WRYZ926

Computer monitors are notorious for causing RF interference.

Coffee is no fun to clean from a keyboard or monitor, especially if one uses any cream or sweetener. I've learned to set the coffee down before reading.

For what Baofeng wants for their repeater, I would just go with the Bridgecom repeater. We are using a Bridgecom and haven't had any issues with it. Or you can always go with a used Motorola and have it reprogrammed for GMRS.

My club fits most of that. We are a non profit organization. The local radio station was kind enough to let us put our equipment up on their 900 foot tall tower. We had to pay for the antennas, hard line coax, and repeaters ourself and we had a few members that do tower work as their profession that volunteered their time. We got lucky when we put up our GMRS repeater. There were abandoned antennas and hardline already in place. All we had to do was purchase the repeater and hook it up. We have one member that retired from doing commercial communication work and he still has access to the shop with all of the equipment. He tunes all of our duplexers for the club. I doubt that we would have as nice of a setup without all of that. A lot of people overlook the cost of overhead when seeing what shop rates are. I retired in 2005 as a tool and die maker. Our shop rate was right around $100/hour but we only got paid around $22 per hour. And we would hear the argument from the shipping clerks about how a loaf of bread costs them the same amount as us. We would remind them the cost of our tools, cost of 2 years of school plus two more years of an apprenticeship program. Where the shipping guys didn't need any schooling and they had minimum cost in tools.

I will agree with everyone, get a good antenna along with the adaptor to go from the antenna coax to the radio will be fine. A lot of people have ran that way for a mobile setup without issues. Yes your range won't be quite as good with a 5 watt radio versus a 50 watt radio, but you will still get out just fine. A lot of times I don't even run my 50 watt dual band and 50 watt GMRS radios on high power. I also would not worry about getting an amp for a hand held radio either. Put the money towards a mobile radio of your choice instead. Yes having a 50 watt radio is nice when you need the extra power but a 20-25 watt radio will suit your needs most of the time.

My Comet CA-2s4SR stays on the rear rack my SxS due to the length of it. There is no way I could run that and still pull into the garage at home. I agree that it is an excellent all around antenna. The highest SWR I get is on the GMRS repeater channels (467 MHz) at 1.7.

@SteveShannon hit submit quicker than I did. I would love to have the IC-7100 if I can just figure out a good solution for an antenna that I won't tear up by forgetting to fold down or remove.

There is also the Icom IC-7100 which is 100 watts on HF, 50 watts on VHF, and 35 watts on UHF. And it can be Mars Modded. I would love to have an HF rig in my Ford Escape but I am veery limited to antenna height since I park in the garage. I'm running a Comet dual band SBB1 in the middle of the roof and it barely clears the 7 foot garage door.

This is going to happen since there are only a handful of repeater channels available for GMRS. And you can't always go by the mygmrs repeater map or repeaterbook.com either. Not everyone lists on either website or they don't keep things updated. We looked here and on repeaterbook.com when our club first looked into setting up a GMRS repeater. Repeaterbook.com was outdated and the two closest repeaters to us were not listed on mygmrs.com. Several of us listened to all the repeater channels for a while before deciding what channel to use for our repeater. We did talk to the owner of the two closest GMRS repeaters to let him know that we were setting up a GMRS repeater. He then updated the map here to show his to repeaters. Missouri is pretty rural outside of the 5-6 big metro areas so we don't have too much conflict with GMRS repeaters. I know that the Kansas City area has more repeaters than the St Louis area and there aren't any problems. And it doesn't help that people don't bother to check either website before setting up their own repeaters. There is the repeater counsel for amateur radio repeaters that takes care of keeping repeaters from operating on the same frequencies if they are too close and/or in the same state. This doesn't always help though. There is a 2m repeater right across the river from St Louis in Illinois that uses the same frequency tones as our 2m repeater. Normally there isn't any issues but sometimes we do have issues when propagation is just right.

There is no stuffing that cat back into a bag. And don't forget about all of the GMRS blister pack radios sold prior to 2017 that people never read the instructions where it stated a GMRS license was required.

Yes it is worth discussing. Though some will be against it. Most newer repeaters should be capable of narrow band. I know the Bridgecom repeaters will work with either 12.5kHz or 25kHz channel spacing. I bet most of the repurposed Motorola repeaters can be set to narrow band also. And you are right, it isn't worth arguing or getting trolled by keyboard commandos (some people).

Basically the only difference between the Midland SPK-100 and SPK-200 is the SPK-200 has noise cancellation and an amplifier that requires a power source. If the SPK-100 works fine in my SxS, it will work in a Jeep. One won't go wrong with either speaker.

Where would the extra frequencies/channels come from without forcing us to use narrow band for all channels? The 70cm amateur band is right below GMRS. Some business band UHF frequencies are actually in the same range as GMRS plus public safety frequencies are right above GMRS. I won't get into the narrow band vs wide band arguments here.

