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I commonly request permission to use repeaters that are listed as 'open' when I first see them listed. This is partially to ensure that the owner actually intended to list it as 'open', but more just to thank the owners for making them available and let them know that their generosity is appreciated.

First, I’m very sorry for your loss. Second, although there are some people who use GMRS like ham radio, listening for people to visit on either repeaters or using a popular calling channel like 19, for most of us it’s a service we use to support communications while engaging in other activities, like hiking, biking, rocketry (that’s mine) etc. Additionally some people have adopted it as a way to communicate and gather information in an apocalyptic event. But I will tell you that if you want to reach out to others over longer distances and visit with others who are interested in radio, ham radio is much more active than GMRS in more places. Plus it has never been easier to study for the tests and Morse code is no longer required.

Because "some people" are very, very stupid.

To me, the best day on GMRS is communicating with people I want to communicate with and not hearing anything I don't want to hear. Therefore, I love PL filters (CTCSS/DCS) and the 3,000+ combinations they give to our 22 rx frequencies.

I got the license to use with family for emergency communications or if we go camping somewhere with bad cell coverage. It ended up being a gateway drug as now I have an extra class ham license to go with it.

I'm dizzy

@JoCoBrian deserves full credit. In response to a post decrying the apparent lost of a repeater, I asked the original poster (OP) why he had gotten a GMRS license in the first place. JoCoBrian stepped up and gave a great answer and I realized this might be a good general interest question. I’ve been fascinated with radio as long as I can remember. My parents had one of those tall wooden consoles with a radio and record player and before I was school age I took it apart. Then in the 60s I became interested in two way radios while watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Every time a company came out with some kind of small walkie talkie I begged my folks for a set. In eighth grade I became interested in ham radio but I never followed through (a trait I still have). When I got into amateur rocketry a couple decades ago I noticed that people were carrying real radios. Eventually my mentor got a Garmin and I bought a less expensive Motorola Talkabout to talk to him. But neither of us were licensed. I signed up for an FRN in probably 2004 or 2005 but didn’t want to spend the money to buy the license. It took quite a few years but a few years ago (2021 I think) my conscience finally got the better of me. I got a license and started watching Notarubicon videos. Within a few months my interest in ham radio resurrected itself as well and in 2022, I took all three tests. But I still want a Man from U.N.C.L.E. communicator! So, why did you get a GMRS license?

I can’t imagine using someone else’s equipment without asking first. It’s so simple it’s crazy. Doesn’t matter if it’s a mower, chainsaw or a repeater. JUST ASK . It’s the proper thing to do. Why is this so hard for people ?

No they dont but that doesn't mean you can use their system without permission. This is the issue with GMRS as of late. I spend thousands of dollars on my gear and use it for my use. Its not open for others. Your just as capable to spend that money and put up your own.

I don't know what happened. It snuck out of it's box and it's hiding in my truck

If I have to suffer... you have to suffer....

That’s a very nice box, possibly one of the nicer ones I’ve seen. I’m sure glad I checked for new unread posts so I could see it.

QRP does add an interesting twist to things....what we learned in doing QRP CW for 5 or 6 years in row was this. Between 11PM and 6AM...it seemed like all the groups put their rookie CW ops on the air, and man if they could hear you a little bit, they worked you. We made 65-70% of our contacts from about 3-4 hours after FD started until the next day when it ended. At the beginning everyone is working the loudest low hanging fruit...at 30-40 WPM in many cases....that's when we'd start our fire and cook our dinner. Hahaha. We'd also run a 6m SSB station (MFJ something or other rig) that was low power, and it did a good job contacting FD stations within 75-200 miles.

Got it when I was old enough to do on my own. PArents had one for years. We used GMRS for a long time before cell phones and email. Still use it for what we did then but added off road stuff as well.

It's tough doing QRP during some of these QRM contests. Even with 500w+, it can be difficult to get through the noise of 1kc of separation. Field Day is no exception. For the past 2 years I have skipped all contesting for health reasons and the fact that it has been close to 100 degrees two Field Days in a row. Normally, I bring out a portable shelter, solar and batteries, and I will string up a dipole between two 35' masts. Same thing on Winter Field Day. It's always fun, but its a lot of work to setup and tear down.

