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I did not notice any degradation in any signal level with my glass-mount antenna when turning on the Rear Window Defroster. In the Phoenix Area, we do not allow any frost on our windows and never had a reason to use it. Also, my rear window has the factory tint. My VSWR on 462 Megs is 1.2:1 and on 467 Megs is 1.6:1 and unfortunately, I hear a lot of FRS traffic about 5-6 miles away and I can communicate with several repeaters approx. 35-50 miles away. On the Trail, obviously it varies due to terrain, foliage, and obstacles and I am not disappointed in the performance. Some of the poor signal reception is because some of my fellow Jeep Creeps use cheap FRS radios from inside of their vehicle You just need to follow the mounting instructions and ensure the antenna is tuned/trimmed properly.

Some radios, even newer ones, won't support cross-mode tones. I was surprised to find that my TYT TH-9800 doesn't. There's only one GMRS repeater in Oklahoma using cross-mode tones, and I've never seen an amateur radio repeater using them, so I guess it doesn't matter much. The one guy using cross tones is probably a goober anyway, and I don't want to use his repeater.

That’s how they are here as well, but there are only a handful of us who actually have licenses. The vast majority of GMRS just buy the radios and use them miles away from populated areas. Honestly, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Maybe there shouldn’t be GMRS licensing for handheld use or lower than some wattage level.

This should be good to watch. Looks like there is a FCC rule change being proposed to bar Chinese Labs from doing FCC testing for certification on various electronic items, including radios. Maybe this will end up clamping down on radios that seems to violate FCC rules from being certified due to questionable testing results. https://www.oann.com/tech/fcc-to-vote-to-bar-chinese-labs-deemed-security-risks-from-testing-us-electronics/

No, it looks like there is now a GMRS version/flavor of the 5RM.. One is H.A.M.s radios, the other is GMRS.. So my earlier statement stands amended.

The GMRS version of the 5RM series is the UV-5G Plus. Type-approval aside, the 5RM variants (with the exception of the UV-5G Plus) cannot be set to power levels below about 2w. That makes them incapable of meeting the technical requirements for operating on GMRS/FRS channels 8-14, since those channels are supposed to be constrained to 0.5w or less. Aside from that they can be correctly configured for 1-7 and 15-22, though they would still not be type-approved, so still in violation of the FCC rules, which not even the FCC has enforced against individuals historically. It would be impossible to distinguish a 5RM series configured technically correctly on channels 1-7 and 15-22 from a UV-5G Plus. Nobody could tell the difference. And on 8-14 it would be hard to know, though transmitting at 2w when you're supposed to stay under 0.5w is more likely to interfere with nearby repeater mains, so not a good practice. <update> If there is now a 5RM GMRS variant, that is probably going to be something very similar to the UV-5G Plus. And it may even be a type-approved radio. You could look it up in the FCC filing but it's a lot of work to find, and ultimately not worth the bother.

Did you check the manual to see if that flashing pattern means anything specific?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Midland Ghost antenna based on ACTUAL TESTS AND DATA that I have done (not based on "Some People's" opinion).. However as others have posted, the Ghost antenna form-factor may not be the best choice, but if you use it, it will perform fine as long as its not blocked/surrounded by any metal.

The Chinese are busy at the moment making deals with Vietnam and India to manufacture their products.. I'm sure they will do the same with their testing. Move it out of China into another country but with the same motives doing it in the heart of China. Pretty soon, you see Baofang made in China and Baofang made in India.

Could be interesting, thank you for sharing......you know my attitude toward CCR's though Better late than never, and not amazed it has taken this long to reign in some of those products/manufacturers, some very "dirty" RF emitters in some cases. Doing some testing with several series of Motorola radios myself soon.....how they operate in GPS and radar compromised environments. Using my own XPR6550/XPR7550/e radios in GMRS band (have to use my personal license) - work does not even want to be tied to this project (unless it goes well, then the "brown nosers" will try to say they supported me all along - funny how that works), so doing while on "vacation". But it caught the eye of the Feds. Received their personal invite, as I also tested cameras, which helped result in the Hikvision ban. For CCR's I do own a lot of them, (purchased to evaluate) which confirms my use of: Motorola, Harris, Thales, and Icom radios instead. The Anytone 878 series is the only CCR I bring along these days to the field.

I made mine because I was excited to get it and bored at the same time.

