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He’s full of it. The license is in only one person’s name but all immediate family members are allowed to use that call sign.

The cigarette lighter is the worst thing to use, especially for a 50 watt radio. The lighter port is usually only rated for 10 amp and a 50 watt radio pulls double that on transmit. Plus there is a greater chance of getting RFI into your vehicle wiring harness that way. Your best bet is to run the radio positive lead to the battery and the radio negative to a chassis ground. This is especially true if it is a newer vehicle equipped with the battery management system.

Your premium membership hasn’t registered for your forum membership yet. I reported it to Rich. He’ll fix it.

Hello, I set up a quick and dirty base station antenna in my attic. It's a Midland MXTA26 antenna fed by a MXTA24 NMO cable. I put a 14" aluminum pizza pan under it as a ground plane. I have about $55 into this setup. The radio is a Wouxun KGSX20G+ fed by a Pyramid 12Amp power supply. So far I think it's working well. I guess I need some adapters to test this setup with my Surecom meter but no smoke yet. Any tips or critiques appreciated. I wanted to test the attic concept before committing to more expensive hardware.

I personally would not try running anything more than a 25 watt radio from the cigarette lighter/accessory port. I would just run the positive wire to the battery and the ground wire to a good chassis ground. Anytime you power a transceiver through the vehicle wire harness you take a chance of getting RFI issues. Now if you are worried about a power drain, you can use a 12v relay that won't power the radio until the vehicle is started. Here is a diagram showing how to wire a relay. So you would run a wire from a power source that is only on when the vehicle is running to 86, that will only close the relay switch when the vehicle is started. And you can use a fuse tap for this. You still want to run the radio positive to the battery positive and the radio ground wire to a chassis ground. For the relay, to work, run the radio positive wire to the relay 87 pin and then another wire from the relay pin 30 to the battery.

He lied to you.. Right to your face..

Make sure your compander is turned off. It’s menu 36.

@WSFE961 I fixed your forum account so it shows the premium user group. This sometimes happens if you create your forum account after you sign up for the membership, sometimes the group doesn't get applied properly (a bug in the forum software we use).

No updates that I know of. Unfortunately there is no mic gain adjustments on the KG-1000G and the mic is definitely hot. The best thing is to make sure to hold it at a slight angle when transmitting.

Is the other person using vox? Vox acts upon hearing a sound and as with everything the time it takes to key up can result in the very first sound being lost. If it’s truly a measurable delay from the time a sound is transmitted until the time it’s received, any humanly discernible delay would not be in RF reception, but delay could easily occur if any digital processing occurs, either at the transmitter or the receiver, or both. The other thing is that it’s always best to wait half a second after push PTT before speaking.

So you'd need two different radios, or one radio with two different antennas to make use of these and the existing GMRS channels? Does not seem very user-friendly... If they are unused, throw 'em to the H.A.M.s.. they'll use it.. they'll use anything.

This is a topic you could search for hours on and not come up with a clearly definitive answer. In fact, there's almost no argument, even. The advantages and disadvantages of each are so minor people don't really seem to be all that passionate about it. CTCSS will behave with older equipment that doesn't support DCS. But who are we protecting? There aren't a lot of people operating 20 year old blister pack GMRS radios lacking DCS support on repeaters. Both are subaudable tones or sequences that have to be filtered out by the radio's high pass filter. Both have different reasons for behaving a little oddly at fringe-reception areas. DCS *may* take a little longer for the sequence to be transmitted completely enough for a radio to open squelch, but we're talking tenths of a second at most. CTCSS may be a little more crowded (you may have a slightly harder time finding a channel and tone pair that isn't in use). But the fact that we have both systems really is a product of the evolution of marketing bullet points from vendors. One or more vendors claimed they had a new and improved system, and they pushed it to the point that it gained adoption. But the fact that DCS and CTCSS have continued to co-exist for decades, filling the exact same purpose, without a clear winner pushing the other out of the way kind of indicates there's not a clear winner.

Well, After studying my butt off for several weeks, I took the test Saturday for General class and passed (35 out of 35). I do have to say thanks to the guy who gave me the link to hamexam.org where you can do flash cards of the questions, it really helped!!! Now on to new bands... maybe I will try out 17 meters or 20 meters in the coming weeks.

