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I worked at Radio Shack when I was in high school back in the TRS-80 Model 1/3 and CoCo days. I wrote a spreadsheet with VisiCalc (long before Excel or even Lotus) to track golf handicaps for a local golf course and we must have sold at least 50 Model III's to almost every golf course in So Cal just for that spreadsheet. About the coolest thing I can remember was the radio tech that tuned my 148GTL-DX when they first came out (early-mid 80's). He had a Commodore Vic 20 with a Kantronics interface connected to a HF rig decoding RTTY and CW on the fly. I just thought that was so cool - to hear/see radio Cuba (and it's propaganda) RTTY news on a CRT/TV without a teletype in real time made a impression in my early years that last until today.

Someone mentioned intentionally using a former address.

Man... I remember when I first bought the TRASH80. So many people talk crap about it, but man did I have fun with that thing. I learned how to write shells and programs using that thing. Backup and restore to a cassette tape was too funny, too. Radio Shack was a great store for two-way radios all the way up to when computers, cell phones and satellite TV became mainstream. I literally bought components to do repairs if I had a customer waiting on a job and I ran out of resistors, capacitors and standard 3-leg transistors... occasionally ordering bulk ICs, and PAs for radios I was commonly repairing or upgrading. The good old days of peaking, opening up modulation, adding channels. Good times.

Welcome to the forums. Only people in the Denver area are likely to be able to talk to you because of the distance limitations of GMRS. Your best bet would be to look at the map here to see what repeaters exist in your area and look at the clubs to see which ones are in your area.

Welcome to the exciting and dynamic world of GMRS! ... One word of warning: Be wary of the trolls here on the forum that tell you that you're doing everything wrong and "if your radio cant transmit 200 miles you should throw it into the trash can" ... He's just a rheet-hard, and other than him everyone here is pretty cool.

You’re just a young guy! Before Tandy Radio Shack there was Allied Radio Shack and before Allied Radio Shack there was Allied Radio and Radio Shack, two separate companies. Allied Radio was a well respected competitor of Lafayette. Not everything sold by Radio Shack has been poor quality. They even sold some reasonable quality coax but they also sold some crappy coax as well. Personally I prefer to stay away from inexpensive coax. I would rather use quad shielded RG6 for UHF, even at 75 ohms, than some of the lossy 50 ohm cable.

well there sonny,,, There was a time when Radio Shack was the deal... Unless your an old timer, you have no clue...

I see I was wrong about this. Thank you both for the corrections!

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

The FCC doesn’t collect a physical station address for either amateur or GMRS. They’ve stated that a PO Box is fine.

I just recently purchase the KG-1000G+ and today we had our repeater net. After it was over I tasked the net master with some questions about performance of the radio. I did a 5, 20, 50 watt check into the repeater 21 miles out. He said R9 on all three. I assume that because I swapped from a 7.2dBi to a 9.8dBi antenna and swapped out some M&P hyperflex13 to 1/2" Heliax hardline. I always had a hard time getting into the repeater using 5 watts on the old setup. And then I asked about the microphone. I did a check basically kissing the mic, 6-8" away and 12-14" away. He said when I was at a foot he noticed the modulation tapering off. That 6-8" seemed best. With the KG XS20G+ I have to kiss the mic to get a good modulation out of it. My TD H3 has a far better modulation profile than the 20G. It also has an adjustable mic gain.

Many HF antennas were made with twin lead wire from Radio Shack. And I still have a great set of Radio Shack Realistic speakers that still sound great after 40+ years. I have to agree with @SteveShannon, I would rather use a good quality 75 ohm coax over some cheap craptastic 50 ohm coax. I don't even like using the cheap Amazon or eBay coax for short jumpers even though loss is not a factor with such short lengths. The biggest issue I have is the lack of shielding in the cheap stuff.

Back in the Radio Shack Days, i don't think there was to many people concerned with Coax quality.. Most of us use it for 10-11 meter stuff and it worked great.. RG58 was the norm for auto installs. The good ole' days

Thanks for the compliment! And all this time I thought I was old and decrapitated. I agree, I think Tandy ruined Radio Shack. It was a downward spiral for decades. I always liked the catalogs back then. There's a site that has PDFs of every year they printed. From what I remember during my CB days back in the 70s, Radio Shack's RG8 was only offered with foam core and the braided shield was horrible. For CB we didn't care. I don't think any of us today would buy their cable since we have so many great options.

