WRXB215

@WSDA306 Wow! That sucks! Used to when you bought a house you looked for things like: is there a train track right next to it, airport, crime rate. Now we have to see if it's in a dead zone.

Amen to that!

An example I have from personal experience. The two radios: I was given an old Kenwood TH-75A. It is old but very well designed. 5 watts max if plugged into a cigarette lighter, maybe 3 watts on battery. I bought a new Baofeng UV-5R8W. The two scenarios: When I listen to NOAA Weather Radio, I use the Kenwood. It has much cleaner sound. When I'm walking at the park and want to talk, I use the Baofeng. The Kenwood will not reach the repeater. It all depends on what you want/need and how much money you have and are willing to spend to get it.

Not wrong, but it makes me feel better about my UV-5R.

The FRS radios may have a tone set. Some of them come that way.

I'm not familiar with this particular radio and not sure why it would be called "Repeater ON or OFF" but it sounds like it may be referring to the "talk around" feature available on many radios.

@rdunajewski is the one to look into it.

I just purchased a probe set and some other items but none of them were prime day specials.

I knew what you meant, I was just trying to be funny. I love typos.

Not sure what "reusable range" is but in my short experience, the longer antennas only perform marginally better but are quite unwieldly so I personally prefer the shorter antennas. As far as tuning, if the antennas are GMRS antennas, they should be tuned properly. If they are U/V antennas, they will likely be tuned close enough but not perfect. For range, height is might. After that, a little more power can be handy trying to punch the signal through a bunch of trees.

GMRS is not an extension of ham. It is a separate service for a very different purpose. GMRS is intended for families and other small groups. Ham is more of an experimental platform so to speak.

Yes, some of us do that but ham is better suited for that purpose.

Is that even possible?

Welcome @Lman57.

This cannot be stressed enough. People routinely talk to the space station using 5 watt radios and it’s more than 200 miles away, but there’s nothing in the way. I agree. It would be nice if I could get that kind of line-of-sight. But I can't. Some of us just can't get an antenna up above the 100'+ trees around us.

It depends on the radio. Some radios come with very good stock antennas. That being said, I've used dual band VHF/UHF ham antennas on my GMRS radios and they worked just fine. No doubt a GMRS specific antenna will work better but the dual bands have worked just fine for me.

I have that same radio. I used the Set software to select the frequency range and after that I use chirp. Have saved several files with chirp with no problem.

Like @amaff I prefer the 701s. In my very limited tests, I don't get enough out of the 771s to make them worth the trouble.

I do a lot of rag chewing at the edge of my fars.

I use the AT-778UV daily. It gets hot but apparently not too hot for the radio. If I ever get time, I'm going to pull the fan out of an old laptop and mount it on the heatsink just for good measure.

OK, you guys made me look.

@thenols GMRS is allowed to transmit a very short burst of digital. See this radio for example.

It has nothing to do with the brand of radio. It is simply not a GMRS frequency and therefore a GMRS radio of any brand will not transmit on that frequency. Many brands have radios, business or ham, that will transmit on that frequency not just Baofeng.

This is the nature of most of what I hear and take part in where I live. Both GMRS and ham. There are technical discussions about radios, but that seems to be about 30-40% of the time.