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Having someone else’s file unless they are programming the same repeaters will give you an idea of what things look like but won’t be exactly the same as what you need. It would certainly be more helpful if you gave some more info to the problem and shared a screen shot of your chirp file to help diagnose what’s happening. It could be quite a number of things.

Here is a working example for my RA87. I hope this helps you somehow. Best Regards! SILVERADO MOBILE 04182025 Ham .img

"SEO ACCY" refers to a specific fuse, likely within the vehicle's fuse box, that provides power to "Special Equipment Option" accessories. This often includes items like mobile radios for police vehicles or other aftermarket equipment. I have this slot. This slot gets no power when the key isn't in the run position. Trust me I don't doubt your method and I know its sound and proven. I'm learning so please be patient with me. The main issue would be testing to make sure that the circuit is not overloaded correct? Update: Thanks for the "why" question. It led me to do some more research. While theoretically the fuse tap would work it's likely for the radio to overload the circuit. Lesson learned and that came simply from you asking why. I appreciate your response. Feel free to add any nuggets that you think that might help further.

Which is not only very simple, but the antenna is very forgiving, so it has a wide margin of error.

I leave mine on all day and only have a 2 mile trip to and from work. The draw for receiving is pretty small and more so if you have your lighting on the radio extinguish after 30 seconds after activity. When it's the dead of winter and temps are way below freezing I'm more mindful of the battery. But in the warm periods I don't think twice about it.

I don't know if this helps anyone, but I decided that I can't be bothered to pay RT systems when the provided software works just fine. That said, entering data is a pain so I wrote two python scripts. Now, what I did is not very complicated. The first script enters the two frequencies, the name and sets the tx power to high. All of this data comes from a simple csv file You then save the .dat file The second script then loads the .dat file, searches for the entries and then amends it for the CTS and DCS codes. The .dat file uses a four digit hex value to determine the displayed value. If anyone wants the scripts, DCS/CTS lookup and my excel sheet that does the lookups. Let me know. it's rough and ready and needs a little prep to share. But as it is, it allows me to edit the spreadsheet, copy some formulas and then export the data for use. While this took me about as long to 'develop' as entering the values. And it took me longest to build the DCS/CTS to four digit lookup table. Of course this requires a 'little' knowledge of python (enough to have python installed and be able to run it) and excel.

Maybe at this point you may need an intervention, maybe.

Boy is the new owner gonna be PO'd when the FCC swat team raids his house at O Dark Thirty.

No, that wont solve anything. Follow these steps, EXACTLY: Confirm that the repeater is up/active/turned on Confirm that you have the correct channel & TX/Transmit tone Ignore the RX(Transmit) tone and REMOVE it from both radios Confirm that you are correctly saving/writing your changes to the radio by looking/confirming the changes ON the the radio itself Get close enough to the repeater that you can SEE it Get your two test radios at least 50 feet apart and test If after all that, its still not working, then using GMRS radios/repeaters may not be for you.

While many antennas are better the little 72 it is light years better than a salt shaker and for the money and simplicity it can’t be beat. One of my trucks still has one and it does 100miles simplex from an 20w mobile unit each and every day 7 days a week 10hrs a day with zero issues. It’s good in that for around $150 total you can get a really nice 20w water proof radio and antenna with coax that will work hard every day and tx over 100miles. Many people spend closer to $1000 and dont get any better, clearer, further signal.

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.

for an all around basic and fair cost base antenna, It's gong to be hard to beat a Tram 1486. The trick is to tune them correctly.

The main reason I operate tones on the RX is noise. There is a lot of DMR and other digital noise in my area that is beyond annoying. It interferes with medium to strong signals by either degrading the voice or overriding it. Tones don't help when the interference is active while someone is talking. But I would be insane by now if I had to listen to all that crap.

Staycation with Horace and Daniel?

Just a thought, but those who have intentionally given false addresses on the license application are guilty of a federal crime. Now the chances of being found and convicted are very slim but I imagine those disingenuous individuals would scream the loudest if caught. Plus it exhibits just plain low moral character.

I don’t have an image file to share with you but I and others here are willing to look at your file to see if we can spot something wrong with it, but receiving more details from you would help us help you. There are a lot of smart folks here who have experience with common radio problems. Asking for an image file reduces the chances that someone will be able to help to the set of people who have RA-87 radios, whereas sharing your file opens it up to the set of people who can read.

are you willing to show your imagine file so people can help you with your specific problem.

