WRYC373

If you have line of sight to the repeater then you should be good. If you don't and when you moved down the road you do then that explains it. Look on google earth if you know where the repeater is and see if theres any industrial stuff between you and it. My guess now that you say moving away fixed it. Is that something is generating interference between you and the repeater. So id draw a line between you and the repeater and see what's there.

Blessed may he be who gave the FCC another 35$ to be told "no thou shalt not!".

Some theories some may be wrong: Street lamps/house lamps causing interference Tropospheric Ducting or Radiating Inversion causing far away signals to interfere Heavy night fogs. The repeater is solar powered only and the battery is on it's last legs. (If no one can talk to each other at night and it's not just you).

Sorry my first reply was more negative than I meant it to be. As @WRXP381 pointed out there may be repeaters near you a quick glance seems that there are many in your area. https://mygmrs.com/repeaters

Do you know other people with GMRS licenses or even FRS radios? GMRS is like a Tequila Mixer its bring your own fun. If you bought a GMRS HT hoping to make contacts or join a club/ learn the depths of radio you may be a little disappointed. I'm not going to discourage you because lots of people do use it that way and if that works for them then more the merrier.

Try searching your Callsign on mygmrs.com not the forum does it popup? If not wait for it to. If it does then try to resign up?

Yep the GM-30s / GM-15 Pro are some of the best sub 100$ GMRS radios and I'm seeing more out there in the wild. I think between friends and family we have 8 or so. Super easy to use and charge.

Your best option is to get 1 repeater really high up. Like 50 to 100 ft high. At least. I can talk 30 miles+ on my 40ft base no gain antenna to HTs. So if youre at least that tall you should be able to do a ranch assuming you don't have rolling hills on it.

Your SWR is bad you are losing a ton of power not including loss due to coax. The surecom is an in line power meter so depending on where you are measuring you may be just measuring power out of the radio. That antenna has pretty narrow range on UHF and may just not work for GMRS.

I'm not anymore but, yes FRS could absolutely be used to teach responsibility and organizational skills along with general radio operator skills (Ie if you press the mic button it takes a second before you should start talking). Idk how your troop is set up but basically the way id imagine it is you could assign someone to be the radio operator for a patrol / group. It's actually a pretty good position to give to scouts. It makes them feel responsible for something during activities, they have to use it appropriately etc etc. Definitely train all the scouts on radio usage but scouts love being given a special assignment. Exercise example: During navigation/rescue practices you can have someone be "injured" and need to be rescued by describing their location over the radio while someone else tries to find them based on the directions given by the injured victim. There's a lot you can do it's basically limited by your imagination.

Enforcement agents of any agency are expected to do a lot for their jobs and making judgement calls is one of those expectations. If a lot of agents report "hey we encountered this, and this was my judgement call to the best i could do" that's when executive rule making sessions occur to try and heed it off. Sometimes the result of these rule making sessions are less than ideal then we go to courts and legislation time. The agency ideally has some leeway in making those decisions/rules but if the law is written in a way that makes it impossible to solve within the boundaries of the agency then courts and legislation time. Is Civics not fun?

Let us go through the sands of time as best as I can tell and Im sure i got some dates and or specifics wrong. 1930's LMR is created for business use. 1960's GMRS (Class A CB) is created and is very popular among small rural business use. Ie Family Farms etc. Basically as a subset of LMR and then some channels absorbed into LMR (MURS started similarly but thats another story) 1970's GMRS business channel pair licensing rule established. 1987 End of GMRS Business exclusive license's and the channel pair rule 1994 FRS is created near GMRS for people who don't need GMRS and didn't want to pay the fee. 2000's GMRS/FRS combo radio's start appearing and people are using 15-22 unlicensed (who could've possibly seen this coming? ). Early 2010's GMRS begins to become popular among Outdoors enthusiasts GMRS communities start forming Late 2010's GMRS linking starts occurring over the internet. 2012 UV-5R appears. 2017 GMRS/FRS combo banned, free band UV-5R's kinda dealt with from the FCC. GMRS really takes off and starts to become Ham-lite. 2020 FCC realizes the floodgates that they have caused ensuring HAM-lite is an eventuality. 2021 FCC tries to clarify some rules/definitions to prevent it, its too late. Whether GMRS being Ham-lite is bad or good im not going to comment as I believe GMRS provides essential short range communications, but; also always had the power and design to talk at least county wide. GMRS is also being less enforced by the FCC and being self enforced by users playing nice is telling me the FCC really doesn't want to be forced deal with GMRS. As long as it continues to play nice and not have interference/nuisance issues basically how they currently treat Ham. Combining FRS and GMRS led to this eventuality and not re-seperating the channels made enforcement extremely difficult and hard for them to justify. Again im not going to pass judgement besides on the FCC's inability to achieve what they want to whether or not I benefit/lose from their mistakes. TL:DR: Issues stemming from the FRS/GMRS combo era mean that the FCC cannot enforce GMRS as strongly as some people wish and the FCC is hoping that people can be civil on GMRS so they do not have to. Like all things in life: Play nice, Work hard, Worry less.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/section-95.303 Im just gonna leave the CFR here but yeah a fixed station is the worst definition ive seen i really want to send it to a lawyer who specializes in communications law to decipher that one. Also it seems we have had this discussion before, and come to similar conclusions. I bet if you asked 3 FCC agents the answer you would get 3 different answers. When you are required by law to interpret the law to enforce the law, the law gets tricky.