In terms of after-action, i'll say there's room for improvement. wasn't going for points, so i was doing some hunt and pounce between 20m and 40m, around 0700-0900 UTC. For some reason I decided to play on high difficulty, and on top of the compromised antenna (end fed wire, sloping from 7ft up to around 20 ft roughly east/west), I was running QRP phone. In retrospect, I should have either taken the effort to set up the interface box and computer for FT8, dragged out the 100 watt radio, or both. I heard club stations as far away as Indiana, Kansas, and Central FL, but nobody could hear me, apparently.

I unfortunately don't have an HF transceiver but I did run my SDR with a homemade inverted V dipole wire antenna and was able to pick up California/Mexico very easily. (Am in Michigan) and I just had the wire elevated about 10 feet. It was more of a proof of concept as I am surrounded by trees so I wanted to check for future use. I heard mainly 20m, 17m and 15m. Was going to go to our local clubs field day, unfortunately it seems to have been rained it, but that's alright. All in all not bad. Hopefully by next year's field day I'll have a HF rig.

So did you ever return his money?

From one of the many available dictionaries, including the Cambridge and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, (both very well-respected), @RayP used the word correctly. Hope this helps you and others. Anxiously Adverb 1. In an uneasy or worried manner. 2. In an earnestly desirous or eager manner.

While it's a good courtesy, realistically monitoring for co-channel traffic works for backyard repeaters, but as soon as you put up even a standalone machine on a mountaintop with a 100+ mile footprint, no user can adequately monitor for co-channel traffic on any significant area of the total footprint. Of course linking makes the monitoring footprint bigger and thus enhances the issue, I'm not saying there's no correlation there, but it exists on just about all repeaters to some degree and especially so for high-coverage machines. By nature repeaters exist to cover areas that you cannot monitor with your HT/mobile/base alone, and most repeaters (being duplex) cannot do BCL on their own transmit frequency without some external receiver that interlocks on the transmit frequency (which has other technical challenges, such as locking out on natural interference, or self-interlocking with its own carrier). The monitoring rule is intended to have users avoid getting a repeater to step on another station elsewhere in the coverage footprint by monitoring first, but this cannot be realistically ensured for even a decent standalone repeater, so this issue is not exactly linking-specific.

Off road/overlanding comms. Backup comms when power and cell towers go down in the Sierra Foothills.

A repeater will take whatever signal it is receiving that opens squelch on an input frequency, and will retransmit it 5MHz lower on an output frequency. 467.7000 would retransmit on 462.7000 for example. It turns out that 462.7000 is also a simplex frequency (a regular channel), so when you hear a conversation on 462.7000 but they can't hear you, it's because that repeater is listening on 467.7000, not on 462.7000. And it's using tones that you probably don't have programmed into your radio. You can hear them, but you're neither transmitting on the correct frequency, nor with the proper tone to make them hear you. I don't know what you mean by only two people being able to use them at a time. Group conversations happen all the time. People just have to be patient and take their turn. Only one person can be talking at any moment in time, or there will be some strange interference.

It is likely that they are on a repeater, which is probably high-atop a mountain, transmitting at 50Watts from a giant, and perfectly tuned antenna. You could probably talk to them if you configured your radio to use that repeater.

Wife is a couple states away with the grand children. She won't know for a while.

Ahh, the stuff you dont want the missus to know you bought 8-P

If you have any local malls within a few miles you might pickup the mall security, assuming they are on FM some are using NXDN or DMR by me, for entertainment. At times you hear some weird stuff. I've monitored reports of food fights in the food court, kicking hookers out of the mall, adult activity in back seats of cars in the lot, running down shoplifters, vehicle repo people with computer controlled license plate scanning cameras driving through the lots etc. They even kicked some local TV news crews off the property because they didn't get prior clearance. It gets much more active near Xmas. A few times some people were "asked" to put certain unnamed items back in their car, at least they didn't call the local PD on them, because it was prohibited to have them in the mall. I'll leave it to others to figure out what those were.

