WRYZ926

There lies the problem. A lot of people now days do not have any respect for those that have different opinions. That seems to be a lost skill that left us years if not decades ago. I've seen too many people not wanting to hear the other side's opinion. The lack of listening, respect, and understanding leads to arguments. Politics and religion are two topics that will ruin a conversation quickly. I've had it happen in my own home with family. And to save me the heartburn and headaches, I do not allow politics to be discussed at the table since no one takes the time to listen to the other side nor do they want to hear opinions that are different. If family can't even be civil to each other, then how do you expect people to be civil to each other when they are not looking each other in the eyes such as on the internet or on the radio. I know most repeaters in my area do not allow politics or religion to be discussed and that goes for all of the 2m, 70cm, DMR, and GMRS repeaters. For those that want to allow any and all topics, then I suggest they setup and run their own repeaters.

This is very true and why politics are not allowed on our repeaters. And the name calling/anger/stupidity/ranting usually ends up involving foul language being used. It's easier to just ban certain topics versus having to play referee, shutting the repeater down, banning people, having others ran off from using the repeater, etc, etc.

The subject of politics has come up a time or two. But the decision is always the same. We are a 501-3C non profit that relies on donations. And the donors come from a diverse background with some donors being left leaning and other donors being right leaning. The decision was made years ago to just keep politics off the repeaters so that we don't take a chance of loosing donations that we need to maintain the repeaters. The choices are simple, abide by the rules if I want to use the repeaters or disagree and find other repeaters to use or stick to simplex. And I have found that the no politics rule is instituted by quite a few organizations/clubs that run repeaters in my area. And they state that it is for the same reasons as our BoD has stated. Discussions range over a wide variety of topics on our repeaters and no one complains as long as the conversations are clean and not political.

Well said @SteveShannon and @tcp2525.

The ban on talking about politics was a decision made by the board of directors years ago. I don't sit on the BoD so I can't even suggest making changes one way or another. And no I do not always agree with the organization's bylaws and rules. But I do have to abide by them if I want to use the repeaters.

Unfortunately there are no coordination efforts nor any repeater counsels for GMRS like there is for amateur band repeaters. Plus the fact that GMRS repeaters are limited to just eight channels doesn't help. I am glad that we are in the middle of the state which made it easier to pick a channel. There are quite a few GMRS repeaters in the St Louis and Kansas City areas.

Merry Christmas everyone.

It's a shame that happened like that. We decided right away not to even consider linking our GMRS repeater. We already have our 2m repeater linked to AllStar. We don't have many rules outside of following the FCC regulations on our repeater. The three big ones are: no foul language, no discussing politics, and no business uses. We are strict about no foul language since there are kids that use our repeater on a regular basis. And politics usually leads to arguments. After talking to another local GMRS repeater owner, we decided to follow his advice and not allow business use. He had a big problem with the big commercial farms wanting to tie up his repeater and we didn't want that to happen with ours. We checked Repeater Book and My GMRS along with listening on all of the repeater channels first. We then reached out to the other GMRS repeater owners within a 50 mile radius of our location. SO far we have not had any issues with unlisted repeaters. We do occasionally pick up a different repeater on the other side of the state when there is a band opening. Merry Christmas everyone.

Actually there is a version of the UV-5r that is Part 95 certified. BAOFENG UV-5R GMRS Handheld Radio

To answer the original question. It depends on the radio manufacturer on how they list the 8 repeater channels. Some manufacturers will list them as Channels 23 through 30 while others will list them as repeater channels 1 though 8 and will abbreviate repeater as RPT. so the radio screen will show RPT1 though RPT 8. No matter how each manufacturer labels the repeater channels, they are the same across the board. All GMRS radios will transmit on 467.XXX to the repeaters and will receive the repeaters' output on 462.XXX. And all GMRS repeater use a positive offset of 5 MHz. Again, I will leave the arguing about if it is okay to use the repeater input channels for simplex to others. The FCC regulations have been posted for those who care about following them.

Am I on the mygmrs forum or Facebook? And I agree with @SteveShannon, I can see where someone that is disabled or has a family member that is disabled would take offense to comments about being disabled. Myself and my wife are both disabled, though neither of us are wheelchair bound. I'll let others argue about using the repeater input frequencies for simplex outside of testing. I have done it for testing purposes only and will use them in an emergency if needed. Okay back to trying to get the excess blood out of my caffeine system.

I have two repeaters within 50 miles of me that are on the same channel. One is east of me and one is west of me. The east repeater does not use tones while the west repeater does use tones. Most of the time I don't hardly ever hear the east repeater due to terrain between us but I can easily get into the west repeater. At times I get both repeaters. When I am picking up the east repeater it is usually at an s4 or s5 on my radio's signal strength meter. And I normally get the west repeater at an s6 or s7. The east repeater without tones definitely interferes with my ability to talk on and hear the west repeater when I am receiving both at the same time. So yes two repeaters that are about 100 miles apart can and will cause issues with anyone in between the two trying to talk on just one of the repeaters. Conditions and locations will have an effect.

