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This wouldn't been an issue if the FCC knew what they were doing to GMRS by combining the 2 services together and see what a mess it caused, and now they want to put DMR on GMRS oh hell no!!!

Grounding is the most argues topic I can think of for hobby radio. The discussion ranges from folks that are commercial radio guys that would see a HALO around the tower and building with ground rods every 10 feet and thousands of dollars in wire being buried in the ground to the glass jar guys that don't think any of that stuff is needed. And while I am a commercial radio guy and the commercial / public safety towers I work with have all that, I am a realist about what a guy is goig to be willing to spend and how much effort they are willing to put towards a grounding system. And the safety / electrical ground system is NOT an RF ground. It might be resonant on some RF frequencies, but certainly not all. And the halo's and legs are not ever cut to any resonant length on purpose. BUT, an RF grounding system for HF and a safety grounding system does need to be bonded together so that the voltage potential on both stay the same in all situations. But discussing the 'proper' way to ground, and all that typically turns into a mess. I offer what I know of it and leave it at that. Now, there was also a question of height and antenna's. And here's the low down on that. The numbers used for reference for calculating the 'realized gain' of the height of an antenna are a 6dB increase in signal for every time you double the antenna height. Now, That goes both ways. And applies ONLY when it's a doubling of height. So if your antenna is at 40 feet, and you move it to 50 feet, the change is not real noticeable. If your antenna is at 10 feet and you go to 40 feet, which would double the height TWICE 10 to 20 and 20 to 40, then it's gonna have a pronounced effect. When the FCC does calculations for radio station ERP, height is taken into account this way. ANd if you don't thing that's the case, let me remind you there are UHF repeaters that have a 2700 square mile footprint that are running 2 watts. Of course they are in low earth orbit attached to satellites, but those are 2 watt transmitters. Back to the increasing antenna height. If you are 15 feet in the air, and are above the roof tops, unless you can go to 60 feet, it's probably not worth bothering with because it's simply NOT gonna have that much effect on your signal level overall. There are some calculations for what your horizon is as well. That has to do with the fact the earth is curved, and RF at UHF goes in a straight line. As you increase your height, you increase the distance to the horizon. Sailors can tell you all about that. I just know it exists and I have run those numbers a couple times dealing with Microwave shots, but I don't remember how many feet it is UP to increase the horizon by 1 mile.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned about the performance of my glass-mount antenna and the fact that it is not tunable. Again, I made another second mistake in life by stating incorrect information. I stated that the Larsen Glass-Mount Antenna did not have a pot to adjust/tune the antenna like the yesteryear glass-mount antennae. In fact, it is an adjustable antenna. Since, I didn't notice an adjusting pot screw on the side of the coupler, I assume that it was not tunable. Just the other day, I noticed that the rod was being held by a set screw thus, the rod can be trimmed for better VSWRs. And to my surprise, and after 4 months that my Bird 43 and several slugs were being held hostage by Bird Instruments for recalibration, it appeared on my door step a couple days ago so I decided to trim the antenna this morning. I did notice some difference in the readings before and after the recalibration. Today, as it turned out, the VSWR for a 467 MHz freq was 1.12:1 and for the 462 MHz freq the VSWR was 1.23:1 throwing 57 watts at it. At the lower power setting (24 Watts) the reflected power barely flinched the needle. So, I adjusted the transmitter high power setting and ended up with 49.7 watts. So, I have to say "NOT TOO SHABBY"

Those 8-14 channels are limited for good reason, they are very close to the Repeater input freqs for GMRS. Narrow band and the watt limit prevent interference on the repeater inputs its why theyre called interstitial theyre between channels. Its not that FRS is dragging GMRS down its that those channels are designed not to interfere with GMRS (GMRS came way before FRS).

I believe there is not a 5 watt regulatory limit on handheld portable GMRS stations on either the 462 main channels or 467 MHz main channels.

