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That's what Amateur Radio bands are for.

Because arguing about it here generates over 20 responses in 5 hours. You can't get action like that from the FCC.

It’s covered (poorly) on page 25 and 26 of the manual - menu 10-13: https://baofeng.s3.amazonaws.com/BAOFENG_UV-9G_GMRS_User_Manual_20210806.pdf

I am running a Radioddity DB-20G using a cup holder mount in my old Chevy Tahoe with a Nagoya UT-72G antenna. So far I am getting good reception and able to hit my local repeaters.

Yes. That's the point. We're talking about the sound frequency, not the radio wavelength. You can't have an "ultrasonic" radio frequency, because "sonic" means sound, not EMF.

I've said this before. As much as sending text messages over GMRS sounds like a neato idea, (which it kinda is), it's yet another example of trying to make GMRS something it was never intended to be. As much as amateur radio gets maligned on this site, the list of ways GMRS wants to be like amateur radio keeps growing. Linked repeaters carrying transmissions into other states, internet setups like Zello, and texting apps like Ribbit. The problem is that GMRS has a very limited 5 mhz slice of the UHF band, and it's channelized. Cramming more and more into it is eventually going to overload it. I'm a bit of a purist, so in my humble opinion, leave it alone and use it for, as the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, says, (I say that with tongue firmly planted in cheek), "short-range two-way voice communication and authorized under part 95 of the US FCC code".

I am in a general area with two linked repeaters tied in to more. Conversations entirely on the most distant one regularly tie up the two closer to me. Another guy has put up a big repeater tied in to a big national network along with a couple of nodes and another guy still, felt it necessary to link his short range repeater into that network. AFAIK, GMRS was not created so that people get to "enjoy" useless chatter from across the state or across the nation. It was for families, friends, and others, to have reasonably reliable two-way radio comms in their local area. I define "local" as how far a base, mobile, ht, or repeater, can reach to other devices in the area it is set up in, be it 5 miles or 100 miles, depending on terrain and gear used. If dead air is so worrisome, there are options available without unnecessarily clogging the 8 existing repeater/50W Simplex channels with pointless noise. Ideas include: 1) get your ham Tech license. It really isn't that hard. A little reading and study. No more Morse Code test. Hams have waay more repeater frequencies at VHF and UHF and can therefore better handle the linking. 2) If too lazy or whatever for #1, CB allows for talking and hearing skip from all over. Unlike internet linking, which is really no different than VOIP phone calls, your radio, antenna, and location, come together to allow you to talk to a distant state (or country) using the airwaves, not a glorified phone network. 3) If your base, ht, or mobile, allows; program in some ham repeaters or other frequencies and listen to them. 4) Download a scanner app and listen to public safety and ham stuff from across the country. 5) call someone on your phone, in the next county or the other side of the country. Be it a friend, relative, or a random desk clerk at a big chain motel; you can experience the same "thrill" of talking to distant places using the same (VOIP) technology that makes those trendy and kewel repeater linkups possible. And you don't even have to remember to key or unkey a mic!

I'm happy with this install. The remote head mount fits in the bottom front console box with no fasteners. Radio is mounted under the passenger's seat. No wires are showing anywhere except what you see here and the coax from the bumper to the antenna. Antenna coax and direct power from battery thru floor drain grommet. Antenna on spare tire mount. Remote speaker wire plugs into Uconnect radio aux input ⅛" socket and functions thru the Uconnect to the Jeep's factory speakers that can BOOM the audio. Ran the coax along the frame and behind the passenger's rear tire skirt to get to the bumper. The radio is programmed to recieve tons of stuff outside the ham bands for monitoring: CB, GMRS/FRS, marine, air, business vhf, and TV alternate sound.

I think your forgetting one important factor: they were all BELOW GROUND. The EM burst was strongly attenuated and dissipated by, well, the ground. That was by design...the NORK government doesn't go out of it's way to piss off it's sole sponsor, the PRC. Our government learned from Starfish, and applied those lessons to future testing. Exoatmospheric detonations won't be so attenuated, at least for some distance.

@Blaise, So, I finally installed Rattlegram. Everything you said is exactly what they represent. I don’t understand how the speakers and microphones in smartphones can transduce ultrasound, much less the speakers and microphone in a two way radio. I also don’t understand how the radios modulate signals in the ultrasonic range. I’m intrigued.