Glass mount antennas have special mounting requirements. They can't be installed on windows carrying electrical charges or metallic film. Embedded defroster wires, heated windows or FM radio antennas all are problems.

Well, it seems that my Motorola XPR7550e also has cold solder joints (in fact 177 radios all from the same batch) near the top of the board. Dreaded issue with many series of radios, with wave soldering being used in production, the top of the board (where the antenna, channel selector, and volume/on/off knob are located) gets the cooler solder joints that fail over time. Or, as I put it.....Motorola Planned Obsolescence. Often times, Motorola (and other brands/model) radios end up in auction sites as they have intermittent issues related to their antenna connectors, power and volume settings (radios get bumped "Off" when the potentiometer begins to fail), or channel select issues when worn on the belt and the knobs are rubbed. This can often be cold solder joints from manufacture. This is not limited to Motorola (I have seen this with Kenwood as well 5100/5300 series handhelds). The fix is to re-solder the connections if the pots or antenna connector is just loose, to replacement of potentiometers if volume/on/off or channel select is too loose. 3D printing also came in handy as shields can also prevent torque on the top knobs and antenna connection, preventing wear on the circuit board connections that may be prone to poor soldering during manufacture. As for Motorola XPR7550e radios, Motorola has repaired them under warranty, or via flat-rate repair if out of warranty.....but will only support them for another three more years (the model was discontinued and replaced by the Motorola R7 series radio), you often get five years of production and five additional years of support. For those buying second hand, buyer beware, or use for negotiation of price. Anyone else experience this with their radios (any manufacture), if so, what was the fix?

Yup. Any ht cheap or expensive will all tx about the same distance so I’d start with a couple cheap hts with 771 antennas. See how that works out. Then upgrade from there. Ideally you would have a 20-50w base station at home with a big tall antenna such as a comet 712 efc up as high as you could go. 30, 40, 50’…. Then a good 20-50w in the car/truck with a good antenna such as an mxt26 or comet 2x4 installed correctly But you may not need that much to start out.

They'll call it Paufeng

Regarding soldering. Back in Jr High we had to take several shop classes, wood, metal, electrical and drafting. You learned skills like soldering. Today I don't think they even have shop classes. That's one big reason most kids today can't do something as simple as solder.

At a rocket launch on the Black Rock desert I picked up enough leaded solder to last my lifetime. Some very fine stuff and some that’s about two times as big that’s multicore with rosin flux. And it’s all smaller than the old “Radio TV” solder that I still have. The smallest stuff is perfect for fine pitch SMT.

What part is false/what are they claiming? When I look them up they just say they are H.A.M.s radios..

... Baofeng made in the United States

So far my BTech GMRS-Pro is a decent handheld. Today when I turned it on the LED by the antenna was flashing Red and Green and after a few seconds shut off. Battery is fully charged, hasn't been dropped. I did a factory reset and everything was fine. Had to restore everything to the radio, but did this after upgrading to the new firmware. If you have one of these radios, and get the red and green flashing LED, do a factory reset and restore all the settings via the app first to see if that solves your problem.

Although I've never really used it, my repeater is set up to remotely disable/enable and i can even send the commands via my cell phone.

This is one more thing I didn't know. If a person's radio didn't support cross-mode tones they could always just the leave RX tone off. They would receive all traffic on that frequency in range but that probably isn't too big of a deal. I, too, avoid Goober Operated Repeaters. There is one GOR in an area I travel occasionally, that after seeing the clues, decided it would be to my benefit not to use the repeater.

