SvenMarbles

It is as much as a radio, but in my experience antenna>radio. I’ll actually spend more money on antennas and have less expensive radios.

I've been doing some looking into this antenna. The creator of it claims that it's predicated on a fundamentally different method of antenna science. I'm not in as deep with antenna science as some are, but it has to do magnetic field resonance, making use of variable polarities, and not just the electric/vertical polarity like typical mobile verticals do. The claim being made by the creator is that not only is this antenna a smaller form factor, but it's actually superior. It'll provide a more stable and readable signal in areas where conventional antennas will flutter, drop, etc. Because the gaps get filled by angular/horizontal polarities and the magnetic portion of the signal carrier. Or something to that effect. It's claimed that this antenna (the 2m/70cm version) can work the ISS and satellites while driving and not having to change the orientation of the antenna. Again, because of the use of variable polarities.. Is it snake oil? It's a $200 antenna for the version needed on GMRS. If it does what it says, I've got no problem paying that. But does it? Just curious if anyone here has had any time with one...

I suppose it gets to what the difference between what Amateur radio and GMRS is. Ham radio is a place to be about radio. It's radio for the purpose of the hobby of radio. Each individual holds a license, and typically gets on to speak to random-other hams. The substance of the conversation had is secondary to the simple matter of "we had a contact". "My equipment talked to your equipment and that's neat". GMRS was actually intended to be a more practical radio service. It's why a license is for an entire household. Families, saying "hey add this to the grocery list", or "hey are you almost home?". Not necessarily for 70cm rag chews about antennas. If you wanna do that, get 26 right out of 35 and 440 is there for you.. Some of us are both of those things but just kind of wish there was a thing we could have our wives, kids, and siblings on for the family talk and not feel like we're stepping on toes, even though we're actually the ones in the correct spectrum. Hams moved in on GMRS, because it was there and novel. Now we have these guys all over it seeping the ham flavor all over it and making it uncomfortable for our families to be on.

No more than a Motorolla MDC tail does. But for some reason that's not as taboo at a roger tone.. Despite it being also completely vain and ancillary, and very popular among people who'll yell about a roger.

So the story behind this antenna is that I actually didn’t even want it. I was simply looking to pick up an NMO mag mount base because the antenna that I was interested in was a Melowave Shadow antenna, but don’t currently have an NMO platform for it to be on. After shopping various options everywhere I spotted this Chinese bundle of what appears to be a copy of these Shadow/Ghost style antennas. But it included the mag NMO base that I was after, for less than the price of just only the base everywhere else I looked ($25 to my door from Amazon). I pulled the trigger and figured I could just pitch the antenna part in the trash and still be ahead of the game.. Obviously though, being a radio nerd that I am I had to at least have a look at it. I connected it to my VNA and surprisingly it has a very nice dip across the GMRS portion. 1.3-1. I then took it for a ride checking into some repeaters in my area and got really good reports. Receive copy was great as well. Repeaters ranged from 10-26 miles away. If you read some of the user reviews online for this antenna, it’s not great. But here’s the thing about it. It’s being sold as a “ham radio, 2M/70cm dual bander”. It’s even labeled as such with a sticker right on the antenna itself. There’s no spot on VHF that is even usable for this antenna. SWR is like 6+. Even on 70cm the numbers are on the high side of the usable slope. So if you bought this antenna for those purposes, it is bad. But fortunately and luckily for GMRS users, this antenna lands resonant (by dumb luck?) at the GMRS region. This antenna is sneakily, and possibly entirely by accident, a quite good GMRS mobile antenna! Has anyone else tried one out?

We have a really nice selection of wide coverage repeaters where I am, and only 1 of them is a s*** show. Naperville 575. Mostly thanks to 1 guy really. He just enjoys the radio hobby as a problem maker, but he’s done a good job of getting people to show up to his house asking him to “come outside!!”. Aside from that, everyone else is really chill. The other repeaters are actually even a bit too ham flavored for my liking.. We’re doing 70cm ham nets on our stuff over here, with calls, and “ham speak”… etc.. Both suck equally imo…

It doesn’t really seem like there are any very good repeaters for use inside of the city of Chicago. Out in the western/south suburbs we have a number of excellent and wide covering repeaters. The city itself though seems pretty sparse, with the handful of 10 mile diameter coverage things.. Just curious if any of those repeater guys out in my area have any ambitions of getting something set up nice and high to do something for the city itself? The ham clubs have some nice ones that do well. But up until now there doesn’t seem to be any good stuff for the GMRS side..