I can vouch for the Midland SPK-100 being a good speaker and plenty loud enough to hear in a noisy environment. I have one attached to the top roll bar on my Honda Pioneer 500 and I can hear my rain just fine while running 35 mph down a gravel road. And the Pioneer 500 is pretty noisy going down the road/trail. Yes the SPK-100 cost more at around $65 -$70 but it is IP rated for water and dust. The IP rating and being 20 watts is why I went with the SPK-100 for my SxS. The SPK-100 works well with my Wouxun KG-XS20G and my TYT TH-8600 radios.

That is the way it works. you need to have the radio off when plugging the USB cable in while the programming software is open. This goes for pretty much every hand held radio I have programmed and no matter what programming software I use. Glad that you figured things out.

Yes I have my General amateur radio license. And I was just curious about testing the different license free bands with a hand held. I really have no need to test other than curiosity. And I already know that FRS/GMRS and 70cm is affected the most by foliage, especially cedar and pine tree. I hit dead zones all of the time even with our repeater antennas at 900 feet above ground on 70cm and GMRS running a 50 watt mobile with a good antenna in my vehicle. This same spots have no issues with 2m. My inverted v 10m dipole is also resonant on the CB band. And there is definitely a difference between what I hear on each band when listening with my 20 watt Xiegu G90. I here way more traffic on 10m and I live 15 miles from a major interstate and 3 blocks from a major state highway. I mentioned testing with a CB capable of FM since @marcspaz did his tests for a customer but was using a CB on AM. Again this is all out of curiosity on my part.

I am well aware of that. I don't have any HT's that work on 10m though. My Wouxun quad band is 1.25m, 2m, 70cm, and 6m. A hand held CB radio capable of FM and a hand held MURS radio would be best for real world comparisons. Especially since neither requires a license.

While VHF does do better than UHF in forested areas, both will be affected. I know all of the Eastern red cedar trees really mess with the 70cm and GMRS bands. There are plenty of spots where red cedar trees were allowed to grow up in the fence lines at the edges of most rural roads. I'm still curious how a CB transmitting on FM compares to MURS. I might ask around to see if anyone has HT's for MURS and FM capable CB.

While we have not activated a SkyWarn net on our GMRS repeater, we do activate it every time there is sever weather on our 2m repeater. And participating in regular nets allows everyone to know if they can reach the repeater or reach others on simplex incase of an actual emergency or SkyWarn net.

The preamble for our 2m and GMRS Nets always starts with " this net is to test our equipment incase of an actual emergency. We decided to cut the GMRS net back to once a month but have the 2m net every week. We are also going to link our 3 70cm repeaters together since they are spread out across our area. Another plan is to have a simplex net once a month on our 2m repeater output frequency. We have had a couple of guys use our emergency coms trailer to run the weekly net from so that we know everything is working in the trailer.

I found a few videos that should help with the FTM-500D. The Youtube videos are from N4HNH Radio. He makes pretty good videos on other radios. I watch most of his videos on the Yaesu FTDX10 and found them easy to understand and very helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm0V68QtSkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee6ErAsRBmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf0LDrmaoAk

Shutting down the actual links is different than shutting down the repeaters themselves. Repeaters are not getting shut down because of this. It is only the links that are getting shut down. I'm not trying to offend people. But it feels like I am stuck watching the Disney Chicken Little movie on constant repeat. The FCC is actually doing something right for a change and trying to clarify the rules making them easier to understand.

CAT control is a must when running digital modes like FT8 or Whisper. I went with the Yaesu SCU-17 external sound card since the FTDX USB port is bad. The SCU-17 has little dials to adjust RX and TX. I'm just running a USB cable straight to the IC-7300 and it is working fine with WSJT-X.

You aren't kidding. And yes Yaesu seems to be the worst. I just got an Icom IC-7300 and put it in line instead of the Yaesu FTDX10. The Icom menu is definitely easier to use. I'm printing out the IC-730 manual now so I have it handy. I bought it from one of the old timers in my club but he couldn't find the manual. The FTDX was given to me but the USB port is bad so I have to use an external sound card for FT8. Otherwise it has worked fine for me. The other reason for switching is that I can use the same Heil headset for my Xiegu G90, Icom IC-2730 and Icom IC-7300. That simplifies things so I don't have to worry about using the wrong headset with the wrong radio.

While the only Yaesu radio I have is my FTDX-10. I can say that having the RT Systems software and programing cable sure makes things easier compared to using the Icom programming software. One of the nice things about RT Systems is they have versions of their software for both Windows and Mac. Don't be afraid of the radio or afraid to ask questions. There are enough forum members here that will be glad to help you.