I would totally take that taxi! …sorry I couldn’t resist

Hams are a great asset to GMRS/FRS just as long as they and the GMRS/FRS are kept in their respective places. When a Ham is on GMRS, they are now a GMRS operator. Its similar to a NASCAR driver also having a job driving taxi. When in the taxi, they are only a taxi driver transporting people, not a NASCAR driver racing a car around the track. Currently, many Hams in my area who got their GMRS license are more than wonderful to those who need help getting on the air whether or not its over the air or on the Facebook page. We currently have a large linked system on analog and aside from a little VOX issue with someone's radio, it works wonderful and everyone is more than happy with what they have.

Thank you for the add I just got my GMRS license and radio couple of weeks ago. I'm in Rochester NH Strafford county NH

I think you're exactly right. Midland's primary customers are not those who care to know this level of detail. They are overlanders and off-roaders looking for an easy to use radio that you don't have to program, is largely plug-and-play and just works. The customizable feature rich Chicom products are for us basement dwelling nerds that use chirp.

Welcome to the forum!

That's correct the FRS is limited to 2 watts and GMRS is limited to 5 watts

I very well could be wrong on that. I will have to look that information up again. I thought that FRS was limited to 2 watts and GMRS hand held were limited to 5 watts. Okay straight from the FCC: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E/section-95.1767# It only states that the 5 watt limit is for the interstitial channels AKA channels shared with FRS.

You are correct that the regulations state 5 watts maximum for a hand held and 50 watts for a mobile on GMRS. Unfortunately that won't stop some from running amplifiers. CB is another prime example, it is limited to 4 watts yet people run up to 1000 watt amps on CB.

Just for the heck of it I looked at Midland's website listing of the MXT275 and there is no mention of wide band capability anywhere. No mention in the specs or the manual. You would think they would tout that as an upgrade or feature in the latest version. Because radio dorks like to know this stuff. Maybe Midland is not targeting radio dorks?

I purchased my MXT275 in May 2022 and it had the latest version of the firmware which is wideband capable on the repeater channels. You can find out what version you have by resetting the radio and watching the version pop up on the display. The latest is R9 for wideband support. This applies to the usb-c models only.

If its at least R9 version it should be wideband on repeater channels.

Welcome!

Welcome @WSAE510

I have one. I will be your friend.

I can’t tell anymore.

It might be!

They are better radios out there if you really don’t need the high power. You could be better off buying some simple commercial grade radios. Many of those are designed to take a beating from hard use and also survive in poor weather. Of course they will cost a wee bit more than a $25 to $50 Baofeng.

You just acted like a hors’s ass to one of the nicest and least pretentious members (WRUU653) of this forum. Thank God for the Ignore list.

Do you honestly really need 8 watts out of an HT?

I do believe the KG1000G is the same radio as the KG-UV980P. What I do not know is if the UV980 firmware will work on the KG1000G. I would hate to see anyone brick their radio though. Even the Wouxun amateur band radios seem to be more difficult to unlock and I too have not found a way to unlock the KG1000G. The TYT TH-7800 and TH9800 are simple to unlock using the TYT programming software. Not that I would tell or suggest anyone do that.

20 kHz is 0.02 MHz. 200 kHz is 0.2 MHz. I don’t know if that helps at all or just demonstrates my pedantic nature.

Actually the lightning arrestor goes on the coax right before it enters the structure. in that hand drawn picture you have it up at the antenna end which is wrong.

The NEC begs to differ, and this is just a small bit on what it has to say.

This is all covered by the NEC (national electric code). It is worth looking the regulations up and reading them. As mentioned your coax shield is grounded to your radio which in turn is grounded to the home ground at the outlet. That is why one should use lightning arrestors on the coax before it enters the structure and also to have everything grounded and also bonded to the service ground. That gives the electric a shorter path to ground. And the lightning arrestor should also keep the electricity overload from entering the structure. Grounding can be a touchy subject and people will always argue about it. I prefer to be safe than sorry and have ground rods at each antenna mast/tower along with a ground rod right at the wall passthrough where my coax cables enter my house. They are bonded together and to my service ground..