It’s literally my base desk radio. I talk all over the region with it. 11 watts GMRS off of battery. USB-C and solar rechargeable. 11db gain antenna outside,.. means roughly 66 watts erp after coax loss.. I have 4 more of them. 3 in the cars and one still boxed just in case. Yeah they’re the best I’ve found yet… I try them all.

Thanks for the tips. I think I'm realizing that I need to do a better job of weather proofing my connection points as well. It's a soggy say here and my SWRs are .3 higher than they were yesterday,.. despite no other change.

So here's the deal with the H8. it is both a ham radio AND a GMRS radio. depending on which model you buy, you'll be shipped a version with a firmware version for each. But it doesn't matter as far as the harware goes. There's a key press at startup that'll put your radio into either Ham, GMRS, or fully unlocked mode.. The TD-H8 is the radio that I use full time. I operate mine in unlocked mode with "software tuneups" that make it do 10.5-13 watts. If you have questions about how to work with an H8, I'm your guy.

It’s possible, if you’re willing to operate your HT as not an HT. Get an N9TAX slimjim antenna (GMRS version). Screw it on and sling it up someplace. It’ll hit your repeaters as long a those repeaters are worth a damn..

Everything does still work fine. I'm just being a bit hyper-vigilant over my SWR numbers. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on "antenna-ry" tuning, and such, but this is just puzzling me.. I just kind of want to understand what is causing this.

For about the last week I've been dealing with a sort of frustrating issue with my SWR numbers. I've got a yagi antenna installed outside about 16 feet high that went up about a month ago. When it was newly acquired I spent the time with it on the ground connected to my nanoVNA nudging the tuning block back and forth to get a nicely centered low SWR in the GMRS ranges I desired. I tightened the set screws nice and firm to lock everything in, then spent the better part of an afternoon getting it erected on my mast. Ran everything with a nice LMR-400 type coax. Everything stayed just about as desired until randomly one day I fired the radio up and noticed that my SWR reading (From my Surecom SW-102 that just sort of lives in-line) was reading about a 2.3 SWR. Now a little bit more context might be necessary about how I operate this setup, and I apologize for this post getting a bit long winded. I have a sort of makeshift "tower" setup consisting of a 4x4 fence post concreted about a foot and a half into the ground, and then a few sections of masting pole (from the TV antenna aisle of the home improvement store) mounted onto it. At the top of that is actually a VHF antenna for MURS. My GMRS yagi is mounted further down on a PVC arrangement that the runs down parallel to the steel mast. This arrangement is set up so that I can grab the PVC that runs down and manually twist it to point the yagi in different directions. I'll include some pictures below. So as stated before, I noticed that my SWR suddenly spiked one day, and my assumption was that my tuning block must have moved around. Now, I've got LMR-400 run up to this antenna, which is a bit of a thick and stiffer type coax. It's got a bit of a slacked loop at the top by the so-239 connection point on the yagi to accommodate the twisting movement of the yagi, but there's definitely a bit of torque being applied on that connection point due to the stiffness of the LMR-400. It's zip tied off a bit below to support the coax at that spot. So with that being said, my concern was that just the slightest bit of movement at the tuning location must've caused the antenna to go out of tune.. I then spent the better part of an afternoon bringing the pole down, fussing with the tuning block again with the whole pole arrangement laid down and propped up slightly. No matter what I did, my SWR's wouldnt budge from about 2. Suddenly a breeze came through and blew the yagi from it's propped up position, spinning it down and making contact with the ground. No big deal,.. I rotated it back up and again to be upright and not touching anything, and bingo, my SWRs were suddenly back down to where I was wanting them. At that point it occured to me that the way I have this yagi set up is completely electrically isolated up in the air (with it being on PVC). Wind had been blowing and putting a charge on the antenna, and when I brought it down and had the little mishap where the antenna touched the ground, it allowed the accumulated electrons to run off.. So that was the lightbulb moment. Everything is fine, I've just got to get some sort of grounded path in my line to this antenna.. My simplest way of doing that was more on the radio side. I took a length of wire to the middle screw on the power outlet at the desk and connected that to the grounding lug that's on the Surecom SW-102, which sort of remains permanently in-line of the radio setup, whether it's powered on or not, it maintains continuity as just a "connection point" like any adapter would.. I fire it up periodically just to see what things are doing. But this accomplished my goal of getting the circuit contacting my service ground. So here's my only remaining issue. On the VNA, it shows an SWR of 1.68 across 467. but on the Surecom it reads 1.38 when keyed up. And it does so whether my grounded wire is connected to the Surecom meter or not... It also seems to move around a slight bit day by day. I've seen it get as low as 1.01, and then randomly another day it's 1.4.. Why am I getting these shifts in SWR, and why are the readings between my meters inconsistent? Anyone have any suggestions on what to look into?

