Leaderboard

Thought I would share with our myGMRS community. The Mesa Crest Repeater Club is growing. CONGRATULATIONS!!! Robert WRXX460 for being our 100th Club Member... The Club has reached its first milestone by reaching 100 Club Members. Robert with the help of one of our Club Member's/Club Sponsor NotARubicon. And the graceful donation of radios to the Club from NotARubicon we are able to do what we are doing today. The Club would like to gift you a Wouxun KG-XS20G mobile unit. Thank you for being our 100th Club Member and thank you to NotARubicon for giving us the opportunity to do this.

Putting an antenna on everyone's roof is going to be the best bang for the buck. In the UHF radio band, height is might. The higher in the air the better. I would also recommend getting a radio that is at least 15 watts with no more than 50 feet of LMR400 cable, which will give you about 11 usable watts at the antenna. A 25w radio with no more than 100 feet of LM400 will give you about 12w of usable power at the antenna. A 50w radio and 100 feet or less of LMR400 will give you the best advantage with 26w or more at the antenna. I wouldn't worry about the HOA with an outside antenna. A half-wave antenna is only about 12 inches high, and a quarter-wave antenna is about 6 to 7 inches tall when you include the ground plain. If you get a black or silver metal whip antenna, unless they happen to be on the roof doing an inspection, I highly doubt anyone would notice.

Welcome! Yes keep reading. Just about every question you can think of has been asked and answered in these pages many times.

Hello from Oklahoma: WRTC493 had my license for a couple years now just recently purchased a couple of Baofeng UV-5G Plus GMRS radios to get started. Finding out not a lot of folks in my area even knows what GMRS is - I’m still trying to find repeaters and how they work & get them active. Looks like there’s only two that’s really close to my area. Now - thinking of working on the idea of installing a radio for inside the house with an external antenna. anyway, thanks and I will keep reading. Edit: if it members here are from Oklahoma and would share repeater info with me - if possible through a private message, I could get you my email and we can carry-on that conversation there. Thank You.

As a community repeater, I'd like it to be able to verbalize messages.

I chose a Vertex VXR7000 and a Tram1486. I chose the 1486 due partially to its very low wind-profile.

shush! it's supposed to be a secret.

Which is why I carry One Radio to Rule Them All

You can't (yet) use CHIRP to program your UV-5G+.. Your best hope is IF you can copy and paste the info from CHIRP into the UV-5G Plus software. Or export from CHIRP and import into the UV-5G+ software, and I'm not sure the 5G+ software can do either.

Just think about what if the government wanted to pull the plug on purpose?

You yelled for help on the radio to see what you'd get back? lol Alright then.. I guess every area of the country might not resemble the rest, but I can tell you for sure that GMRS far more active where I am. There's still plenty of 440 and 2meter stuff, but all of those guys are just also on GMRS. Not sure why so many hams do that, but it seems to be a thing.. The GMRS repeaters out here get way more traffic than the club ham repeaters.. But as for what's a better SHTF radio. Technically anything that works to reach your intended party is a good one. I will say this though. GMRS is SUPPOSED to be more for the family units to be able to carry on with more "familiar talk" with husband/wife/kids etc. Somehow though I think if it got used that way hams on the channel might actually accuse you of being in the wrong place, and that you're interrupting the "rag chew".. The irony.. Ham radio on the other hand is explicitly hobby radio. You're not supposed to use it for practical or "familiar comms". You're just supposed to go on there and talk to other radio guys about radio stuff. But I digress.. If i'm choosing the most appropriate line-of-sight band for what my idea of SHTF backup comms is, I'm choosing the one I get to have all of my people setup with, and not the one that is only supposed to be for hobby purposes.. Colostomy bag Larry ain't showing up with food and blankets for you..

