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Yup, not gonna be the first means for someone but it’s great tech to have. I have been on emergency calls with folks that have disabilities; deaf/blind. For those that are deaf, we often grab a phone or notepad. In a disaster, this gives someone who can’t hear another option if traditional comm paths are down. Cool stuff!

If the simplex channel is trying to check into the net, why not go back to that person on simplex and give them the correct channel they should be using? They think they are on duplex and using the power allowed for a repeater channel.

I have 6 NMO mounts on the roof of my F150 (crew cab). All are hooked up to APX mobile radios. I see no noticeable issues. Really will depend on power and quality of radio. Cheap radios and high power don't go well together.

Or were the parties on simplex simply using their radios, oblivious to the presence of a net taking place.

If only we could get all manufacturers to put the same default CTCSS tone on all simplex channels...

Not planning on doing any super tight winds; I just spent two hours writing up a Quality Assurance report to Engineering on a landing gear harness with excessive bend radius. As anal as we have to get with the fiddly bits on jets, I see no reason to not take the same precautions on my rig...and we run loads of coax in stacked runs.

Adding a larger, correctly tuned and well-placed external antenna will almost always certainly perform better than the stock antenna, but depending on your terrain, and 3million other variables, you may or may not notice. With good line of sight, you might get 20 miles of farz on the radios using the stock antennas, but if you have a mountain at 21 miles, then no big antenna is going to get you 22 miles of farz. Dont overthink it.. If you are getting the farz that you need with the stock rubber ducky antennas, then use them. If you need more farz, then connect to a correctly tuned and well-placed external antenna. Queue the overly complicated, 10 paragraph responses that don't really address or answer the question:

This is where my money is.

Yep, I primarily use mine while snow surfing on my 12' long 160hp 2 stroke couch.

This world never ceases to amaze me. It seems like Alaska would be one of those places you would need a radio the most but no one will ship them there. @WRYH211 USPS does ship lithium batteries, they just don't fly them. Ground only so they take longer.

rolling hills will kill ya.. There aren't too many repeaters i can hit in the 70 mile rage.. The repeater in particular i like is located on El Paso Peak in the Mojave Desert and overlooks the desert valley as far as the eye can see in all directions. I've talked from Acton Calif to Lone Pine Calif through this repeater with no problems.. End to End that is about 130 miles.. I've heard some reports that people can hit this repeater from Barstow, which would make end to end Barstow to Line at about 150 miles. The Midland antenna is nice GMRS antenna works well. I use a Hytera HM782 radio and it's doing a nice job.

I mounted a Midland MXTA26 to a Third Brake Light bracket i got on Ebay on my Ram.. Very clean install, no drilling and coax easily routes within the headliner through the back side of the third brake light. .. The bracket mounts between the brake light and the roof chassis and looks like a factory install.. I was going to drill the 5/8" hole in the roof but i ran into this bracket a guy was selling, he never used.. I can easily hit repeaters 75-80 miles out, The bracket i got was unpackaged and has no manufacture name tags, otherwise i would share that info.. But i'm sure you can find with a google search. Edited.. I found the info on the bracket.. It's made by Bullet Proof, here is a video... These things are a bit pricey... I got mine for $75, not sure if i would pay the $300 new price.. It is a high quality item....

You will lose range. The antenna will also transmit more directionally. Be slightly more deaf and often have much higher swr, due to the weird shaped/smaller ground plane (compared to the roof). If range is a concern. Then center of the roof with a high gain antenna, is the optimal answer, almost always. The cab (windshield and a pillar) will partially shield the signal. Not to mention the 2-3 foot difference in height. The ground plane differences lead to 2db or greater loss compared to a center roof mount. Remember, to get 3db gain (roughly one signal bar) you have to double the power with everything else equal roughly speaking. Comparably, although it is not as bad as you think. My hood mount antenna hears about 60-75 percent of what it did on center of the roof. Transmits about 75-80 of the center roof mount. Hence why we always recommend grabbing the drill and mount a nmo. When you do no ground plane antennas, stealth antennas, mag mounts, sub optimal locations. You take a comprimse and add more comprimises. Really comes down to what you can live with. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk

Typically you would, but the terrain and elevation differences between the two points comes into play. GMRS is all LoS (Line of Sight), so you have to work within its limitations.

