tones were given to me in an email. Nothing changed on the mygmrs repeater listing (tones still not shown). Maybe the repeater owner you requested approval from doesn't know he has to send that to you.

Just an update that Premium Members can now export a CSV file compatible with CHIRP from the myGMRS Reports page: https://mygmrs.com/reports Note that there was a bug in CHIRP that prevented cross-tone DCS codes from importing properly, but this has been fixed with today's latest update of CHIRP-next.

Thats not the real-world that I live in, so i'm glad to see that for everyone like me not in an RF-heavy urban environment, the radios dont "suck" .. Because at first, based on your statement, us non-techy people might have misunderstood you to be saying "they suck", which it seems is not the always case, so thanks for clarifying.

I heard a rumor that this video was made specifically to disprove comments that a few "experts" in this very forum seem to regurgitate on almost a daily basis. But, probably just a rumor..

"never" means "never" .. I reiterate what Mr Spaz says about speaking in absolutes.. This is one of the reasons why many people dont trust "online experts".. or, make fun of them.

I have to 100% disagree with almost all of this. LoL There is no rule, exception or most. There is only science and fact. The fact of the science is, this is a UHF line of sight service of which range is strictly limited to line of sight and RF interference or lack Thereof. When someone speaks in absolutes with words like "always" or "never", and someone provides and examples of how their statement is incorrect, it's somewhat disingenuous to move the goalpost by throwing the "exception" flag. What is the exception for someone who lives in the city is the norm for someone who lives in the mountains.

Inspired by https://www.scadacor...-line-of-sight/, I decided to run another test quickly. Grabbed a ladder and climbed up into the attic crawl space. Sent a GMRS check to my wife. In the past, it did not even rise above her squelch level, but this time she at least got a staticky signal. Hoping the improved antenna will clean that up further so that simplex comms are workable. Plus, having the antenna better placed, I'm hoping for more hobby time on a couple repeaters in my area. Cheers, Ken