jsneezy

I would definitely wait to see what Radioddity has to say on that. Sadly, I haven't had the chance to get mine installed yet, as I'm going for a bit more of a permanent install. The heat has been absolutely brutal for the last month and a half or so. It's supposed to be dipping down into the mid 90s this weekend, but I have plans to get away for the weekend and disappear into the woods with my wife and daughter, a tent, some fishing rods, and the HTs.

I think you're getting a little mixed up. The use of wrist straps and belt clips are to impress the chicks. I think the slow and deliberate speech is so that "some people" can also understand.

I have a couple ideas. It's just a question of how much the metal the antenna will be attached to will help to serve as part of a ground plane.

I don't think that mag mount would work for my situation. Between the way the ladder rack is framed up and the way it gets loaded, it would be unusable. There's too much obstruction with what gets loaded up there and the magnet might get drug around the roof while loading in the mornings. I actually have a Nagoya UT-72G that I decided not to use for that reason. I have a right angle mount for an NMO and a Tram 1126-B that I'm going to try out, mounted to the side of the ladder rack, but I also have to figure out the ground plane concern.

I believe my wife's desktop is Win10, but it's also an AMD processor. I don't think that's really going to help much in this instance. I do know that between the driver for the cable and the Radioddity software, it was plug and play in Windows 7 64 bit. I should be getting the radio installed in the truck next weekend, weather permitting. Some things have changed with work, so it turns out I'll still be using the truck for work so I do have to figure something different for an antenna. I do have an idea, but I will need the antenna to be pretty short, and looks like it will end up mounted on the side of a ladder rack. I'm just hoping I won't have ground plane issues.

Seeing this post come back up reminds me of a question I have, and the manual leaves a lot to be desired. I don't need dual monitoring, and it looks like the radio defaults to a frequency that I'm not likely to use on the secondary channel anyway. Is there a menu setting to disable the dual monitor?

I drive into a lot of low clearance areas, like parking garages and things like that. I typically only get enough clearance to get away with a 1/4 wave antenna in this situation. If it weren't for all the pipes and conduit on the ceilings, I could probably get by with a 1/2. I will be mounting to the side of the rack. I was considering taking off the shark fin on the front, since it's only for satellite radio, which I don't use, and putting an NMO there, but the rack and anything loaded on it would just be an obstruction. And it could potentially be broken off during loading.

Basically, what I'm looking at is something like in this screenshot. Mine is custom made for the truck, with rectangular tubing rather than the round tubing like the one in this pic. The red circle shows roughly about where the antenna would be mounted, with the cable run along the underside of the rail with coax clips like a cable TV installer would use, then down the vertical at the front of the bed, in through a grommet I'll add to the back wall of the cab, then forward under the carpet to the radio. The reason I chose this location is partly because I can get better antenna height, no tie downs ever go near that spot, and nothing ever goes over the edge of the rack there. As for terrain, it's mostly going to be around Phoenix, so some spots with hills, and some flat, but not a whole lot of trees. The plan is to use half of a mirror/roll bar mount with the NMO attached to it, so I can set it so the NMO is flush with the top of the rack. I'll try to get a better picture of it later, for a better reference as to what I'm trying to do.

I'm going to be adding a radio to a work truck, and because of the ladder rack, a roof mount won't work with the way the rack gets constantly loaded. I was thinking about doing a mount on the outside of the rack. I'm a little concerned about the lack of a good ground plane in that particular spot. I'm trying to keep the antenna as high as possible, without the possibility of signal being blocked by the cab or anything loaded up on top of the rack. At the same time, a 1/2 wave will be too tall. Would either the Tram or Midland antenna be better for this specific install, being that I do need it to be as low profile as possible, or am I better off looking for other options?

Someone's gotta make the coffee the morning after.

I seem to remember that one starting out a bit differently. The first word of it wasn't very family friendly, though.

@WRXE944 the firmware version on mine is 2.34.

I definitely purchased the Radioddity DB20-G.

Considering they have had about 2 or 3 years to get Chirp or RT working, if they haven't gotten it figured out by now, I don't think it's likely to happen. Whether it is a handshake issue as far as initiating communication or something in the coding I can't really say, as I haven't looked too much into it yet. I'm not as worried about getting too many more repeater channels. I'm not even sure that I'll use all of the repeaters I have programmed. There's quite a few that I know I absolutely will, but I also have a few around Tucson programmed, and I might end up near there about once every 10 years, if not even longer. So far from what I've seen, I'm pretty impressed considering the price I paid. One thing that I did think was pretty interesting was one of the times the radio restarted during programming, I looked over and noticed that the display said "Anytone! Welcome". As far as I was able to find, it sounds like the Retevis RA25 is the exact same radio, with different firmware. I'm still working out a plan for antenna cable routing but I'm planning to work on all of that next weekend. I'm just trying to do something that isn't sloppy, but also not too permanent. Considering I was a car audio installer at one point of my life, it shouldn't be too bad. I just need to look a little closer at what I'll be working with.