Almost everything about this post is wrong. Whether you like it or not your radio is connected to a ground. Lightning travels miles through the air to get to ground and your antenna and tower are just a convenient path for it. Current will follow your coax (either the shield or the center conductor or both) until it finds ground. That’s why you place surge arresters outside the house and connect them to your house ground system, to give static charge an easier path to ground. You don’t have to open the electrical panel or hire an electrician to do any of this.

Dont GROUND and WHY>>My power pole will be 10 feet taller than my antenna mast, thats what will get struck. For one you are creating a ground that makes your antenna more likely to get stuck, basically making a lighting rod, no amount of surge protection or ground will protect your equipment. Anything under 30 feet is not required to be grounded as per home insurance, if it's over 30 a licensed electrician MUST do the work. Why would you also wish to tap into your home electric panel, do you wish to destroy your entire homes wiring? Are you an electrician, LICENSED? didn't think so. If you are not the tallest thing around you will not be attractive to mother nature ; unless you GROUND your self and make it so. my e mail is ndi911108@yahoo.com YouTube BaaSicStuff I could be wrong but the whole Kite and Key thing makes sense to me; on a stormy day just disconnect and place your coax in a mason jar

You're right about the PO box option. Many people I know, many people I look up on QRZ.com, and my own club repeater, N6CRA, all have PO boxes instead of street addresses. But these days, even without the help of the FCC, anyone can Google your name and probably find out where you live, and buttloads of other information you probably didn't even know was out there. Displaying your name on the FCC database isn't giving people any confidential information, it's just making things a little easier for them.

There is no quick, easy, simple fix for everything. GMRS is almost universally-agreed upon to be a mess with the FRS interaction. If we want to clean up GMRS then FRS will suffer. Personally, I say we remove FRS completely out of GMRS frequencies. GMRS then loses one of its voice channels to strictly APRS-like digital position reporting, etc but gains all of the FRS shared channels for its own use. What do we do with FRS, then? If I were in charge, it would be merged with MURS. All the little blister-packs of FRS radios are hereby banned from manufacture. Those on store shelves can be sold and those out in the wild can be used, but no more can ever be made and none can be repaired. Once they're gone they're gone. We will just need to bite that bullet and deal with thirty years of FRS blister pack radios till they all naturally break or get lost, etc. My suggestion is basically that we delete FRS. Anyone that doesn't want a license and doesn't want to fool with one can go buy MURS. The only issue was that we "already have so many FRS blister packs" to that I say we just need to rip the bandaid off and ban their manufacture and hope people just lose them or break them quickly. I agree, there is nothing wrong with discussion. There won't be a clear path. One will have to be forged and any direction anyone chooses will have others naysaying the whole decision. Look at Amateur radio, they can't even figure out their digital modes. There's Fusion, DStar, DMR, several others and apparently none of them play together well. Interoperability is not something humans do well. They don't do it at all without careful planning and only then if compelled by government to do so.

There are plenty of threads on the forum about changing GMRS and adding digital, etc, etc. A lot of us do not want GMRS to be made more like amateur radio with all of the digital modes. GMRS already is Wideband and we are allowed to have up to 50 watts on mobiles as it is now. More changes would be nice but at what expense. The available frequencies/channels have to come from somewhere. Do we take away from other bands to increase GMRS? I'll add that I prefer how GMRS is now. If I want to play with digital modes, I will use one of my amateur band radios.

Assuming that you know for sure that there's no GMRS repeaters in your general vicinity. Yeh, I would put one up, even if you discover there, are repeaters in the vicinity that you weren't aware of before. I would still put up a GMRS repeater, because you may want to help out community while keeping the lines of communications up when others are down. One of a few differences between Amateur Radio and GMRS. To put Amateur Radio Repeater, requires frequency coordination and since GMRS has only 8 repeater pairs, choose a pair and play ball.

My suggestion is that if there are no repeaters in your area, be a pillar of the community and put one up for you and everyone to use!

