SvenMarbles

I get it.. You’re vested in your GMRS situation and identity. You should meditate on it. You actuate out of bounds.

It’s simple. If you’re not with a concerned group of people with utility of the GMRS service. Beat it… It’s not a radio AOL chat room. It’s concerned groups and families doing THINGS. Don’t clog up a repeater pair with your money if you’re not with that vibe. The technicians class and the 440 is SOOO available for you guys… And you’re right at home there. You can just pour over your latest dialysis treatments and all the rest, and they’ll hang on your every word. But the GMRS/FRS is just for the groups, friends, and families just trying to keep in touch in the field. It’s wives, 13 year old girls, and dads. If you made a repeater, and this type of traffic isn’t welcome, then actually… YOU need to vacate. Free up that repeater pair for the 5 watt repeaters that actually need to be there..

No it’s not isolated. It’s anywhere. Through public repeaters and the home simplex that has tones. They scan the tones. The bothersome old men get involved..

Yeah it’s label maker taped onto the radios. But when it’s just minutia communications between our party, why is some guy even trying to chat us up? it’s just like, go away,.. lol And to my original post. We could just be like beep beebeep beep bebeep bebeep beep beep bebeep.. That’s my call sign.. it doesn’t MATTER if you know it. The papers are in order with the FCC. Other users don’t really need to police it. Amateur radio users have the culture of self policing. This isn’t that. When I go fishing, I don’t walk the shore checking licenses..

Well I suppose that’s sort of the predicate issue. The general use of GMRS as a social venue. And then expanded from there, the amount of people who want to shout “WHISKEY SIERRA UNIFORM BRAVO”,… Just conjuring images of them with a headset on at a submarine radio station… It’s a practical use band. Like, my wife and kids are camping. I think what most of you guys are MEANING to do is ham radio. And that’s 20mhz south on the dial. So why not just head on over there? You’re creeping out the casual folks just trying to use GMRS (women and children) who are trying to use GMRS correctly. My wife doesn’t need to be asked what her call sign is from some goof while I’m on my way back to the camp site with a bag of ice…

It kind of seems to me like so many social GMRS users are eager to shout out their call signs on the air. Why? is it like a radio-cool thing? Or you just genuinely want to shout out your home address to goobers with mustard stains on their shorts? It’s also legal to run it off in fast CW and ASSUREDLY no GMRS users would know how to deal with it. Legal. Your license situation is between you and the FCC. You don’t need to share it with every mouth breather on the air…

I don't really see how it would melt anything,.. Drawing a RATED current through a receptacle. And with it, it makes an actual 18-19 watts. People are mad at this radio only because they paid 3x for something else and don't even get 1.5x the results.

I use even cheaper ones that are very good. Amazon sells one called "KMR-400". Super good quality and connectors. $49 for 50ft. Pretty good for an LMR-400 facsimile.

There's hams here that are used to the normal answer, "it's complicated". It actually isn't. For a first mobile/base GMRS radio, the correct answer is the Radioddity DB-20G.

By the way, I'm not a schill for any specific brand. I use a 40 watt Retevis RA87 at the house connected to a GP-9 outside, Radioddity DB-20G's in the family cars and we use VGC N-76's as HTs on ski trips and such.. (BTW, look into the VGC N76 as a GMRS HT, bluetooth to phone and the family or group is just texting eachother reliably) Yes, brief data bursts of text messaging is legal on GMRS. If you have a wife and kids who are uninterested in radio and just prefer to text with their phones, this is the one.

If you're going to spend Midland money on a GMRS radio, tell me what the argument is for not going with Wouxun instead? This "ease of use" argument is just nonsense. ALLLLLL type-certed GMRS radios come with the baked in channels. At least with these certain models, one can choose to button press reset to get out of the GMRS jail. But,.. you never have to if you don't want, and they're RIGHT there with ease of use with Midland. And, you can say "I've never heard a complaint from Midland users",.. Yeah well that's because they're just casual people. You put a radio in their vehicle for them, told them "it was a good one" and they pressed the button, talked, and didn't think about much else. And I don't knock that btw... I'm PERFECTLY fine that most GMRS users are appliance users. So are my wife and kids.. It's actually the intended vibe of GMRS.