Well as I said, I don't. I can't hear my phone *ring* at that range with the ring volume on max, so it seemed reasonable to assume that the speakers can't reach that far. It's certainly possible that the ultrasonic frequencies penetrate farther through my house, I suppose. With a dog, a wife, and two rugrats constantly thundering through my environment, opportunities to test are few and far between, so I haven't had the opportunity to implement more variable-controlled experiments yet! Although, if this app can actually send data 20+ feet through doors and down stairs in your home just using your phone speakers, that would be pretty amazing in and of itself!

I didn't think you were. I freely admit that I barely know what I'm doing, and that my methodologies are questionable. It's certainly possible I tested it wrong. putting a radio down a flight of stairs and in a room across the hall is hardly a variable-isolated testing environment. Maybe the phone picked up the sound directly, or maybe the app wasn't really transmitting at 20kHz. I just tried some shit, and it worked, so I based my opinion on that observation without really analyzing it! If you load the app, there's a menu option for "Danger Zone". If you go in there, you can turn on ultrasonic transmission. If you then pick a high sample rate (up to 48kHz), you see lots more frequencies in the Carrier Frequency list, as high as 23,200 Hz. Now, I have no way of validating that these numbers are *true*. All I have to go on is that it *said* it was 20100 Hz. When I didn't hear the data burst, but a message arrived, I just assumed it was true!

I’m not questioning you, please don’t take it as a personal attack. We see too much of that. Here’s why I’m questioning what really happened. Because we use FM the frequency of the RF signal varies with the frequency of the audio which modulates it. But the government (and courtesy) stipulate how much bandwidth we’re allowed. For FM stereo broadcast transmitters are allowed a wide bandwidth so they can broadcast a wider audio spectrum. But two way radios is only expected to reproduce speech. In fact I would expect our radios to have a filter between the microphone and the modulator to avoid creating too wide of a bandwidth. I would also expect that neither the speakers nor microphones on the inexpensive radios to be able to reproduce ultrasound. I thought I read in their PDFs, that Ribbit attempts to send digital data by converting data into audio tones that are in the center of the spoken voice audio spectrum, between 500 Hz and 2500 Hz. Their centerpoint is 1500 Hz and they go 1000 Hz either side. 20,100 Hz is way above that, but 2100 Hz is right in there. If you were able to transmit at 20100 Hz, I would be interested in what an RF spectrum analyzer would measure. But, I always say you can’t argue with empirical evidence, so I’m trying to understand what really happened.

My kneejerk response to this is: So? Who cares? My dishwasher wasn't "intended" to be a sterilizing kiln for my homebrew beer-bottles, but it works great at it, and gives me a lot of added utility. The decorative tower on my rescued Victorian home wasn't "intended" to be an antenna mount, but it does a fantastic job, and gives me a lot of added utility. The internet wasn't "intended" to be a corporate-dominated wilderness of false information and endless scammers, but... OK, that one's a bad example... My more thoughtful response is: If something is intended to "facilitate our activities", and we find a new way to facilitate our activities with it, isn't that the very definition of "intended"?

Looks good! Yaesu, or clone? Wiring to factory speakers is great, aux underseat speakers don't do much. And I also like your manual gearbox, not many people these days "row their own".

GMRS is not a "hobby" GMRS IS intended for people to bring their own audience (ie; your group while off-roading) GMRS is NOT for people that "want to make contacts" It seems you have been misinformed about what GMRS is for, and what its primary purpose is. It sounds like amateur radio or the Grindr app are more of what you are looking for.

I guess you’d have to ask Blaise what he meant when used the term “ultrasonic”. To me it sounds (no pun intended) like he thought that he was saying that this method of sending text messages would not be audible to people listening to the affected frequency because they would be in the ultrasonic range:

Maybe I'm not thinking clearly (not enough coffee yet perhaps), but aren't y'all mixing up 2 different things? We don't hear radio waves. We hear the sound waves that the receiver converts the radio waves into. When we say we hear digital noise we are hearing the sound the radio puts out not the radio waves themselves. So all that matters for what we hear is can the radio receive it and convert it to audio. For example, AM broadcasts don't cause any recognizable signal on my 2m radios. (Out of band signals like that may contribute to the background static/white noise but not in a distinguishable way.)