If you have one radio for 70cm, 2m, 6m, and 10m, another one for GMRS and MURS, two mikes hanging off the same mount, and dual antennas whipping in the wind (nod to Billy Ray Cyrus), are you overdoing it? I absolutely could not find a single antenna that covered all those bands. 2m/70cm antennas will often work great on GMRS/MURS, but when you add 6m or 10m, GMRS SWR goes stratospheric. It's just too much to ask one antenna to do. The driver side has a TYT TH-9800 under the seat mated to a Comet tri-band or Diamond quad-band as the fancy strikes me. Under the passenger seat is an Anysecu WP-9900 feeding a Nagoya 200C dual-band antenna tuned for GMRS and MURS (not useful on any ham bands). The TYT speaker is on a Lido headrest mount. I have an external speaker for the WP-9900, but I haven't figured out where I want it yet. The speaker for the 9900 has a volume control because it's a PITA to adjust volume on that unit. The NMO connectors on Breedlove mounts are each supplied with 10' of RG8x coax shielded with wire loom and the connections are sealed with waterproof heat-shrink tubing. The coax is fed up through the factory holes in the floor behind the seats. The radios are on quick-connectors, and I can swap one out for something else in a couple of minutes. Maybe overkill, but I figure at my age, I don't have many more years crawling under trucks and I want to install it once and call it complete.

2.15 not 2.5

While a relay is not needed, some like to have one so that any accessory wired directly from the battery will not receive power until the vehicle is turned on. This is quite common when adding accessory lights to vehicles. And it keeps from killing the battery if you forget to turn the accessory off.

It is the recommended method for any mobile two-way radio. Not enough to matter. Why?

If your antenna is 100 feet in the air an additional 1.5 db might be worth it. As you increase db the antenna's radiating pattern on an omni-directional antenna gets flatter. It sends more of it signal to its horizon. I would recommend plugging the info into a one of the free typographical antenna coverage calculators to quickly ascertain if it is worth it. They changed this tool it seams. It use to allow you to map it out and set each site differently with gain and antenna values. This is what I use to recommend. https://www.scadacore.com/tools/rf-path/rf-line-of-sight/ Have you thought about a yagi on with a TV rotator? Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk

Last time I checked the US military is still using 30 MHz to 70 MHz. I know we used that section all of the time when I was in. Low band was 30-50 MHz and high was 51-70 MHz. And the 6m band is not called the magic band for nothing. 6m is either open or it’s not. And it doesn’t matter if you are using FM AM or SSB. 6m FM won’t get much farther than 2m will

I guess when I get a boring moment, I'll snap some photos of my racecar communications and post them. I've done several racecar comm installations in the past and yes on a occasion or two, installations with mobile radio setups because of the unique application requirements.

If you are tracking your race cars on oval or typical road courses, a mobile radio is not the hot set up. You would be better off with a portable radio and an external antenna. If you were racing off-road or La Mans whereas there are miles between the driver and the crew/pit then a mobile radio would be the set up and the pit with a raised base station antenna and maybe a portable repeater at a higher elevation point. In the video, the radio was not installed in a good location. Reaching over to your side or behind you during a session on the track is not the ideal thing to do under those conditions. That would be a total distraction and may cause you to make a furtive movement in your driving. That installation was a very poor choice. The antenna mount should have been a NMO mount with either a Phantom, quarterwave, or a low profile blade antenna. The XPR mobile radio was also way overkill for several reasons. You don't need a 1,000 channels, maybe a radio with a channel capacity of not more than the total number of itinerant channels that would be licensed for would have been the smart choice. Maybe something like a Motorola CM200D or 300D or even a Kenwood would of been a better choice and a lot less money. He probably paid at least $1200 or $1300 for a radio that he didn't need. In my opinion, the video is a good example of how not to install radio communications in a racecar.

Congratulations!! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Steve is absolutely correct about the tests. If I can pass the Tech with a 35/35 and the General with a 35/35 then anybody can do it. They have some great tools for people to use to study for the exams (hamexam.org) is what I used (which someone here suggested.... thank you!). Ham is a great hobby and I am glad I did it.