That’s a good example. You’re probably at an optimal terrain position to be able to do that. You’re doing it with 20 watts. lets suppose you were in a sub-optimal terrain position. The 50 watts wouldn’t fix it..

Yes. That’s something I hadn’t considered. I could step on top of the strange random men who are also on channel if I wanted lol. In my use case though, it’s just the wife son and whoever else I decide is a relative that day for GMRSing.

That’s definitely true.. But here’s another enecdote. I once received an SSTV image from a cube-sat that transmitted at 1 watt. The point being that if you’re in the clear,.. You’re in the clear.. 1 watt or a factor of 10 doesn’t matter..

I’ve spent a fair bit of time modeling my own location with software, and also doing a lot of empirical testing out and about. Home to car, car to car,.. Changing variables, Height, antenna gain, and power. GMRS is UHF,.. The properties of UHF are the following,.. Lossy as heck on coax, is line of sight, can punch through manmade structures better than VHF can, but ultimately crashes into terrain and dies.. Doesn’t matter if it’s 5 watts or 500. Nothing defeats the mound of dirt. You really have only one remedy. Height….. On both the transmitting and receiving side. Power just really hasn’t ever been a substantial factor as far as variables go in anything I test or model from 15 watts to 50. Even 5 watts gets into the same places, just at a lower volume. But on UHF, the things that kill it seem to come into play well before the wattage difference between 15 watts and 50 does. Is running your GMRS at 50 watts just a waste of electricity? Tell me about why you might want to run a 50 watt radio over a 20 watt radio and not have to have such an amp draw…

One thing that I did notice is that when doing those power tests with meters like that (and mine), what you have on the antenna side of the meter matters. Whether it be a dummy load, or a tuned antenna. I did a lot of work recently on my coax run and antenna setup. After doing that, my output readings increased.. It’s almost as though the radio feels like what you have going on down line of your coax is junky and it only puts out a lower percentage of power..

If you bought the “GMRS version” of the radio. It’ll stay 5 watts even after unlocking.. You might have to use the “power tune tool” from the Tidradio website and increase the values… It goes to 10 watts UHF and 12 on VHF. Trust me..

I see it as nearly the same, maybe SLIGHTLY worse actually. But it has the added benefit of the more manageable cable...

1.4 DB loss at 50 ft on a 400 coax. Bit under 25%.. Then do a gain antenna to get it back..

For GMRS, a 50ft run is what I'm comfortable with. It's at that point that I'd want to bring my radio nearer rather than run more coax. Buy "KMR-400" from Amazon. MookieRF. Get the 50ft piece.

Some people on here don't recognize that their particular situation doesn't extrapolate evenly over the country.. Yes, you would like to have your own repeater, and it looks like you do for your needs. nice work..

I should mention too, it's happened very seldomly. Maybe 4 total times in the countless hours that this radio has been operating. It's really not a bother, but more of a curiosity.. I just haven't been able to make any sense of it..

That all makes perfect sense, but I never hear any DTMF going out when this happens. Thanks for clarifying what that ANI-ID stuff is though because I never knew really. This will happen just sort of randomly when Ive got the radio on a repeater and chit chat is going on. It just happens sort of randomly..