Update to your request. I am ACTIVELY working on getting a shell script together that will run on an instance of Debian with ASL loaded on it to convert it to the mygmrs system and get the web management and all the rest working. Once this is done, it will be a simple as loading Debian, then loading ASL and copying the script to the machine and executing the script. I will have detailed instructions for doing this. Now there will still be some other configuration that you would need to complete. Things like setting the correct drivers to be loaded for the repeater / radio interface would need to be figured out by you. But I will say this is all based on AllStarLink that Hams have been using for years. There is a TON of online information on getting ASL setup and running, but there of course are several things that need to be done to make it work with GMRS.

The FCC does actually go after pirate radio stations very aggressively - not just the pirates but also going after the people/landlords that own the houses/land that they broadcast from and by definition none of those guys signed up for a license. Source: https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/orders

Conversely, the gas station at the top of the hill has been broadcasting about 1600w of wide band energy in the 400-700nm range onto oncoming road traffic for the past decade. Can the FCC look in to that?

Personally, I think it's sloppily written with inaccurate premises and illogical conclusions. I see absolutely no reason why a ham radio licensee should be excused from paying for a GMRS license and arguing that equipment that requires no certification should be allowed on a service that requires certified equipment is ridiculous. But it's interesting what people will ask for.

Yup hams trying to inter-fear in yet another service. My hopes are the FCC laughs at this one.

Popup blocker stopped me from reading it live, but it was downloadable. My comment: New enforcement nightmare. Just because people should be licensed to be legal doesn't mean they will be. If this was approved, within 2 months a new Baofeng GMRS+ would be on Amazon and about 3% of users under the new rules would hold + licenses.

DMR channels do not use 7.6 kHz of spectrum; they each use 12.5 kHz but they use time division multiplexing to share that portion of spectrum. In other words each current GMRS channel would only represent two DMR channels. Gil is correct that this would impact everyone who has an analog GMRS radio. Use of such a radio requires the entire channel, making it unavailable for DMR. Conversely, to those who have analog radios, every DMR transmission sounds like an impact wrench. “Here in California, CERT, neighborhood or fire watch, militia groups, etc. have implemented GMRS because 80-90% of their members have no direct interest in the technical aspects of amateur radio.” I don’t know how true that statistic is, but ruining GMRS for the rest of us isn’t the answer. P.S. People who have no direct interest in the technical aspects of amateur radio might have a tough go when they have to program a codeplug. DMR codeplugs are extremely technical. I guess you could sell the radio with a basic codeplug that’s simplex DMR on 1-22 and duplex on 23-30, but what do you use for talk groups, time slots, and color codes?

As a fellow Jeep owner, I too became victim to Midland's marketing monster. Having a TJ, room is even tighter than your JKU, and having a radio hanging out in plain sight during top off season made me nervous, so I thought the 275 would be a great replacement for my old CB radio. Being new to the GMRS world, I dove in, got my license, bought the 275, and went to town. It didn't take me long to find the 275's shortcomings, especially since one of our local repeaters used split tones. It wasn't 6 months later that I sold the 275 to a fellow jeeper that just wanted a radio to communicate on jeep runs. I went head first down the rabbit hole, did some research, and ended up with Wouxun's KGXS-20G mobile. 20 watts, so more power than the 275, a very small chassis, so I was able to mount it in front of my console. The mic had controls for the radio, and a speaker in the mic, which proves super handy when traveling with the top down, or a noisy soft top. The dual watch display is super clean and clear, just so many more features to choose from, and room to grow as a GMRS radio nerd to be. And, at $219, while a bit more pricey, if it were to get stolen, I wouldn't cry too much vs. $400-$500 options. I usually just unscrew the mic and toss it in my security drawer under the seat when I'm in a sketchy neighborhood. I liked this radio so much, I bought it's HT brother, the KG935G. It has almost identical features to the mobile, is Part 95e only, no silly computer programming shenanigans to try to make it work as a radio it's not, and the quality so far has met my needs. I now have 3 HT's, 2 different antennas at home and work to use as a base for the HT, and enough coax fittings and coax cable options to choke a horse. I also now host a weekly GMRS net locally to grow community awareness to GMRS, so yeah, I've got the bug pretty bad!