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GMRS is normally a bring your friends along service. If your here to find friends you may be disappointed. Yes there are some areas that are ham like but alot of areas gmrs is radio to radio or user groups that really wont answer another user....

I can 100% tell you through experience, if you don't use some serious filtering, like found in a duplexer, vertical separation isn't enough unless you plan on using very low power... like 5 watts. I have a portable repeater system the doesn't use a duplexer. At 5 watts, it can have both antennas about 100 feet from each other and it works locally with limited issues. However, if I want to run 50w, or even 200w, I have to separate the two antennas by about 400 to 500 yards to avoid desense issues. I also have a fixed repeater with a duplexer sharing 1 antenna. The duplexer cooks off about half the power, both transmitted and receive. However, antenna placement is going to impact performance more than transmitted and receive losses in the duplexer. You would have to cut your power 4 times to see a single s-unit of loss. Most people who don't run a duplexer, don't do it for performance benefits, mostly because it's not a noticeable benefit. It's done to save money or to provide rapid diversity in deployment and changing frequency or even bands without having to re-tune or replace the duplexer every time. Such as my portable field unit.

Steve, The noise is still there and takes away from my voice clarity. I'm hoping that it is the microphone as I just ordered one today.

If the cable is less than 25 feet a higher-grade cable won't buy you much.

Thank you. These are the kinds of things I NEEDED to know!

You need vertical separation for a dual antenna setup. Unless your doing a combiner and receive multi-coupler I don't see the value in the dual antenna setup. A good duplexer will have a small amount of loss and in the end work much better than the dual antenna setup. There is alot more to this discussion than just antenna. The repeater is another big item that needs to be figured out. A repeater made from cheap mobiles will be worse in a dual antenna setup than a purpose built LMR repeater. In the LMR world a lot of sites use dual antenna. My one SAR site uses a receive multi-coupler with a DB408 at 35' up a tower. The TX antenna is thru a TX combiner at 15' off the ground. With the filtering on both TX and RX I see no desense at all on 75 watt Quantars on GMRS and our SAR channels. Another site we have an ICOM FR4000 with a BPR duplexer. Out of the duplexer is a 30 watts into 1/2" LDF 150 up the tower. Again no desense at all and there is multiple LMR repeaters at this site. Both sites have great coverage for the area and both serve specific purposes. If I didn't have other SAR LMR frequencies at the first site we would have a duplexer. Normally the cost of feedline and antenna will be the same cost of the duplexer.

I use the Tram 1486 because it is not very expensive, it's relatively high-gain, and it does not look like an alien spaceship on the roof. It was also easy to trim/tune - I got 1.01:1 SWR on the first try. You should use good/decent coax, but do not listen to "some people" that will try to convince you that you MUST USE hardline or Heliax, or some other $45/ft coax. I am using LMR400, which is plenty "good enough". You should ground both the mast and the coax (using a lighting suppressor type inline ground block), but i wont get into the details about how/what to ground them to as no doubt "some people" will be starting ongoing arguments over proper grounding techniques any minute now.

When I did a fresh install of the Prolific driver, it gave me an option to repair. That never happened before, so I think I'm headed in the right direction by installing the programs in a newly created folder instead of an existing folder within my PC. For now I'm listening to the SW ham bands with SDR# now that I've got that working again!

Repeater users rarely can hear local traffic on simplex. Only when simplex stations are close to the said repeater user. That kind of interference from the repeater is a fact of life and unavoidable. Move to another freq if you are on simplex.

Sounds, to me, like she did not believe: Thank goodness, he keeps an HT in the bathroom!

I used to listen to the old analog 800MHz cell phone stuff back in the day. Still remember a guy talking to his mistress and she was ticked off because he had the nerve to "sleep with his wife". More recently while scanning GMRS/FRS I picked up a transmission from a guy that said "Honey, next commercial break can you please bring me some toilet paper? I'm waiting". I just had a sip of beer at the time, laughed so hard it came through my nose.

A good way to see the terrain between you and your friend is a line-of-sight tool like link below. Scadacore.com had a better one, but their site seems to be down as of this post. Our cabin in up by Alpena has some serious elevation changes (300') depending on the direction. We can get anywhere from 4-10 miles using simplex with a vehicle mounted MTXA26 Midland MTX400 (SWR 1.1) and 15' tower mount MTXA26 Baofang HT (SWR 1.5). I have done some testing and agree, its all about antenna height and terrain. https://www.solwise.co.uk/wireless-elevationtool.html

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.

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.