My personal opinion is that Midland GMRS radios are pure butt. Midland made turd CB radios sold in Walmart for decades before finding relevance as a GMRS radio maker. I'm not sure when the hell Midland became the Yaesu of GMRS. It's all marketing. You're much better off getting GMRS radios made by companies like Radioddity, Retevis, and companies like that for the same prices, and I'll challenge anyone to tell me that you don't get a better quality product for the same money spent.

The DB-20G is absolutely what I would recommend to anyone as the quintessential quality/price ratio radio. They're just,.. good radios. $99, 20 watts (real watts), plug and play. But also unlockable if you want to get out of GMRS jail and have more repeater channels and more custom channel settings. If anyone asks me "hi, new to GMRS, what radio,.. etc.." Just get a DB-20G. They're radios that radio good for $100. End of conversation.

What are you talking about?..

This is a confusing statement lol. If I'm talking on the 30 GMRS channels, wh... Well, anyway..

For anyone who may have been wondering, yes this radio is usable at GMRS frequencies. Full app control, including transmitting and receiving of audio (android only), and even text messaging from the app which makes it just as simple as texting on your phone normally.. You can actually link the radio with your phone, set the radio, and just walk around with your phone. It's also just an overall very high quality radio.

You and your wife don't need to be yelling your call sign back and forth to eachother. In fact, the frequent yelling of callsigns on GMRS is a learned dork habit of all of the ham radio people who've moved in on GMRS.

Yes I agree with that. And where have they gotten this idea?

Well,.. the whole "money back" thing is if you're foolish enough to get the second mortgage to let a company do a pro roof install. I'm not trying to replace my mains power with off-grid solar that runs the house entirely. I'm more of the mind of having some field deployable solar kit that can get set out in the yard to be a supplement, or bare bones sustenance level capability in the event it would come to it. But I'll tell you what, I've dug into this stuff enough just as a personal interest that I probably COULD extrapolate what I already know how to do and accomplish a setup robust enough to power a small home entirely.. I wouldn't need to spend 100k to do it either...

The problem is that I believe that a lot of people genuinely believe that the principal mission of GMRS is to get on and socialize with the traffic that they hear. They probably legitimately don't know better because there IS this pervasive thing happening on the band. It's clear to see just by the way people discuss it on THIS forum.. Here's a litmus test... Did you buy 1 GMRS radio, or did you buy 2 or more?... If you bought only 1, you're probably a perpetrator.. lol

It's illogical to say that you doubt what I'm telling you my experiences are. I'm pretty sure that we do not live in the same places. Do you suppose it's possible that what you experience in your location could vary from what I experience in my location? It is in fact what is prevalent here. And it isn't just that it's inappropriate to ask about equipment, It's inappropriate to make the unwelcome contact to begin with. When someone hears chatter on the GMRS, maybe listen to it. If it sounds like a couple of people just exchanging mundane information between eachother, use your non-autistic brain to recognize that it's not a CQ call... This only sounds alarming and insulting if you frame all-things-radio with a Ham radio mind. And therein lies the issue.. Hi, not ham radio...

Nah, not on the GMRS. The problem is that the radio nerds moved into GMRS as a novelty, not appreciating that is was for the casual appliance user. It became so prevalent they started to make themselves at home here. When they hear traffic, they get on to let us know they're monitoring . Moral of the story,... I want the wives and kids to be able to grab a radio that we set up, key up, and call eachother. Callsign is label maker printed on each mic, but frankly, do we need to even be about that? If my son raises me on the radio for some minutia communication, and rando Dave jumps in to ask for a callsign ID, am I wrong for feeling like that guy can kind of F off? We've got our call and IMO that's between us and the FCC.. I AM a radio nerd. I'd equate myself to a highly informed and motivated Tech class (despite not being one). But I understand and appreciate that the fam (and fams in the plural sense at large) aren't going to be. And we should be ABLE to set the radios up within our circles and do the GMRS thing without the ham types getting mixed into our practical comms type situations..

She didn't know about what kind of antenna she had and how much gain it had...

The whole reason why I'm even on this crusade is because of some goof getting on the radio and making my shy wife uncomfortable while we were trying to use GMRS correctly... Since then I've just been willing to let let people know where 70cm's is...