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Just joined a few minutes ago. I’ve been fascinated by radios since I was little. When I was about 8 or 9 a friend got a pair of walkie-talkies for x-mas and I thought they were the coolest thing ever. Magical! I got my first scanner when I was about 17 and since then I’ve always owned one and a few “walkie-talkies” too. I keep the radios for a while and then give them away and buy new ones. My new toys are a BTech GMRS V2, which I have only one. Such a great little radio. I love the two PTT buttons. Great idea! I also have 6 (yes 6) Ailunce HA1G. Great radios, but with no one to talk to its hard to test them. I am an US citizen but live in Tijuana, Mx and work in Sam Diego. Monitoring GMRS frequencies in Tijuana is boring. Nothing but people using them for business purposes. The reason I bought six of them is because They have some great specials and, I am planning to do some volunteer work with organizations such as Aguilas Del Desierto. A group of volunteers that go to the desert near the Mexican border and look for lost immigrants and helps them. It’s not uncommon for them to find dead people. Including dead children. So sad! Anyway, I know they carry radios but most are cheap bubblewrap radios. I got my GMRS license not long ago and like others in here I am here to learn and share.

What has Talkpod support had to say about all this? Surely you contacted support for help?

@ADVBikerRadioGirl welcome! Important work you are doing. Be safe.

Welcome @ADVBikerRadioGirl and yes thank you.

@ADVBikerRadioGirl, Welcome! Thank you for doing that volunteer work.

It can not. It's a HF/6 meter radio and can't receive over 75MHz.

Probably better to send Rich a message and ask him....

I use my KG-1000G+ in a Hardened Power Systems/Midland MXPW500 with a 10Ah LiFePo battery and it lasts for days, transmitting and receiving.. I usually use it on Low/Mid power, but it works fine (just not as long) at high power.

Both radios are working exactly as they are supposed to. Any GMRS repeater must have, by definition, a +5 offset. If it does not have a +5 offset then it is not a GMRS repeater and the radios will not allow you to transmit on them. And, the radios will not allow you to transmit on anything that is not a pre-set GMRS channel/frequency, which explains why you cant transmit on a 467 frequency with a +5 offset. It sounds like you bought the wrong radios for your needs..Or, you are really, really confuckulated. Edit: IIRC some of the A36 GMRS radios shipped with the wrong offset. .that is on them, but you should be able to easily change it to +5 from a 462. channel.. I was able to do that with mine, no problem. But you would be within your rights to send it back and ask for a refund as it does not work as it should, as defined by the FCCs and according to the radio's documentation.

This is a great question. A little background: I worked at Motorola for over 30 years and asked this very question to some of the RF guys there. The resounding answer is to "go high baby". Well, in a case like yours where your high-gain and low height option is not really very high, then yes some extra maybe 10-20ft with a somewhat lower gain will be better. Now if you were already at 100ft with high gain and could go up another 20ft with low gain, this could be a different story. That would depend on the surrounding terrain. But in short "go high baby". As evidence of how this works, I too ran a repeater during the above mentioned time period, that being a 450MHz ham band repeater at my house. I lived on a small hill in the Chicago suburbs, maybe a 40ft above average terrain. Sounds like not much, but in the Chicago suburbs that's all you get for a hill I chose to go high baby, and put a 6dBi gain antenna as high as I could get away with, about 60ft above the hill. I was afraid to put a larger higher gain antenna at that height due to tower strength limitations. And wow, did it have great coverage for being just a home brew repeater. In the direction where the land sloped down slightly it easily had a 40 mile mobile coverage and I had people 80 miles away using it from simple base stations. Now granted this was one high performance repeater: 25 watts TX (yea, not huge I know) but the receiver was souped up by me, being an RF receiver guy, it had less than 2dB noise figure counting the duplexer loss (for those who don't get noise figure, 2dB in that case is outstanding). Hope this helps.