Well, if you are operating on someone's repeater, and have been 'told' (documented) to NOT use their repeater, then the complaint is malicious interference with the repeater. Which is one of the few things that the FCC will in fact look into. But the repeater owner needs to have documented proof that you have been informed that the repeater is for private use, which is also legal under GMRS, and you are still interfering with the repeater. Randy mentioned that there are FEW enforcement actions in the GMRS service. But those that do exist are for interference. Now here's the rub. If you are contacted by the FCC about interfering with someone's private repeater and you tell them it's a paid repeater. Then, since they are doing an investigation, they MIGHT look into that. If the owner has his documentation together and can prove it's either a club machine and he collects 'club dues' or he can show that the money collected is ONLY for the maintenance of the repeater, he's in the clear. If not, then he might get a notice too. But YOU are getting a notice if it goes that far. Regardless of what he's going or not doing legally, you are interfering with his repeater. Interference is one of those really broad regulations that most anything fits into. Broken radios that are transmitting off frequency is interference. Putting up a repeater on the same frequency as another one in your town when there are other pairs open. Again, interference. This one needs a bit more to it, like the new repeater owner needs to KNOW there is another repeater there, or at minimum your repeater needs to be well documented as preexisting the new one. And your not gonna get any assistance with this if your repeater is on your garage and talks 2 miles. But a high profile machine that is documented and public, yeah, the FCC is gonna be on their side of it. But, in this case, being told, with documented notice (first class mail with signed receipt) that you are interfering with the operations of a private repeater can get the FCC's attention. But it's gonna need to be more than a telephone call to the FCC office to get the ball rolling. But if the repeater in question is well used by other's and they are paying their fee, and you aren't. It's not difficult for the owner to request the membership file complaints, and actually get part of them to do so. If you get multiple complaints from multiple license holders, you are going to get a letter from the FCC about your actions.

Ha! Except they’re using GMRS radios.

Such dirty talk in the thread.

Most of those components between the portions of the Chip Dragon picture are antenna connectors and channel pots for Motorola handheld radios.

Luckily, with the warranty period ending, and the fact that we have Chip Dragon (I miss labeled the picture as Air Dragon though) stations spread across the country, we can do this. In fact, Motorola XTS series radios as they age also have this problem.....but it only manifests after 10-15 years of use. And why we still use XTS series handhelds, we can repair them, they work well, and Battery Universe sells IS rated batteries for them, even though Motorola ended support and manufacture a few years back now. Soldering is a skill that I wish more "radio" technicians were taught. Now, it is IT types being handed a radio system, that in some cases do not even know how to change a car tire (if their car even comes with a spare now), let alone solder. Then, crappy solder that does not last, or flow well because it is hazardous....that gets to be a crazy situation for a large company and anyone that even tries to solder. I had an intern in a safety class mention that "soldering" should require a specific hazmat class and safety classes as you could get burned and contaminated with lead. I told my "leadership" that if they push too hard on that route, they may see some of the older techs leave...with no replacement. The youngest member of my team came from Icom America and is almost 40 now....and he can solder (but most often is working on Kenwood NX-51xx/53xx series radios, yes those fail too). Thank you for the reply.

for the most part and in most areas i agree, GMRS users are generally polite, however in the areas if have traveled in in the last two three years (in this order) i find Los Angles, Sacramento, Dallas, parts of Arizona and parts of Washington to be complete jerks. Los Angeles i just turn the radio off..

I don't even carry my CPR / BLS certification card around with me, and there's an exponentially greater likelihood I'll need to show that one. I've got a digital copy I can pull down if I ever need it. But until then...

As others have said, you may or may not have any issues with a glass mount antenna. Defrosters, embedded AM/FM antennas and certain types of tint can cause a problem. Or they may not cause any issues. Some window tint has enough metal in it to affect RF signals.

I very much doubt I'll be in a position where I have to prove I have an amateur or GMRS radio license. I just bought the card because it's cool.

I'm not involved with that product (I do the BF-F8HP Pro handheld and the GMRS-RPT50), but BTECH seems to be committed to providing features people request, as upgrades. The BF-F8HP shipped with firmware V29, went to V33 about a month and a half later, and V44 which just came out. A bunch of the enhancements in that firmware were due to requests from Facebook, here, to me directly or to BTECH. So the radio you bought the week it was released in October 2024 can be upgraded to the same functionality as the units currently shipping. The only difference is that new V44 radios will come with a somewhat updated v44 manual which describes the new features. The GMRS-RPT50 got a bunch of features people asked for, like being able to used the microphone to use the radio as a base station, to get rid of the annoying (if you're the only person with physical access to the repeater) password prompt, etc. * Please bear in mind that I'm a contractor working with BTECH, so noothing II say should be construed as the official position of BTECH. vers-old.pdf

You can only use one channel at a time.

CTCSS is older and more prone to spurious noise opening the squelch - weather or ambient. Additionally, there are relatively few usable tones. DCS is newer was was designed to address those shortcomings. Both came out of Motorola, who initially was one of the only manufacturers of radios with enough frequency stability to use DCS (though others caught up quickly). Even today, some Baofeng as they age have trouble with a DCS system. Also, many older radios can't use DCS at all, and a few transitional models needed modules to enable it (usually you'd swap our the CTCSS module to a dual mode module). So, yes, DCS is better, but CTCSS more compatible.