I discovered the company TIDRADIO when I purchased their H8 model which, as many of you know, had some very real problems but, to the surprise of many, TIDRADIO not only did not deny the problems but, instead, they tried really hard to listen to their customers and they fixed the problems which were reported. It took them two attempts, but they eventually succeeded. Not only that, but they replaced the early production models with fixed ones, at no cost to the client. Many, including myself, were very impressed with how TIDRADIO turned what could have been a major problem into a major success. Clearly, TIDRADIO listened and swiftly acted to correct the issues identified. I was so impressed by not only the company, but also by the H8 model which came packed with superb capabilities, especially for an extremely competitive price, that I contacted TIDRADIO and offered to beta-test their pre-production models. TIDRADIO quickly and kindly agreed and sent me their latest H3 which I shall review below. The TIDRADIO H3 and H8 As you can tell from the photo above, the H3 very much looks like the “smaller brother of the H8”. But that would not at all be fair to the H3 which, while being amazingly small, packs a lot of awesome features. But let’s begin with one of the features which made TIDRADIO HTs so popular: both the H8 and the H3 offer three different boot-up modes: GMRS, HAM and “unlocked”. Just to clarify, each time you change the boot-up mode, you are doing a factory reset, so if you program your radio in one mode and then boot up in a different mode, all your changes will be lost. There is, of course, an easy workaround here. Two in fact: if you use the CHIRP free and open source software or the ODMASTER app and website, you can quite easily copy your frequencies/channels into the memory banks of the H3 (which has 199 memory slots, more than enough, at least for me). Both the H8 and the H3 can also be programmed by Bluetooth using the ODMASTER app. Both CHIRP and ODMASTER offer access to repeater databases, but for me the best results were achieved by using the “query→repeaterbook” option in CHIRP. [Note: I have found it helpful to, after I am done with CHIRP, to also connect to the radio with the ODMASTER app just to double-check some buggy aspects of CHIRP which, for examples, messed up my TX power settings when cloned back to the radio. One simple “read” in ODMASTER followed by a single “write” fixed that issue for me] I should mention here that the H8 and H3 have different RX/TX capabilities: H8: 144-148 & 420-450MHz (TX) and 76-108 MHz (FM Broadcast Radio); 136-174 & 400-520MHz (RX) H3: 8 Band Receiving: ( FM )50-76MHz; ( AM )76-108MHz; 108-136MHz; ( VHF ) 136-174MHz; 174-350MHz; 350-400MHz; ( UHF ) 400-470MHz; 470-600MHz and 2 Band Transmitting: ( VHF )144-148MHz; ( UHF )420-450MHz The fact is that while both the H8 and the H3 have the same transmitting capabilities, the H3 comes with a galore of extra frequencies, including Airband! So, as you can tell already, the H3 is hardly a “little” brother to the H8 but a very capable radio in its own right. While the radio is small, which is a big advantage and very convenient, it also feels very solid and well built. All the buttons function smoothly and having them backlit keyboard is a very good choice. The only suggestion I have would be to change the color of the characters on the buttons from white on blue to bright yellow over blue as that would make it easier to read the characters. The battery has a very long life time and fits very snugly into the radio. The stock antenna seems to be of a very decent quality and it is well built. The sound of the speaker is very good. No problems here. The choice of a single top rotating power switch/volume control, a flashlight and two indicators is a very good layout, I just wish the knob was a little stiffer to rotate. The flashlight itself seems decent, but the light is too widely dispersed and should be better focused by a better lens. The H3 does not have any IP rating, but it seems very well built. Don’t go swimming with it, but it should fare just fine in light rain, dust or sand (especially if you cover the two USB-C port with a small plastic plug). I was unable to test the USB-C programming slot. While CHIRP could “see” the H3 when I used a regular programming cable, I could not get my computer to “see” the radio when connected to the internal USB-C programming slot. This might be a GNU/Linux specific issue, I don’t know. The USB-C charging, however, works very well. As I mentioned, the ability to boot into different modes is a true “killer feature” which I hope all future TIDRADIO radios will retain. I did most of my testing in the “normal” (unlocked) mode but I tested booting up in GMRS and that works very well. I tested the Odmaster and CHIRP programming with the H3 (using Android and GNU/Linux) and I have had zero problems. Both applications work really well (though in my case, only when using a regular programming cable). The ability to copy and paste between various modes (HAM to GMRS or GMRS to HAM) allows the user to configure the radio to exactly his needs. The user manual is well written and the radio’s menu system works well, but there are 3 menu items which are missing from the user manual: #52 (200 TX) #53 (350TX) AND #54 (500TX).I also suggest that option #34 (frequency hopping) should be given an explanation on how to use it and what to use it for. I find the implementation of the AM mode clumsy. Why not have it immediately activated when on the airband? The “selective scan frequency” is still very “raw”. For example, the frequency scanner seems to start on the last frequency it detected. This is not good. I also hope that future software updates will add an option to give the scanner a starting frequency. The FM radio is adequate, but it has zero ability to scan. When scanning in the FM mode, I could not get it to detect a single FM radio station. So the current firmware still could use some fixing, and I am confident that TIDRADIO will fix these issues in future updates. I admit being very impressed by the H3 which is among my top favorite radios which, considering its price, is a huge achievements. The H3 currently sells for $39.99 on Amazon. For comparison, my Wouxun KG-935G Plus now costs $149.99, my Btech GMRS Pro cost $154.89, my Wouxun KG-UV9GX $187 and my Wouxun KG-Q10G now sells for a whopping $219.99 (and it has at least as many bugs as the H3 including a basically useless GPS receiver). FYI, the 2nd Gen TIDRADIO TD-H8 now sells for $69. So for 110 bucks, you can get both the TIDRADIO H8 and the TIDRADIO H3! Then I want to return to the form factor: the H3 is really very small, fits in a pocket, yet it is very strong, it has this solid quality feel, and the color screen is superb and very well designed. And while the H3 is both smaller and cheaper than any of my other radios, it is the one I mostly carry around. Could the H3 be improved upon? I think so. First, it would need to be made “outdoors” compatible, which means a decent IP rating and a GNSS chip: the Wouxun KG-Q10G only have a GPS chip, the Btech Pro has a chip which can receive both GPS and Beidou signals, which is better, but still not the full GNSS (which combines GPS+GLONASS+Beidou+Galileo). Nowadays GNSS chips are cheap and small, and the first HAM/GMRS radio featuring a real GNSS chip would have an immense advantage over all its competitors (much faster acquisition and much superior precision). All in all, the H3 is an absolutely fantastic radio with a huge potential and TIDRADIO/ODMASTER are a company which tries really hard to offer very capable radios at unbeatable prices. I can definitely recommend both the H8 and, especially, the H3.