Magnet mounts on 6M and HF don’t couple very well to the body of the vehicle. The cable ends up being part of the ground plane. On a 1/4 wave 6M antenna I ended up using a ferrite toroid near the magnet mount base to decouple the antenna. Otherwise moving the coax around resulted in significant SWR changes. I also paid a few bucks, at a flea market, for some magnet mount CB antennas, Little Wilson, with the idea of cutting them down for 10M. Finally gave up since the bandwidth was very narrow and the SWR jumped around every time I moved the coax a bit while adjusting the antenna.

Would be good to know where on the vehicle the Nagoya is placed (i.e. roof, trunk, etc.). You want to have at least 6.3" of clear surface in all directions around the antenna (figure 12.5" diameter). You also don't want it right up against the body or cab of the vehicle, as that will block both TX and RX signals. Also, the Nagoya UT-72G antenna can be hit/miss. I know four people that all got them from Amazon, and two have "workable" SWR's on the GMRS band, and two are basically paper weights because they are so bad. The one that I got is at 1.8:1 on GMRS Simplex (462MHz), and almost 2.1:1 on GMRS Repeater inputs (467 MHz). Both SWR values are "acceptable", but not exactly great in comparison to other mobile antennas.

Shouldn't be a problem. (Big shouldnt). Remeber, 70cm is third harmonic ( I think) of 2m. So best practices would be shut one down when in use. My xtl 5k will overload my ftm400 when transmitting on occasion. But that is when the frm400 is listening to 70cm, the xtl5k is used for gmrs. It's to be expected at 4.5 feet between the antennas, especially since 70cm and gmrs are so close in frequency. I haven't seen issue on the 2m side when transmitting on gmrs. I say if, since Marc had problems with his 2m xtl 5k, that one he thinks it might have been the gmrs xtl5k, that damaged it. Hopefully, he can chime in with his real world findings. But if you are really worried. Run some cheap filters. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk

Thanks for the alternative link. Scadacore was the tool I always used.

I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s the best, with all the other devices that are available, but the fact that it doesn’t rely on special hardware or cables makes it potentially valuable in the absence of those devices.

@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.

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!

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"?

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.

I used the UV-5R for a while. It's an OKAY radio in my opinion, there's nothing that good about it. And there is nothing that bad about it, it is just okay. There's really nothing more to say about it in my opinion. I recently started getting into Motorola's that are tuned down to GMRS Frequencies, I use them often while working, and while doing shifts as a security officer, I found to my personal preference the baofengs just aren't big enough for me. I like larger radios that have a little weight in your hands but that's just personal preference

Compared to the DMR crap regularly blotting out GMRS channels for hours at a time, I would think that a few 1-second bursts per minute at ultrasonic frequencies would be a trivial concern!

I was biting my tongue trying not to say that.

Geezus, some people could over-complicate a cup of water. YES, it will work.

Recently a big GMRS youtuber posted a video about the repeater-jammer, callsign WRTD259 in Steelton PA that got busted by the FCC for jamming a repeater. In that video the youtuber reads the public FCC violation notice and displays the FCC public notice of violation on the screen - you can see the full, public complaint against WRTD259 here: https://www.fcc.gov/document/jonathan-gutierrez-licensee-station-wrtd259-steelton-pa Now SOMEONE has filed a notice of privacy-violation against that video, demanding that all personal information about the jammer be removed from the video.. Of course, there is no way to know exactly who filed the notice.. But if we were to guess who filed the notice, hypothetically, it would seem funny that a jammer would demand everyones attention while jamming, but does not want any attention after he gets caught.

Each radio has its own RF signature due to inconsistency in manufacturing and assembly of components. Has something to do with how quickly and cleanly a radio comes up to selected frequency. Interesting and DEEP in the weeds. Apparently you can use a sdr dongle and some plugins to explore this concept. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_fingerprinting https://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~gruteser/papers/brik_paradis.pdf https://www.rtl-sdr.com/using-an-rtl-sdr-rf-fingerprinting-and-deep-learning-to-authenticate-rf-devices/

I wanted say more now that I own 2 BTECH GMRS PRO. Sure there's gone to be some flaws, but overall, it's a simple radio to program and use. The BTECH GMRS PRO would even be more useful if a mobile version comes out. Especially for large events, such MS 150 City to Shore, that's if all volunteers have a GMRS license. I can't wait for BTECH to come out with an Amateur Radio UHF / VHF version. Hopefully, BTECH would include DMR or NXDN this way I could or any Amateur Radio Operator could also monitor railroads or other services.