I get trouble about that too. One guys calls them Hop Sing radios. But the Wouxun radios work well. And just because a Radio says Icom on it doesn't mean it is a good radio. My Icom IC-T10 is no better than the UV-5R. @WSFW950 I have zero experience with the Wouxun UV-8H but have used the UV-9D Mate and own the KG-Q10H. Both of those are good to go. I also have the KG-935G Plus and it has been good to go. I know the menus are the same for the KG-935G and the KG-XS20G and easy to use.

I do have the instructions for setting up the Bridgecom to use an external controller along with a sheet showing the cable pinout for connecting the two. Our plans are to connect the Bridgecom GMRS repeater and one of our 70cm repeaters (Motorola) to an ARCOM RC-210 controller once it arrives. I forgot to add earlier that we bought our BCR-40U without the built in duplexer. We had a spare duplexer that is higher quality sitting around so decided to use it instead. My biggest gripes was the lack of customer support and the fact that they deleted any negative reviews on Facebook. I bet they do the same on their own website too. I figured I would post my review to help save people some headaches if they are looking to get a Bridgecom GMRS repeater and want the CW ID to work as expected without having to buy an additional controller.

I also found out that e-ham will delete any review that says anything negative about customer service. Shouldn't that be included in any review?

Well I figured it was time for a review of the Bridgecom BCR-40U repeater now that we have had ours on line for 12 months. The good; The repeater works pretty good for the most part and the sound and duty cycle is good. The bad: First the built in CW ID cuts people off and no one can transmit on the repeater while the ID is transmitting. Second, the CW ID is ONLY transmitted without tones. So if you have receive tones set on your radio, you will never hear the CW ID which leads to the first problem of getting cutoff mid transmission. The UGLY: Bridgecom customer service is non existent when it comes to their repeaters. I submitted my first support ticket only to have them reply to shut the CW ID off. To make it worse, they closed the ticket before I could even reply to them. I then tried contacting them by phone and on their Facebook page to try and get some answers. This went nowhere. And Yes I was polite every time I contacted Bridgecom. I had to submit yet another ticket and explain everything over again along with asking them not to close the ticket before I could reply to their answers. Well they did that. But their answers were far from helpful. Again they stated to just turn the CW ID off and they had no clue why it was cutting people off mid sentence. Their only other suggestion was to use an external control I try my best to be polite with customer service since I know how people can be. But there was no excuse on how I was treated. To make it worse, I made a comment on their Face book page only to have Bridgecom delete it. It seems they don't want people to see any negative reviews or negative comments. Needless to say I will never recommend any of their products again based on their poor customer service. Here is a screen shot of my comment when I received the notice that it was deleted.

The poor horse should have been beaten so much that it is nothing but liquid puree by now.

A generator that is NOT properly shielded for EMI and RFI will definitely jam radios. You would have to be within 150 feet or less with the generator though. And yes I know this is a fact since I would purposely jam certain peoples radios with my truck mounted machine shop while I was in the Army. The truck had a PTO driven 25 Kw generator that would jam all commo equipment within a 150 foot radius of the truck when running.

Yes he was on our 2m repeater. We would have just told him to use the proper callsign if he was on our GMRS repeater.

I should have been more precise when I talked about the kid. He is at least old enough to drive. He was driving grampa's truck the time he used grampa's call sign. The email to grampa was nice in that we offered to help the kid get his license. We also stated the consequences of what could happen if the kid continued using the radio without a license. Grampa has only been licensed for a couple of months. I bet grampa was pretty upset when he found out the grandson was using his radio(s) without permission. Like I said, we haven't heard the kid on since we sent grampa an email.

We had a kid that was using his grampa's radio without permission. He kept getting on the repeater using CB lingo. We ignored him. Then he tried using a totally made up call sign. Again we ignored him. Then he was dumb enough to use his grampa's call sign. One of our members then started talking to him. We got his grampa's name and address from the call sign. We then send an email to the grampa. We haven't heard the kid on the air since. We have had instances of kerchunkers bouncing from our GMRS and 2m repeaters in quick succession. Again we ignore them while members try pin point the person's location. We have found a couple and just the threat of FCC fines was enough to stop them. We also programmed our repeater controllers with an anti-kerchunk feature. It keeps the people that just push the PTT in for a second from even opening up the repeater. That has took the wind out of a few kerchunkers sails. Sometimes a cease and desist letter is enough to stop people and other times it's not. A cargo van with a bunch of mag mount antennas on the roof parked across the street is enough to stop some people too.

Here is an interesting video to watch. How the FCC Finds & Fines Radio Pirates, Jammers and Interference Generators

I agree with you. The FCC stated themselves that is what they will actually take into account before thinking about investigating. That does not mean they will actually do anything. Their own track record shows they do not do much at all.

The FCC won't even think about looking into things UNLESS threats have been made on air by the ID10T. And the FCC still won't get into any hurry. You have to have things well documented before submitting complaints to the overlords. Otherwise, do as Randy has said. Track the ID10T down and try talking to them. If that doesn't work, send a cease and desist letter. And if neither of those options work then it's time for a good old fashion attitude adjustment in front of his family and friends. A fourth option is to get a nice focused log periodical type antenna and park out front of the ID10T's house and jam him every time he decides to show his fourth point of contact to the world.

I can say that the Bingfu definitely has less than stellar real world reviews from people that have tried them. I would say the other two are probably no better.