Well, officially,GMRS is:

Ultrasonic frequencies are not transmitted by voice mode radios such as GMRS. The available bandwidth severely limits both the audio frequencies that can be carried as well as the data rate. Any Ribbit transmissions will be right in the most audible frequencies that humans hear. Ribbit transmits using the audio frequency range of 500 Hz to 2500 Hz.

Agreed! Once again, in a perfect GMRS world, with no linked or "networked" repeaters, this should be a minimal problem. Absent garbage being constantly piped in from across the state or across the nation, most repeaters I have ever heard, have little traffic. If you regularly operate on one repeater output for 50W simplex, and a repeater becomes active, you could switch to another 50W output and probably find it vacant. Without linking, the chances that all eight are in use via an overpowering repeater in your area are kinda slim. With so much linking, well, that can be a problem in some areas, especially when all eight 50W channels are blasting the same conversation out at the same time.

462.xxx5 (channels 1-7) are repeater-free. Perfectly adequate for local traffic between HTs or between HT and mobile. Local traffic between mobiles on 462.xxx0 at full power has a good chance to overpower repeater interference. The opposite happens only when mobiles are far and repeater is close. In this case use reserve frequency, according to your communication plan.

Wow first post and I get the famous Notarubicon guy! Challenge accepted!

Sadly, thats not how Youtube works..

Perfect example of why a commercial radio isn’t ideal for people who just want to buy a pair of radios off the shelf, get a license, and talk to their family while recreating.

Pretty much what @marcspaz said: They are not consumer radios, they are difficult to install, they are large/bulky, usually very expensive and are VERY tricky to program IF you can even get the software. They are also not "FCC legal" for GMRS, but since the FCC doesn't care, neither do I.

I use a Radioddity DB20G with a Midland MXTA26 antenna. I connect the two with a Midland MXTA13 magnetic NMO mount centered on the steel roof of my 4Runner. The whip on the antenna is much taller than the roof rack. For a handheld I use a Garmin Rhino with built in topo maps. It displays my location and the locations of my friends who also have Garmin Rhinos

Geezus..Learn to read the room dude.. In my Jeep I started with a BTech GMRS 50X2, after a year or so i upgraded to the KG-1000G which I used for a few years and then replaced that with a Motorola XTL5000 (NOT recommended for most people).. IMO, the KG-1000G is the best choice for most people in this forum. The entire time I have been using a Midland MXTA26 antenna. A simple setup like this (any of the 3 radios I've had) will work more than well enough for most people, no need to learn about db gains or noise reduction %%.. Those terms, when over-used, are most often spouted by "some people" that feel an uncontrollable urge to try and show everyone how smart they think they are.

If a Factory-Reset does not help, throw them in the trash and spend $40 on 2 new ones from Amazon - problem solved and lesson learned.. That lesson being that eBay is a den of liars and thieves.

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I did forget to mention the organization that requesting radio operator volunteers. The organization is Multiple Sclerosis Society Delaware Valley Chapter is still in need of volunteers. It would also help if you had Amateur Radio License too.

I have been interested into setting up a simplex repeater similar to what you are mentioning. I was planning on using the Surecom SR-112 . I have a plan on how to power the repeater. The only thing is I live in southeast Ohio lots of trees and hills . I can set the repeater high up in the trees etc. I just don’t think using a 5watt hand held with even a good antenna will be enough to cover the area I want it to cover. My question is with the ADS-1 are you able to use a mobile radio such as a MXT115, or a Retevis RA25 radio? If so what cables . Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

And the new Motorola MotoTRBO R7 is almost upon us... https://fccid.io/AZ489FT7143 Large screen, same antenna, same charger, same belt clip, different batteries and different connector port... so APX/current XPR microphones won't be compatible with it. The only thing I consider an upgrade in my book, from just skimming through the FCC application is the larger screen... I like large screens (who doesn't LOL).... but receiver specs are yet to be seen how they stack to the XPR7550e... and unless they are on another dimension good, I'll stick to the good old XPR7550e for the foreseable future. Also pricing on this thing is going to be APX level of expensive... so at that point I think it will be better to just go with APX radios altogether. I'll reserve judgment until I see some reviews and videos of the radio, but it looks to me like the XPR7550e might be the last of a kind... G.

So are you saying ham radio is like Grindr for people who just want to talk??