It seems odd that it won't let us store anything beyond those 17 total channels for repeaters. I don't have a lot to compare it against, except for the Baofeng UV-9Gs that my wife and I have, and those have a total of 32 repeater channels if I remember right. But even beyond those channels, to my knowledge, you can program anything for scan, but if it's within GMRS frequencies I believe it will let you transmit. Although, that may have something to do with a possible setting in Chirp that will allow you to disable the receive only setting for said channel. It's not a deal breaker on this DB20-G though, I think I have a few repeaters that may end up getting removed from the current programming. I don't think I'll be in the areas that they are located in enough to make a difference.

Firmware version is the one thing I didn't think to check. But I did remember to save the original code plug. If it's in the code plug, I might be able to check later, otherwise, I don't think I'll have a chance to power it back on for a couple days. The one thing I did find, which may be a limitation of the programming software, is that when I tried to set up a repeater on channel "41" as the radio sees it, I could not get the 467.xxx on transmit to save. I was trying to save the local Phoenix area repeaters to one block, and leave some empty spaces before adding in the northern AZ repeaters, but no such luck. Maybe I missed something simple, and have to take another look.

Got the radio today, and got it programmed using the CPS. It wasn't nearly as bad as some of the reviews I had come across mentioned. Getting 12V to it to get it to turn on was another story, since I don't have a power supply for something like a base. I ended up modifying an old computer power supply that I had laying around that I've used for other things, and cut the lighter plug off the radio. A lot of the reviews of the programming software mentioned having to type in everything by hand, but what I found was a little different. On the farthest right column, there is a box with 2 arrow symbols pointing right (like this >>). Double clicking that brings up a box that allowed me to name the repeaters and select the tones from drop-down lists. All in all, I think it took me about 15 minutes. The next step is going to be running a wire from the battery, through a fuse, then to a relay behind the dash of the truck. From there, I'll use either the stereo turn on wire or the accessory wire off the ignition switch to trigger the relay to turn the radio on and off with the key. After that, it's going to be antenna wiring and then testing. I'm still trying to decide how I'm going to run the antenna cable, since it is only going to be a mostly temporary installation. Once the weather cools down, I'm planning to put an NMO mount in the roof and adding the MXTA26.

I only keep Windows 7 around because I still tend to game on the computer. Though I don't have much time for that any more. I actually prefer Linux, and it seems that gaming support has been getting better for it over the last few years, but it does look like I'll still have a reason to keep Windows around. The radio and antenna should be here today. I grabbed the Nagoya UT-72G for the time being, because it's been hot here for the last couple of weeks. I don't suspect that I'll be seeing any cooler temperatures until somewhere between late September and mid October, and working at the roof of a truck when it's over 110 out isn't fun. Especially when work happens to be garage door service, so I'm out in the heat all day, 5 days a week.

I've been noticing since opting in that the "view on myGMRS.com" and "request permission" are missing when I'm looking at a repeater in the app. It may just be my phone, but figured it's worth mentioning here. Pixel 6 Pro in case it matters.

I can't remember where I had come across it, nor am I able to find it again. Thinking back on it, it was someone having driver issues with the supplied cable, and I think they may have mentioned that they were going to try the Wouxon PCO-003 cable. For all I know, it could have been someone on Reddit that mentioned the idea a while back. Is there a way on Windows 11 to disable certain updates from installing to keep the functioning driver from updating? I've always had my computers set to notify me when updates were available so I could review them and only install the ones I've actually needed. But I also stopped at Windows 7 and will not be buying another Microsoft Operating System. I do think I'll most likely be setting up the radio with the repeaters that I also have programmed in my HT, and anything else will probably be added in from the radio itself if I come across something while traveling.

That is exactly me as well. I decided at some point, I think around the time 8 was announced or maybe when they were giving away 10 to get people to "upgrade", that any more operating system changes to my computer would be Linux. I only keep Windows 7 around for a few games I still play. I was sure that one or more of the reviews I had come across had mentioned getting a different programming cable than the one that came with the radio because of issues. I didn't pay too much attention to which cable they were saying they used. For all I know, it had something to do with a driver that didn't want to play nice, and a lot of people that aren't technologically inclined tend to blame the hardware first. I'm just going off what I had seen elsewhere, as I don't have the radio or cable in hand just yet. I do seem to remember Windows 7 rarely having issues with much of anything. I'm actually kinda surprised these don't work with Chirp considering how long they've been on the market.

I'll be programming it mainly by computer, unless I happen to need to add something in while on the road. I'm still on Windows 7, so I'm not sure what will be in store for me with drivers for the programming cable. I think some of the reviews I had come across mentioned something about using another brand of cable, but I don't remember where I had seen them.

Put it in reverse and it's Driver Returns On Foot. To get back on topic, I think the KG-UV9GX is going to be the better of the two, partly because of that sexier wrist strap, but also the fact that it's superhet.

I ended up ordering from Amazon. Looks like it will be here Saturday. Now I just have to figure out the antenna and what I want to do there. I've been kicking around a mag mount like the Nagoya UT-72G or an NMO mounted through the roof with either a Midland MXTA26 or the Tram 1181. Either option would be going as close to the center of the roof of a Nissan Frontier Crew Cab, so a good ground plane shouldn't be of too much concern. Also, @WRXE944, I won't complain if you want to share some more shortcuts.

Thanks for this. It definitely helps to know that it's possible before making the purchase rather than finding out I can't after the return window is closed. The way everything I could find with quick searches made it sound like it was basically the 22 simplex channels, 17 total repeater channels, and everything else was monitor only.