Dancing Demon changed the computer world forever...

Should have said thanks Steve for posting info from Gil.

One of the main differences between cheap coax and more expensive quality coax is the amount of shield braid used and also the materialist is made from. You will only see about 50-60 percent of the dielectric being covered by the shield braid on cheap coax where you will see 70 to 100 percent coverage in the more expensive coax. The amount of shield braid makes a difference in how it protects against RFI and will also act as a better counterpoise when the coax is used as such. It is common to use the coax as a counterpoise when using end fed half wave antennas for HF versus running a separate counterpoise wire.

Not all RG8 is stiff.. Radio Shack used to sell a flex RG8.. I've used it many times and yes it is flexible. It was a pain to make connectors though, the dielectric would stick to the center conductor which had to be scraped with a plastic wedge and the shielding would mold into the outer sheath making that a pain to remove. But over all after spending an hour putting connectors on, it was decent cable

It did occur to me after reading some comments that because this is a NGP antenna in a NGP installation, perhaps the real difference is that the cable I changed to acts as a better counterpoise than the one I replaced. That could simply be a fluke, because I doubt either US or Chinese manufacturers give any significant thought to its characteristics as a counterpoise. Maybe they do, but I'd be a little surprised.

Although LMR400 cable is not constructed the same as RG8 coax cable, but they do share the same physical dimensions and RG8 coax was predominantly used in mobiles several decades ago especially when a ball and spring mount was used. The minimum bend radius spec for heliax in addition to the difficulty of routing heliax throughout a vehicle would make it impractical.

I don’t recall ever saying that you are using the wrong coax. I pointed out that RG8x has a foam dielectric and RG58 has a solid dielectric and that’s why RG58 is frequently used for mobile installations. RG400 also has a solid dielectric and a tiny outside diameter. It’s expensive though. A person could build a Frankenstein cable using RG400 where needed and something with less attenuation elsewhere to make up the necessary length, but the splice points reduce reliability and potentially add losses. Also, nothing I’ve said has been demeaning or critical of you or in any way personal. I’ve tried to stick to factual information, demonstrating how I did any calculations.

Im just trying to help and little, but i think there is benefit to watching this video. I put it together for some new Hams in my club, but the Amateur frequencies in UHF are close enough to GMRS, that the demo is still very valid.

No, you illiterate. I specifically stated that it's an NGP antenna. But even an NGP antenna can often benefit from a good ground plane.

Antennas typically consist of reactive elements and radiating elements. The reactive elements are used to match the impedance of the radio and feedline which is usually 50 ohms. The radiating element is one or more metal wires or rods that convert the signal into RF. It’s usually the most visible part of the antenna.

How do we "loose" an attitude? And which one is it? Should we stop discussing this stuff or should we share our knowledge and experience? I'm confused.

I'm your Huckleberry.

So what is the right cable? "You're doing it wrong" isn't helpful information. It might make you feel superior, but it sure as hell isn't going to save me any heartache or money.

Thanks for your input and the photos you shared, I'm going for the LMR400 equivalent. I only need 40 ft so it should work out for me,it just needs to make one 60º bend through a port in my exterior wall it should be flexible enough for that.

Welcome, Zack!

I see you met our resident troll. Yeah he’s kind of a piece of work, not real good at social cues. Welcome to the forum anyway and congratulations on having an awesome sister! Cheers p.s. there is an ignore setting

WE THINK YOU HAVE A LOT OF LEARNING TO DO ... So get on it SOCAL !!

I should also add (Gotta give back to the community): It looks like if the firmware is R9 (Enables Split Tones and I think wide-band). So now in the menu instead of "Pt" for Privacy Tone, they have "tC" for Transmit Tone, and "rT" for Receive Tone!

I am sorry you are having reading difficulties. But thank you for letting us know!

some 30 odd years ago i mounted a NMO UHF antenna in the center of a MasterCool Swamp Cooler sitting on top of a 3 story building... Worked good and the antenna is still mounted where i left it when i left that job.