Program the Dayton tones into channel 23 and the Tipp DTCS code into channel 26 and see if it works.

Socalgmrs lives in a great area for UHF. He really needs to take a trip out to the NE and experience hilly and mountainous regions where sometimes 50 watts won't get you 2 miles.

Congrats I take the General on 5/10/25.

That kinda looks like my attic for one of my three antennae. By any chance do you have a Del Webb constructed home? I am using a Laird non-ground plane mobile antenna.

Nice. If it works there’s really no reason to do anything else.

We have an active, polite, and helpful, GMRS community and there are a couple of nets each week on the main repeater. We sort of, kind of, tend to encourage folks to use phonetics when first transmitting their callsign but don't chastise anyone if they don't. We may ask them to use phonetics if we can't understand them because they are talking too fast (or our ears are too slow) or the transmission isn't clear. Other than that there aren't many "rules" or etiquette for general conversation. We have some folks that talk conversationally, others that use more military-type jargon, and the occasional user that sound like they're Smokey and the Bandit. We don't get too bent out of shape and just roll with it. Usually it is an acceptable combination of all three. The advice given in previous posts is good. Don't be a jerk, keep your language clean, and be polite. If you have a repeater you can get on, listen in to see how the users converse. After a while you will start recognizing call signs and voices and how the flow of the repeater works. Most of our repeater traffic goes something like this. -Listen for traffic, if none heard- "WSFN703 Monitoring (or standing by or listening)" - if you're not looking for anyone in particular but open for conversation. You may strike up a conversation with someone. If someone is driving they may say "Mobile" instead of "Monitoring". This can let folks know that you may lose TX/RX due to terrain, buildings, or distance. It also tends to imply that you may not be active on the radio for very long, i.e. you reach your destination. "WXXX123, WSFN703, Fred are you out there?" - if you're looking for someone specific. If they answer, you go on with your conversation. If you know they are listening, just call them by name. "WSFN703, Radio Check" - if you want to see if your radio/antenna is working and how well. Someone will chime in with their evaluation of your signal. If there is traffic and you want to say something, be it a comment on the topic being discussed or a question for one of the participants, maybe an emergency call, or to contact someone else (and then move to another freq. or repeater); -Listen for a break in the conversation- "WSFN703 Break (or Comment/Question)" - Wait a second or two for the other stations to acknowledge your break, then proceed with your comment. "WSFN703 Emergency, Emergency, Emergency" - State your emergency and vital information. 9-1-1 should be used first but there may be cases where cell phone coverage is not available and GMRS is all you have. After your conversation, however brief or extended, is ended. "WSFN703 Clear" - usually means you are signing off but may mean you are done with the repeater and may still be listening but not actively looking for a conversation. The context of the conversation can provide the meaning. "Well, I've made it to work. Good talking to you. WSFN703 is clear." "WSFN703 Monitoring" - I'm done talking but still listening if someone else wants me for something. This is not any kind of official script we follow. It's just how most of us talk when we're on the repeater. It helps keep things manageable. If we are on a net, we let the net controller set the rules. Simplex may be similar but generally it's just you and a friend or two on a channel so it's whatever etiquette you wish to follow. Profanity and vulgarities are still generally frowned upon since children may be listening but I don't know anyone that polices it.

I still carry around some souvenirs from my time in Iraq, so maybe the shrapnel is helping to act as a counterpoise.

Yep...not enough counterpoise.

If that's the case then it's amazing that I can talk to anyone while using a HT. I'm a 5'9" and 145 pound skinny guy.

Ham is a hobby of hobbies. You figure out what you want to do or what might interest you and you do it. I think a lot of people judge the exams to be harder than they actually are, because they start reviewing the question pool and they don't know most of the material. But, you can learn it. There's also a lot of talk about "Amateur Extra is a lot easier if you have a background in Electrical Engineering", which might be true, but EEs weren't born knowing that stuff either. They had to learn it to get their degree and work in their field. If they can learn it, you can at least learn the minimum you need to pass the exams. I feel like you should aim as high as possible, then you can grow into your license privileges, rather than hitting a wall when you want to try something new and having go back and study for another exam. And, when you reach AE, you can just enjoy no longer being in perpetual "studying for finals mode." Just my take...