Thanks, I have tried to find videos on youtube for this, but there is not any with only the baofeng uv5g. NotaRubicon has 1 w a different radio, but it says to save the C tones / numbers on ch 17, as the example was for ch 17 which would be Repeater ch 3 (ch 25). I spent 34 years talking on fire dept radios, but this gmrs thing is confusing to me. It is probably because I was gifted a uv5g and not a radio w all the keys.

You want to set the tones and talk on the repeater channel. Repeater channel 6 is setup with the correct offsets whereas Channel 20 is not since it is a simplex only channel.

In the image, you don't have any tones set on the repeater channels.

Not all repeaters are configured to send any kind of acknowledgement or squelch tail. Some places there’s just nobody comment on a transmission.

The IC-2730A as well.

The old IC706MKIIG is one, but the power output is low due to the filters. IC-706MKIIG Freqequency Mod Power Output.pdf IC-706MKIIG Transmit Power Mod.pdf IC-706MKIIG Frequency Expansion.pdf

Here, I'll just get it over with: You will get a $250,000 fine AND go to jail!!

Can't speak directly to that model, but I did buy a different Cotre DMR radio (which is not currently available): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09TW4CS58/ It's "OK". UHF only, seems to work fine on both analog and DMR repeaters. I haven't used it very much and am actually planning to sell it since I have better DMR radios. Not very polished; for example the software comes as a RAR and you just unpack it and run the executable out of that directory, it doesn't even install on your PC. It also requires a cable with the CH340 chip. I couldn't get it to program using any of the numerous other K-type cables I already had.

I think you would be better off with a UV-5R that has front panel programming.

I think I am on the fringe of distance. I tried the Observatory Hill repeater too, but no luck. Will keep trying. I have another antenna to try also. Maybe that will help. Southwest PA Is a bit hilly. I live at the top of a hill , so maybe I will get lucky. Nice to have Ma pool of knowledge from which to draw here. Much obliged.

If you go Lifepo, go big, I tried my kg1000g+ on my little 10ah lifepo4 and it would shut off at high power when transmitting. On medium it worked fine.

Knife edge refraction works best with hard surfaces, esp on UHF (GMRS is in the UHF range). Large, hard deep rocks are more likely to give knife edge than soft soils.

Thank you. The talkpod I definitely has the appropriate 462 channel with a +5 offset. I see the frequency turn to 467 but then it makes a restricted beep. Maybe I’ll try new firmware and then returning if it doesn’t work. I am partially unconfuckulated sir! Absolute legend , what a pleasure

To further emphasize what Randy said, there are no 466 MHz frequencies in GMRS.

I have one zone on my commercial radios programed for narrow band specifically to communicate with FRS users too.

Well it seems like the interoperability is more useful than I may have realized at first glance. That makes sense.

I believe that FRS/GMRS interoperability is a strong point for both services. I use the same channel for a few groups. Our Jeep group is all GMRS, the deer hunting group has mostly switched to GMRS, but not completely. The group around my cottage (mostly golfcart-golfcart) is mostly FRS. The fact that un-licensed people can legally communicate in each group is a good thing. At my cottage I have the channel NFM on my KG1000, KG905 and KG UV=9GX for the times that I dont use on of my FRS (very old Motorolas), I just have to remember to TX my FCC call sign. If you have a problem with FRS on your channel then use a different channel or different PL filter. If you are scanning all channels with no PL filter so that you will hear everything, then dont be surprised when you DO hear EVERYTHING.

But that should have happened in the 2017 revamp. I don't see FCC doing it now.

Here's my setup, works well. I have a 25-ft piece of LMR400 and run it on my trailer batteries.

No reason exists to try to make them play well together. Ham radio promotes the ability to try many things, just for the sake of trying. But what’s learned there might affect decisions elsewhere.

Press the button.. WAIT.. then talk.. See if that helps.. If not, go outside or seek higher ground and try again.

And there are more of us that have both amateur and GMRS licenses that don't want GMRS to turn into HAM Lite.

I would use the 2 bad radios for parts in case there's issue with the new radio. I'm glad this issue was posted because I was going to purchase this radio, and now I'm having second thoughts