You are correct - and this specific problem is probably worse with GMRS than 'coordinated' Part 90 systems. However, the Linking issue can make the problem much worse over a much larger area. This exact issue would be part of the reason why people should read the "You just got your license, now you want to put up a repeater?" sticky - and then understand why overlapping coverage is usually less than ideal, and should be avoided. Still, there's a difference between me putting up a machine that I know might be lacking in coverage and still making best attempts to monitor before transmitting (up to and including monitoring the output freq. at my repeater site, in order to disable my repeater when a co-channel user is on the air), and me putting up a linked machine that by default says I don't care about your conversation, mine is somehow more important. If there are linked networks that are monitoring somehow, I'd still be interested to hear about it.

It's here.... Now all I have to do is wait until after work

You are wrong. Free means you don’t pay. Open access means you don’t have to ask permission.

Well until they figure out that much power won't get them much beyond the radio horizon. No "channel 6 super bowl" on GMRS. Also UHF amps that can do 250 watts won't be cheap either, if you can find them.

You can buy either a 12v or 15v. Both have adjustment screws to dial in your voltage.

Another suggestion is simply a longer dual-band antenna. While it still isn't that close to resonant on the air band, there's more antenna. More steel in the air, as some amateurs are fond of saying. I have a Uniden BC75XLT handheld scanner that covers the air band. With the short stock antenna it works pretty well, but just having a longer antenna it works better. The Diamond SR77CA is a popular choice. That way you retain the ability to transmit while getting somewhat better air band reception.

oh. you are missing out.. very good tool, much easier to navigate then use of the site navigation tools. And it has a LOT of other uses too...

And the humidity was through the roof early when we started putting up antennas. We were all drenched is sweat by the time we were done. As the sun burned off the excess humidity and the breeze started, it got much more comfortable. Still hot but bearable.

I did help setup. When I left, all the antennas were up, and all but 1 had the final run of coax connected to their radio. I did make a time lapse of the antenna erection, but I haven't had a chance to review it yet, I did get uploaded/backed up to the gopro server, just waiting on me I guess...... Boy was it a hot weekend.

And I agree with you totally on the Man from U.N.C.L.E. pen!!!

Amateur Motorsport comms, and now lots of other Activity Comms. Hiking or road tripping with the family. Talking to my kid on the pit-wall (or talking trash to another buddy on track). Talking to friends or family on a road trip in the other vehicle. I'm fortunate to be somewhere fairly repeater heavy, so it's also nice to have as a backup when hiking in case someone gets hurt where there's no cell service but I can probably hit 1 of the repeaters on a mountain top, which is nice. And sometimes I go overlanding. I'm new to it though, and I doing this right?

No, but I did wire his tower building, mow the grass there every other week since 2019, painted the outside of the building, cut brush. Dragged thousands of feet of hardline to the site ranging from new 1/2 inch to several 200 plus foot lengths of 7/8 and 1 5/8 line. repair radios for him and a number of other things that I can't even remember right now. But I figure I should do that.

Got the license after my wife gave me the radios. We use them to communicate on some rural property (hiking, riding atvs, tractors, etc.). Now at home, it’s part of our plan for communication after a disaster or emergency.

Not a problem at all. Honesty is the best policy as long as you don't really go overboard.

That's very cool.

Adam I was looking at a group photo from a Field Day in 2000..I was only 40 then....in the group of 11 there are four of us left. It brings back a lot of good memories, but it's also a bit depressing. We met at Caesar Creek State Park in Ohio for 6 or 7 years in a row....some great times, and great memories. Flying Pigs QRP Club International was the group. We ran QRP CW for the entire Field Day. So much fun it should have been illegal.

Kids were too young for cell phones, and we did a lot of skiing together at six different ski resorts. Plus they were getting old enough to visit neighbor friends as I worked from home. GMRS was a good way to find each other if we ended up at different lift bases, or took some wrong turn skiing. It was a good way to be able to say, "time to come home", it was great around the campsite, backing up to the trailer, that sort of thing. They're older and have cell phones now but we still use them skiing, hiking, camping, backing up to the trailer, at outdoors events and parks. We use them where cell service is unpredictable, or predictably absent. And now it's sort of a fun hobby, and probably a gateway to amateur for us.

