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I wonder how many know what we're saying... I'll be honest, this is more than I thought.. lol

I know, I had no idea I was pushing a virtual domino of peaches responses. ?? Can’t get it out of my head now ?

The word is CONFUCKULATED ...

IMHO Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man in a factory downtown.

Just idle curiosity... What is the longest range repeater in your area? As a relatively new GMRS user primarily for four wheeling use, I've been checking the repeater map in the places I'm likely to travel and I've come to realize that I'm extremely lucky to have a couple really nice repeaters in my area, and around the state. In particular the Tiger Mountain Oly-Comm3 is a monster and lists 90 mile range. It covers all the major metro areas of Western Washington and well beyond. I can hit it from my house 55 miles away on HT. Most surprisingly, it's quiet most of the time, but always has folks listening. I do understand our unique geography is a major contributor to the great coverage. It's just really cool that I can drive 3 hours down the interstate and still talk to the mothership.

This is kind of fun. Today, I made a new setup for operating in the field. I assembled two 25' masts from a 31' mast and a 19' mast, and strung the main element of a homemade OCF 80m antenna between them. The small element tapers off on a slant, with a rope staked in such a way that the end of the short element is about 5' off the ground. Both masts are also setup to receive vertical VHF/UHF antennas. So, I can work Amateur HF, VHF/UHF and GMRS all from one massive setup. I plan on putting this into operation for a 24 hour race I am doing communications for. I'll probably be up for 30 hours with at least 26 of them on the air. So, I'll find out just how good of an 80m NVIS and 10m-20m DX antenna this setup is. If it works well, this will be my Field Day setup. I'll shoot some pictures and video from the race to share later.

And im sure everyone else has had enough of our erroneous and horrible singing so.... We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic "Antenna selection home base station"

Your question made me look for a video that would explain this better: Stan Gibilisco passed away within the last few years but I liked his videos: As for your other questions, almost all communications cable is 50 ohm. The antenna you showed is also 50 ohms. The port on your radio expects 50 ohms. But, there are lots of different types of cable and different types have losses that increase proportionally to length. Those losses are simply characteristics of the cable. Unfortunately, the rate of loss increases dramatically as frequency increases. At GMRS frequencies some cables lose half or more of their power in less than 50 feet. But, a good antenna, raised high can compensate for that somewhat. I wouldn’t select less than LMR400 and if I was going longer than 50 feet total I’d look for something even better.

Not well. TV cable and related fittings are 75 ohm. Two way radios expect 50 ohms. Using it for your radio will introduce an impedance transition that results in a higher SWR than usually desirable. But, people do it. You can use the hole that currently exists.

I mentioned in a previous post some commercial radios have a signal strength measurement feature, RSSI, built into them. This is NOT the simple bar graph display you commonly see. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/302-nx-1300duk5-rssi-display/?context=new A number of radios have the ability to measure the RX signal strength during normal operation, typically for trunking systems with multiple TX sites. The radio can be programmed to use the site with the strongest signal.

Yes, I mistakenly conflated the information in your post with the situation of the OP. I’m sorry about that.

If my Baofeng spying me, only going to hear is my fart ? all day and is not anything compromises on that.??

I managed to touch Simpsonville tonight, a little rough but forty miles from me.

I'm new to this. Was able to hear the Greencastle (Indiana) repeater crystal clear (sounded like a cell phone) 28.7 miles away between Beech Grove (Morgan County) and Martinsville this morning at someones house that lives in a valley in a very hilly area. I didn't expect to pick up anything there. That Greencastle repeater has suprised me.

Two repeaters 24/7 at 30 miles. On rare occasion when the conditions are right there is a monster repeater 160 miles away. I am in Florida - not a lot of mountains.

My Sun City West 625 Repeater has a Laird FG4695 5 dB omni antenna about 30' to the tip and I am getting about 20 miles out on flat terrain.