Do you mean a Raspberry Pi SDR?

Did you back up the firmware first? I know chirp on linux can be odd so id always back up firmware before trying to modify it. If you actually fully bricked it yeah return it to amazon.

Technically that radio has a non-removeable antenna due to it having data capabilities to comply with FCC rules Part95E. So if you got yours off without a picture i cant tell you the connector.

Yes, but it seems for it to be a default freq you need to set the special key "12" in the manual to cycle to NOAA. https://tidodmaster.oss-us-west-1.aliyuncs.com/h3/H3-Ham manual.pdf page 10 and 11. First thing when you get a radio is to read the manual. The second thing is try to figure out whether the manual actually applies to your radio and try all the buttons.

Vertex 231s are excellent and are findable cheap 2nd hand, just ensure they are in the GMRS freq range.

I wouldn't do a mag mount, due to it scratching paint. The best ground plane is going to be a nmo hole drilled.

There could be I know theres Rattlegram that @OffRoaderX showed off a few weeks ago for short texts. I think we would need opensource community standards ala APRS for GMRS and then like with amateur radio get enough people to buy the feature to show there's a market to integrate it. My idea to offload some of the data limit: Callsign via CW TEXT DATABURST (1 sec or less limited by char count) 30 sec Callsign via CW LOCATION DATABURST (1 sec or less) This is my very poorly thought out idea on how it could work with the limits in place (which I fully support to avoid GMRS becoming nothing but fax noises). The listening program would decode the CW to text and attach it to the decoded databurst coming in the issue is it would be very sensitive to interference from repeater Idents. I think offloading the Station ID should save a little for texts at least. But may not be worth the extra hassle. Remember closed standards are often dropped for the opensource standard if it is easy to adopt and has customers willing to pay for its implementation. Especially when there is no competing dominate standard. "GMAPRS" would be really cool if we could do it and as long as the 1 sec limit every 30 sec is followed. APRS uses 1200 Baud on VHF and 9600 Baud on UHF https://www.amsat.org/amsat/articles/g3ruh/109.html I found this link that says 9600Baud fits in 20Khz just barely which is what I thought so it may be very possible to do at least text or location if not location and text together. TLDR: APRS could be adapted to GMRS to create an open standard the work needed would be heavy but its actually very possible with modifications to the existing protocol.

Any member of your immediate family as defined by the FCC is covered regardless of household/address. GMRS used to be used primarily for small bussiness/farms so it made sense to have the things the way they are.

I've seen people do close to 200 Miles but its peak to valley desert and it's usually not consistent. Ive gotten 400 miles on VHF ham before Mountain peak to valley but VHF pushes a little father. GMRS Suburban Typicals: HT to HT 2 miles or so max Base to Base 10 miles or more if good antennas and good area. I routinely talk ~25 miles on my HT to another HT but we live across a lake from each other. With UHF/GMRS the antenna matters 10x more than wattage basically so if both users have a directional and are line of sight they can go pretty dang far. And even just putting a higher antenna makes it that much easier to have line of sight.

Youd want a power meter with a dummy load. VNA can also be used to diagnose this issue and ensure resonance.

I use a meanwell 30a personally.

I don't see a source listed for these can you point me to the database? I'm assuming you're pulling off the my GMRS.com list. If that's so then that's because there's a known issue of people adding repeaters as theirs when they do not own them leading to duplicates. Not someone owning a bunch.