We don't have roof rights to anything else. We had to pay a one-time charge for the run of the cables across the roof and the roof penetration, plus annual inspection and any necessary maintenance. It is also the highest elevation on the roof (unless we were to construct a tower, which a) isn't needed and b) would be prohibitively expensive). If this was for a GMRS project, then getting additional elevation would have been worthwhile. But for GPS we have a good view of the sky and the cellular extender antenna has line of sight to antennas of several carriers. The L-channel was already there and provided a convenient mounting point for the antenna brackets. The cellular antenna is actually between the two units, while the GPS antenna is attached to the piping side of the mini-split but it comes with an ultra-flex N pigtail which we then connect to the LMR600 and put thick heat shrink with adhesive on the inside over the connection (as we did with the connection on the bottom of the cellular antenna). The unit to the right is top-exhaust and apparently defunct, and our mini-split has the antennas mounted on the inlet side, not the exhaust side, of the coils so they're not getting baked.

It's a trade-off between cost, ease of installation, performance during operation, and a bit of everyone's different opinions thrown in. At work, I ran two 200-foot runs of Times Microwave LMR600 between the roof and our basement office. One was for a cellular repeater antenna (this pre-dated the pre-registration requirement, by the way) and the other was for a GPS antenna. I had to put a 10dB attenuator between the indoor lightning arrestor and the Wilson cellular amplifier or I'd overload its front end. The General Dynamics box the GPS antenna went into was perfectly happy with the GPS signal level. All the connectors were ordered from Pasternack, as were the LMR600 stripper and crimper. I have a leftover piece of LMR600 with an N connector on the end that I use as a walking stick. OTOH, my entire (large) collection of home-use connector adapters cost less than two of the Pasternack LMR600 connectors. It's a trade-off between price, performance, and personal opinion. My repeater is currently using some no-name super-flex 400 (they can't call it LMR because that's a trademark of Times Microwave) to its temporary antenna. If the Commscope / Andrew fiasco ever starts producing antennas again, my DB420-B will be connected to the entry point lightning arrestor using 7/8" heliax with N connectors. My grounding consists of eight 8' long copper-clad steel grounding rods, 16' apart, with one end tied to the electrical service ground. The whole run from service ground to the antenna lightning arrestor is one continuous piece of #4 stranded copper with green insulation jacket except where the jacket was shaved to connect to the grounding post clamps, electrical ground, and lightning arrestor ground terminal. Forgive the non-GMRS pictures, but they do show good (to me, at least) cable installation practices... You can't see the outdoor lightning arrestors as they're at the point where the cables are about to go through the roof penetration.

I'll give you TWO tips! always back-up your channel set before doing a factory reset dont run with scissors

Hi Dave, Gil, @wruu653, pointed out that the repeaters appear in a search if you turn on Stale and Offline repeaters. But then I found something weird, a mismatch (I think?) between map view and tabular view. If I do a tabular data repeater search to include stale and offline, both repeaters appear on the map. But if I go to map first and turn on those two switches for stale and offline, the repeaters don’t appear on the map. I have written to Rich, the site administrator, to learn what I might be doing wrong. Anyway, if you do a repeater search to include Stale and Offline repeaters, both Eureka repeaters appear in the list, allowing you to select them. If you do that they appear on the map and more importantly the owner’s call sign is available for you to contact him. You might want to contact the owner and ask him to update his data on the site.

You and your wife don't need to be yelling your call sign back and forth to eachother. In fact, the frequent yelling of callsigns on GMRS is a learned dork habit of all of the ham radio people who've moved in on GMRS.

Because RF is emitted in all directions equally from an isentropic antenna, one way to compare the range of different power outputs is to think in terms of the volume of a sphere: Two watts fills the volume of a sphere of a radius of 0.78159 (the units in this case end up being the cube root of watts.) Five watts fills the volume of sphere of 1.06078. So, all other things equal, the range of a 5 watt radio compared to a 2 watt radio, to produce the same RF strength, will be approximately 36% further. Increasing it to 10 watts (five times the power of the two watt radio) results in 70% greater range. Increasing power to 20 watts gets you a little more than twice the range of the 2 watt radio (2.14 times to be exact). Finally, increasing it to 50 watts gets you less than three times the range of the 2 watt radio. (a factor of 2.917). Hopefully this illustrates how little/much RF power actually matters. Edited May 14, 2025: The above should have referred to the surface area of the sphere, not the volume. I regret my error.