It’s not a matter of trust. You haven’t explained what functionality isn’t working. An overly generalized statement of “it’s not working” doesn’t really describe the problem. Is your radio actually transmitting? If you get rid of all receive tones, do you hear other people? Seeing other people’s configuration files might not do much for you because they are operating in different locations with different repeaters, but you could provide details about the repeater you’re attempting to activate and post your file.

Just keeping it family friendly just like if I was talking on the radio.

Couple things to point out. dBi and dBd are two different values. dBi is going to be 2.5dB less than dBd. Because the dBd "d" stands for dipole. Which has 2.5dB of gain above a isotropic radiator. Which is the 'i' in dBi. I don't own the Comet that others have talked about. The circles I run in and company I keep gets me DB-408's and DB-420's for my stuff. Those of course are the 2K dollar antenna's you mentioned. But a guy in Columbus put one up on his repeater and it was a night and day difference between the 6dBi antenna he got with the repeater and that one. It probably added 5 to 10 miles of range or better to his repeater, all other things being the same. No change in mount height. Now, be aware that you can have too much gain if you have a lot of height. The realized gain in an antenna is accomplished in moving the radiation pattern. Think about it like a 100 watt lightbulb. If the light is going all directions, at all angles, no specific direction or angle gets any more light then another. To create gain, an antenna take the unused light radiating up and down and points in to the horizon. The more this is done, the higher the gain. When you get the gain high enough, there isn't much radiation down. So with a bunch of height, you overshoot the signal where you want it to go. Mind you it requires a LOT of height. But if you are on a mountain, and get a super high gain antenna, the valley below will NOT see much if any signal. Just be aware of that.

You left the "sh" off.

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.

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.

Nope totally wrong. Tell him to kick rocks. If you had read the fcc rules that you already signed that you read you would know this. His pants are probably still on fire.

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

Third! He was completely wrong. No such notification is needed or even possible.

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.

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.

If you had read the fcc gmrs rules that you swore you understood before you paid your fees you would not have to ask this question. I guess the baby sitter that posted the link to the rules was right. Well not really since you still didn’t bother reading them. NO! THE FCC DORSNT CARE IF YOU PUT UP A REPEATER. So you listen on all simplex repeater out outs 15-22. You check sites like this. Then you select an unused pair and turn on the repeater. The real question is do you need a repeater? Why do you want it? Do you and your friends do stuff in the area that simplex doesn’t work? Farm, off road area, hiking park race track ect….. can you get the antenna up high enough to matter? Most, like 99% of people don’t need a repeater. What’s the benifit? Or are you just trying to chat with strangers men on the air waves.

I easily resolve that issue by saying this establishment only accepts checks. Seems GMRS has more of that issue than the ham bands.

That problem is easily remedied by talking politics on the air. You're guaranteed to wake up at least 50% of the lurkers.

Looks good. Personally I would have spent less on a better radio and more on an antenna but if it works then it works. antenna and coax is light years more important then the radio.

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

Before you get too excited about the long range possibilities of a low band repeater, talk to anyone who has actually built one, or tried to use one. Beyond the problems of skip, near-far, and antennas that can double as fishing poles, you also find out that you need to have one antenna tuned for the transmit frequency, and another tuned for receive. Typical bandpass cavities are 5 ft. tall, you will need enough space for at least 6, and you better keep them in a climate controlled environment, unless you want to keep a separate set tuned for each season. You also need to know that a typical low-band mobile antenna is only good for about a 500 KHz spread while your proposed pair is 3 MHz apart. Noise is a huge problem, terrible at times. It's only gotten worse in the last 25 years. There's a reason why Commercial (paying customer) Low-band has become a wasteland. Actually, there's many reasons beyond the ones I've mentioned. Most manufacturers have abandoned the band.

Wong.. again... Stalkers, haters, and other radiotards often look up FCC call signs to get home addresses.

Some of us pack heat and lie about vacations we never take.

Then Why Post A Deffiniton Of "Code Talker." Makes No Sense & Totally Irrelevant. FCC Definitions Are Quite Clear To Me.......

Well, unless your using this product, your antenna won't be top notch

GMRS is not really intended to find anonymous men to chat with for "action". For that kind of "action" you might want to look into H.A.M. radio or the Grindr app for your phone. GMRS is primarily intended for things like communicating with your group while off-roading, hiking, caravanning, etc. so in many/most places it is very quiet.

I was chatting with someone on one of the local repeaters, he said that I need to update the FCC with all persons using my license but I can't figure out that on the website. With that said, does anyone know how to do this? My apologies if I was misinformed and this is all incorrect.