Thanks Marc!

I got on the roof with a Nogoya UT-72G mag mount stuck to a roof jack. My brother had a Nagoya NA-F30G antenna from his back patio. Using cheap GM-5RH HTs, we were about to have a conversation. It was a little quiet; but not terrible. I can certainly hide a mag mounted antenna from the HOA. I'll probably try the Midland MXTA 26. I could go a little higher on the roof; but it would require significantly more coax to get down to my desk in the garage. From where I had it, it would require about 25 feet of cable.

So this setup will cause you to not hear transmissions from that repeater, unless they also have a code of 67.0 set on their transmissions? Why use a channel shared with a local repeater? There will be interference when both are transmitting, subject to the "capture effect."

Depends on of you are using the mobile site or desktop site. On the mobile site, open the menu, click activity and then Unread Content. I bookmarked that page. On the desktop site, use the navigation bar at the top of the page to click on Activity, and then Unread Content.

I disagree with your assumption that phone service would fail nationwide under most conditions. A SHTF situation is generally localized, but the locality may cover a large area. Hurricanes and wildfires are fair examples, as those affected would treat the problem as a SHTF event, but 100 or more miles away, there are no problems. You would probably not be able to communicate outside a small area around you using GMRS or FRS due to the frequencies being used. Amateur radio in the 2 meter and 70 cm bands would likely experience the same problems. However, not all frequencies would be effected the same and hams, having access to many other frequencies, should be able to relay messages and even phone patches to other areas.