GMRS etiquette - almost as prevalent as FCC enforcement!

My personal guess would be DTCS since it's a series of digital numbers sent over the air. The attached paper describes in some detail how the system works. With tones it all depends on the quality of the TX and RX radios. A few have commented that radios with low levels of deviation have failed to access some repeaters. Also there are cases where ding-dongs using something like DMR, against the rules on GMRS, have caused false triggering of the CTCSS squelch function to turn off the audio mute. DPL _ DCS Squelch System.pdf

And that is why I avoid any and all cheap cables with clone/pirated Prolific chips in them. It's bad enough that Prolific drivers have not been updated in years. I've had issues with some cloned Prolific chips on Windows and MacOS. I have a couple that I never could get to work on either operating system. Even Linux doesn't like those cables.

You are not listening,, 'It's the Winds'

All cables with a chip require a driver. Some versions of Windows have the drivers pre-installed, but not all. Because there were a lot of counterfeit FTDI cables, the pre-installed drivers in Windows 11 check for counterfeits which sometimes can cause problems.

One advantage of amateur radio is that there are repeater counsels to help prevent that kind of mess. Though that is harder to do with GMRS repeaters since there are only 8 repeater channels available.

I *think* there is an FCC rule buried somewhere about not using repeaters without permission? But I will yield to anyone that knows/cares more about it than I do.

They can complain to the FCC who, based on their record of enforcement over the last 15 years, statistically speaking, will do nothing.

Correction: Based on the FCCs "enforcement" record over the last 15 years for H.A.M.s radios, GMRS, and CB radio, they apparently do NOT like to enforce their rules.

Yes, anyone licensed can transmit on any GMRS channel. BUT, you can not use MY radio without MY permission. That repeater is MY radio!

CORRECTION: Not "illegal", but a violation of FCC rules..

Makes sense. Again not a theory I'd like to test. But the temptation for the "better newer" is tough to overcome. Look at the gadgets for cars and firearms the don't really do much but look cool.

You can do a not for profit and not be a registered 50x. The 'trick' is that anything you take in you keep record of. You put those funds in a specific account that's only for repeater maintenance and you don't pull / spend that money for anything outside of that. If you do that, and it gets questioned. You have records of the incoming and outgoing money and it's a mute point. If you are just dropping the money in your personal account or similar and spending money out of that account then you REALLY need to be careful about tracking what's coming in and what's going out. And if you aren't doing any of that, then if it's looked at, they will consider it for profit. But the first thing that would have to happen is someone get mad and file a complaint on you / the repeater owner. Now this does happen when someone gets told to get off a private / pay to play repeater. The user gets his feelings hurt and calls the FCC to inform on the repeater owner. Now, is that gonna bring the FCC to their door. Who knows. At this point, the FCC has said that they will ONLY respond to INTERFERENCE related complaints. Of course, this ain't that. So again, who knows. But is it legal to 'charge' for access to a repeater? And the answer is, it depends on what you are charging for. IF it's 'CLUB DUES' then yes 100%. If it's actual access and there is no club, then all the stuff above applies, records and such. And to have a 50x you about need a club or organization to have that tax status. Personally I just don't bother with fee's or due's because it's a pain in the ass. Trying to NOT piss off people while running a wide area coverage repeater is not worth my time. If someone hands me some money to support the repeater, I put it towards the electric bill, or tools, or other stuff for the repeater. And honestly, I have has the repeater on since 2021 or so, and the grant total of donated money has been 90 bucks. So again, not worth the hassle.

I dont know man, I am not such a petty control freak that i would care about something like that.. jeezus.. go outside and touch some grass.

This is most likely a combination of poor soldering techniques and mostly lead free solder. Simple fix is to fire up the old rework station and go over the problem area. It sucks and it's time consuming, but it's a fact of life purchasing this crap designed for a throwaway society. I just love Kester lead. And don't get me started on MFJ/Ameritron garbage. I never seen an American worker solder so horrifically poor.

None are 100% fail-safe.. If you want to 100% fail-safely hide your information from any person, agency or situation, then the only way to accomplish that is to go off-grid, not get a license of any kind, and do a whole lot more stuff. If all you want to do is prevent the average lazy radio-stalker from easily and quickly finding your home address when all they know about you is your callsign, then a PO Box or HamRegistry is plenty good enough.