Does anyone think this is remotely a thing that is on the radar of law enforcement? “What ya got Bob? DUI? B and E? Domestic…?” “Na man this guy doesn’t have a valid GMRS license!” “What kind of animal is he?!!”

I'm in your camp. I have very little desire to collect names from around the world like Pokemon, just isn't my thing. That and the cost of entry into HF is more than I'm willing to spend. I got my General ticket for the challenge more than the added privileges. 2m\70cm\1.25m are very active in my area and I do get a small thrill when I can key up a repeater 50-60 miles away with an HT running through an amp in the car. I've got 3 mobiles, 9 HTs, and still have less invested than a used HF rig would set me back. If I really want to reach out around the world, I can do that on TG 91. Yes, I know that many consider that cheating, then again, I really don't care :). They can enjoy the hobby their way, I'll do mine.

So far mine has been working great! Very happy with it. Been testing it with some of the other ranchers so far in heavy woods we have gotten 14 miles south and 12 miles north of me so far.

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/

AS others have stated, its about location, location, and location. Scadacore has tools that will allow you to see if there are obstacles, like hills, between your work and house. You can also use it to see which repeaters can be used (assuming you know where the repeater is physically located) between your house ad the repeater and your work and the same repeater. Of course, just listening for the same repeater at both locations also works. You'll need to test if you can reach the repeater using your handheld at your office and home as it may require either better antennas or more power at both locations. The key piece in any situation is the antenna used. My recommendation is for a small (20-25W mobile at the house with an external antenna and not a handheld. Two handhelds are great for unit to unit conversations when you are outside, but can be iffy in connecting to repeaters because of the lower power/

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.

You're not kidding. Many years ago I was dealing with government surplus and you'd be amazed at what was let out in the wild that I should have never seen. Not only harddrives, but other tech that retained sensitive information. Believe it or not, the Pentagon was the worst offender. This was after 9/11. Of course, I was required to destroy the items. All of this is attributed to human stupidity and laziness. As for digital radio, I absolutely dislike any form of it.

BORTHER THANK FOR USING BIG LETRS SO THEY READ EASY. MY EYES AINT SO GOOD AND I CANT GET TO A EYE DOC SINCE BARB LEFT AND TOOK THE KEYS GOBBLESS

Well heck,, let me try. Good afternoon passenger, welcome aboard flight GMRS 10-100 to Egypt. We are currently pushing back from gate 462/625 and should begin our taxi towards runway 467.625 momentarily. Please ensure that your seatbelts are fastened, your seat backs and tray tables are in their upright and locked positions, and your carry-on luggage is stowed securely under the seat in front of you or in the overhead bins. Please say Hi to our Guest WSHH504 in route to 10-98 in Bum F*ck our final destination. .

I had same problem. the side tone on the radio is set to dtmf. try turning it off. and ring time is set to 3s try turning this off also.

In the past few weeks, members and staff alike have researched the controversy regarding type acceptance or certification of radio equipment. We have found absolutely NO evidence that the agency is issuing citations to licensed GMRS operators for using Part 90 equipment in Part 95 service. We have anectdotal evidence that agency inspectors randomly allow Part 90 equipment in Part 95 service as long as all Part 95 technical standards are met. Therefore, it is the decision of the staff at MyGMRS Forum to once again allow posting of "Equipment Reviews" regarding ALL types of equipment whether Part 90, Part 95 or Part 97. We feel that it is the responsibility of each member to screen the information that is provided by others and to make an educated decision on whether or not to use any equipment of any kind in your own personal setting. Reviews of Part 97 equipment are acceptable due to the number of Amateur Operators here, however, we do not wish to see any reference to Amateur Radio Part 97 equipment being 'suggested' that it works on GMRS frequencies. Thank you all for your patience in this matter and thank you for your understanding. The forum is once again open for "Equipment Reviews" and similar postings under these guidelines listed above. The MyGMRS Staff

for right now i am using the cig lighter plug for now was doing some testing