I also started with CB back in the early 1970’s and found it very useful until the early 1990’s or so. I considered getting the HAM ticket, but never took the time. When building out my new 4Runner I found YouTube videos that highlighted GMRS and thought it would be a good addition. After a bit more than a year the “radio bug” bit me and I now have a couple Icom radios and will be taking the test soon, to finally get the HAM license. My son & I both have mobile radios and we have several handhelds between us. The overall clarity, range, and repeater capabilities make this feel like an excellent option for us.

Great topic! Grew up around CB, back in the day you had to have a license for it. Remember my dad had a Dymo label, the kind that imbossed the plastic, with his callsign stuck to his base unit and the mobile one in the Pinto. Neighbor behind us had an aerial so tall the guy lines were in all 4 corners of his backyard, heh. When we moved out of the burbs and off to the hillbilly nation when dad decided to start a trucking business for coal, everyone had a CB cause you needed it. Nice to know that switchback your getting close to on a hill has a fully loaded truck coming down it is at the switchback, so you could stop far enough away so they could swing the corner. Lost interest in radio after I moved away, but around 2014 or so, I needed one for work, or more like, one would help but there was not enough to go around to everyone. Bought a UV5R from the Amazon in 2014 - cost me close to 40 dollars then: Learned how to get it programmed for work and used it, but not much more. Years later started looking into going HAM, but for me the work was not worth it, as that was more than I needed. Can't remember when GMRS crossed my mind, but figured it was not as geeky as HAM, but I could expand a bit radio wise with it. Now here I am, becoming more geeky about radio.

Hard to say unless you can look at the whole history of the introduction of these frequencies. Usually the govt is way behind on making rules. They are usually reactive. When something goes amiss they make up a new rule/regulation/law to said offense. When they opened the GMRS frequencies was it their intention to make it so people/families to be able to communicate farther than 1000 ft? And because of the new capabilities to the radios the manufacturers came out with new products that the Ef Sea Seas didn't have rules for? I don't know. But that is how innovation usually happens. The innovators are far ahead of the rulez makers and things get going before they can respond.

So whats odder is back in the old days when we had a repeater for home use we had a "remote" at our house for control of the repeater. It used a RTL (Radio Tie Line) from our house to the mountain top. I know in those days it wasn't cheap. Autopatch was a thing then on ham big time but you could not add that to GMRS. But wants needed as Dad would call and mo would tell him to get xyz on his way home. Later on control stations took over for remotes. Just funny how stuff progresses. Isay just enjoy GMRs for what its built for and fdont try to make it something it never was. Jeep riding, talking to kids in a park, hiking, caravans home use is what 90% of the folks who use GMRS use it for. Its only folks here that have to have linking and nets.

While I don’t dispute this happened, the issue of asking for call signs is a bridge too far. The owner should not need to produce any such info, but even if they do I doubt anything would come of it. The government always tends to overreach and it’s up to the citizens to push back and keep them in check.

Yeah, mine is listed as open but I get requests all the time too. So you had an argument with the owner of the repeater that you were going to have FREE access to. That seems like perfectly reasonable thing to do... Do you remember (probably not) Nancy Reagan's catch phrase? You might look into that and take her advice. Then, with you hat in your hand, apologize to the guy and see if you can get back into his good graces and get permission, hoping he's not a scorched earth type of guy like I am. Because personally, if you are dumb enough to argue with me prior to getting permission of at any point after that, it would be a cold day in hell before I let you on my gear. But that's how I roll. But if it's the guy on here I am thinking it is. He's actually every bit the A-hole I am and wouldn't pee in your face at this point if you beard was on fire. So you might be screwed.

Based on all your multiple previous comments about how EVERY person you know dumps EVERY radio (Midland, Retevis, TidRadio, Wouxun) unless that radio happens to be the same brand of radios that you use, it is becoming clear that you don't actually know anyone. ... Or, you are just F.O.S. But either way, your mythomaniac comments are great for pointing at and laughing so keep up the good work!