Re-Examine what you have posted. I assume forum was on providing communications during SHTF when commercial landline and cellular are not available. Sure, providing phone patches for people is fine and dandy, but during a Real SHTF situation, it's a guarantee that commercial landlines and cellular systems won't be functioning. So, having a patch from an Amateur Radio to a phone is useless.

As said forget the repeater. Just use simplex. IF you are going to use it when you get someplace else using the travel tone would be prudent.

I would not bother with the repeater. Anyone that can hit your repeater, even if there were no tones or they knew the tones, would also be able to hit your mobile radio. I would turn on the vehicle's AM/FM radio to hopefully get information and use the mobile or handheld to scan the frequencies it can receive.

The propagation of the radio waves. UHF can bounce off the atmosphere giving you a longer "line of site" distance. This happens more often where there is a large temperature inversion (commonly noticed as heavy fog).

my precious

I agree, the wording doesn’t make it sound like he was frantically hollering for help. He appears to have been asking if anyone needed help, or asking if anyone needed help with GMRS. The wording makes it unclear. If he was falsely calling for help I suspect that would be a violation of the regulations prohibiting transmitting a false or deceptive message that appear both generally for all private radio services in 95.333(f) and specifically for GMRS in 95.1733(a)(2)..

Sargent Schultz, I see nothing.

I know nothing, nothing

Manufactured by Gollum Radios I'm guessing.

I'm not a conspiracy believer, but either the government has a secret "kill switch" or an understanding with the cell phone companies to turn off the service when asked/ordered to do so. If nothing else the FCC has the authority to license and control transmitters, which of course includes cell phone towers, and force the shut down. People forget that Ham radio was shut down during WWI and WWII by the FCC. It took a lot of lobbying to allow Ham radio to resume in a fashion like it was doing before the war. Not likely today, but that could change. https://bw.billl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Radio-History-03-Amateur-Radio-Before-and-During-WWII-By-Dan-Davis-W8LUX.pdf Then there is the question what happens to the Part 95 services? Is it also possible they too might be ordered to cease operations?

Every day I become more and more convinced that is the most likely scenario we will face.

This is great info! I learn so much here. Thanks!

I could be misreading the post, but I think OP called out to see if anyone needed help, not that OP needed help... I think. /shrug

Moisture bearing vegetation is even worse than houses full of .. .fat people!

You may find this tool helpful but nothing beats trying it out with your radios. If you can safely get up on the roof with your HT you may get an idea of how much an antenna higher up will make. A mobile/base with a good antenna should certainly help some. It sounds like you are already beating the odds so that's cool.

I actually translated the signal, it's a LifeAlert signal from the Moon.

Did you consider this? It could be that in your location the signal is just weak enough for this to be the issue.

Newbie checking in, just received my call sign earlier this week. What started as a pair of 935G Plus HTs, it is now going further down the rabbit hole, had little idea how deep it is, especially antennas AND height. Base stations, telescoping masts, LMR 400 cabling, etc. etc. A lot to learn. This is a great forum, glad ot be a part of it.

Having radios was the only means of communication this morning. My cell service finally came back around 11:00 this morning. Even WIFI calling was spotty.

Yep. No hurricane, tornado, earthquake, war, etc. Yet it still happened. We are more vulnerable than most people think.

GMRS wasn't intended for what you are looking for. If I heard a call I'd change channel or not answer.

Prime example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

So my newbie question is about tones. Some repeater sites state only one tone say 141.3 tone in no tone out given another repeater will show tone 141.3 in and tone 141.3 out or another tone, So I look at Chirp for the Btech GMRS V1 and I am not sure where to put the second tone number? Attached is an example of one tone but not the second one?