I have not tried but I'm just using an HT so not likely. Farthest simplex I have managed so far is about 20 miles and it was getting scratchy.

Impressive. You're in the RF holy grail of height and water. Would be curious if you can hit the repeater back.

I was going to do the test today, but it's raining. Have to see if I can do it tomorrow.

Hey fellow WA resident here. I live in the San Juan Islands and can hear the Tiger Mt repeater loud and clear. I listen regularly to a group of folks that chat on their commute to work every morning from all over the Puget Sound area. Kind of entertaining at times. Just looking at the repeater map that has got to be maybe 130 miles from my location. I'm about 40 miles outside the green circle. I am up on top of a 500 foot hill so probably is line of sight for me. I don't use repeaters at this time as I just use GMRS to talk to local friends and family. But nice to know how great the range can really be.

Our Delta repeater in Southern California easily gets farz of 60+ miles, with the record so far being 120 miles from its location near Mt. Baldy California to Chiriaco Summit east of Palm Springs.

There are 2 repeaters around here that have solid, uninterrupted coverage for a 30 miles radius and the scattered covered (50% to 70% covered) for a 90 mile radius. Keep in mind that repeaters like this have the coverage they do because they are going to be up on a hill or mountain with an elevation advantage of over 1,000 feet compared to the coverage area. When an antenna is only 30 to 50 feet off the ground in a relatively flat area, you are only going to get about 5 to 8 miles. Moving up to 300 feet might bump it to 25 or 30 miles, depending on the rest of the terrain.

I use a Garmin GLO2 with an iPhone 14. Seems very accurate. Because of where I normally store my iPhone, the external bluetooth GPS unit really helps.

The answer hinges on exactly what you mean by the above. It could be anything from low audio volume to a lot of white noise/static on your signal. The remedy depends on the symptom. Since you are zeroing in on procuring a mobile radio to shuttle between the vehicle and house you can try that and see what improvement if any you get. With 25 feet of RG-8X coax you're losing about 3.65 db, 57% of your transmitter power at 467MHz, based on a chart I have for coax cable types in just the cable run.

Well @buttholejim if that’s your name ? I do believe Midlands are SOC.

This statement is based on what exactly? I run two systems that are on DB420's for TX and RX. One has an 8 port combiner and the other has a 6 port combiner. Cable for TX and RX is 7/8. Cable length is 400 on one and over 500 on the other. Combiner loss is 4-6 db depending on the port and the base stations are set for 20 watts. The system consistently out talks it receive but has a 50 mile radius of operational use. Height is of WAY more importance than power out. If you sit down and run the numbers, 20 watts out of the repeater into a 6 db loss is 5 watts up the cable. 500 feet of 7/8 cable is .787 per 100 foot. That is an additional 4 db of loss and two connectors are an additional .5 each.... total cable loss is 5db. So 5 watts into 5 db of loss gives you 1.58 watts at the antenna connector. Antenna gain is 11.3 db. That makes the ERP 20 watts. And it talks over 50 miles in all directions. Of course the reason it don't hear as well is there is no tower top amplifier driving the receive cable and the loss ends up being too great for TX/RX equalization. The Tram antenna is 5 dbi gain. Not the best thing on the planet but it's better than a coat hanger. The tower is 50 feet so the cable run is under 100 foot. Yes, his duplexer is showing an issue, but the cables being backwards aint it depending on where he checked the Power out. If backwards, the output would have been no where close to 50 watts same as if it were mistuned on the TX side. RX tuning may be an issue, as well as a bad RX cable. Point is that the loss of 3 or even 6 db of power level has only a small effect on the overall range of a repeater, depending on the circumstance of the installation. Here's a better question... Where did he check the SWR and what meter did he use? Reason for this question is simple. Go back to my install. Take a Bird meter and check the forward and reflect at the combiner output. You use a 25 watt slug, forward is 5 watts, reflect is .5 watts... why is even doing this wrong, and what is the actual reflected power at the antenna?