SvenMarbles

I’ll allow it.

It's likely that rack is a problem. For an experiment, unroute the coax and just slap it onto your hood instead and do the same experiment with your friend. Once your SWR meter comes in the mail, test it in both spots. That hunk of metal up front of it is going to really monkey with the waveform. I doubt you have connection issues. I'm sure you knew to screw things together properly.. How bad do you need that roof rack on there? lol

I'd say, GMRS isn't a ham facsimile. I know that a ton of people on it seem to really want to treat it as such, but it isn't what it's for. It's closer to FRS. It's aim is to be a utility/domestic/family service. That's why the call isn't for an individual, but a household. It's for house:main radio, family cars:mobile and some handhelds for ski trips. Nobody constantly yelling out call signs and whatnot.. But, it's a novel radio service that attracted the ham nerds who took liberties with the 8 repeater channels and here we are.

That's the one. VE2DBE. It likely is french now that I'm looking at it..

Significantly better. The antenna on your vehicle not only has a proper ground plane, but it's likely a gain antenna, at least 3db. Your effective radiated power from a gain antenna increases by an order of magnitude every 3db. So a 5 watt HT from a mobile 3db gain antenna is roughly 10 watts ERP. Get a 6db gain antenna and then it's 20. The cool thing about car installs is that it IS that simple, because there's no coax loss to take into account. HT antennas, even good ones are compromise antennas. No gain and they have a problem with counterpoise. The ERP on those is actually lower than the rated radio power. What antenna do you have out of curiosity..

Let’s be honest.. Nobody knows who’s your brother or sister or cousin on the air. If you’re on a ski trip with your “group” for a day and you handed out walkie talkies with your call on a label maker sticker on them, it’s not going to matter. I’m not confirming or denying if I do that or not, but there’s no use in getting that far into the weeds on that issue IMO..

right click and save those images, they zoom in better than it displays on this forum.

Ok so Ive generated 2 different ones. One is your simplex range to ground units, and the second is your "repeater range" that shows repeaters that you'd be capable of hitting assuming they were at least 150ft high.

Standby

The mission is simple,.. Get your antenna up high. If you want to spend $4,500 on a proper 35ft tower, that's alright. but the result is essentially the same as doing things like this. My tower has been up in the state that is is for nearly 6 years..

Yeah typically if the just publish the tones outright on the listing, it's an open system. Scroll down a little lower on those pages and a lot of times the repeater owners writes something there explaining the repeater a bit.

I'm playing around with this really awesome tool that I found. It factors in the topography (elevations), height of your antenna, the gain of your antenna, wattage (ERP), and it actually generates a detailed "heat map" overlayed on the standard google map showing how you're getting out. My example below. I've found it to be pretty accurate. I actually went out to one of the far flung isolated specks of red to try to get a copy from back home, and sure enough it came right in.. It's kind of a clunky old windows 95 era web page and it's in another language and you have to register an account, but if you're interested in getting your coverage map made I could generate one for anyone interested. I just need the key data points of your station.. -Your location (within a street or two if you're concerned with privacy) -Antenna height -The gain of your antenna (3db, 6db, 9db, etc) -Your output power in wattage -If you're using lossy coax on a 100ft run you should probably let me know about that too, it'll matter. This map will assume that receiving stations are mobile or HT with an antenna about car roof high. It's possible to adjust the parameters to assume higher receive antennas to see how you hit high mounted repeaters for example. Let me know.... I'm having a lazy Sunday and can sit here doing this for a bit..

Yeah 250 miles probably isn't going to be practical. Impossible? no.. I mean if you wanted to pour endless amounts of money getting a couple of high mounted repeater placements on some towers and daisy-chain them, then you could achieve it. But then as you point out, it would run kind of contrary to the whole point of emergency coms. Too many points of possible failure. It sounds like the guy is looking for something more peer-to-peer (simplex). Even in the ham radio side of things, you can't exactly achieve that in a reliable way. There's nothing inherently different about 2m and 70cm ham, just different licensing. And on the HF side, you can talk around the world, but only when the conditions cooperate. You can't pick the landing spots of your signal. So that's kind of out for "emergency coms'. NVIS would be semi-reliable for a 250 mile wide shine down spot, but now you're getting into some pretty elaborate gear, a general license, antenna-ry, and a crowd of "ham guys" that might be annoyed that you're using the band that way and not just calling CQ and making contacts. There's only one remaining option that I can think of. LoRa. Theoretically, if you can run a trail of nodes (and find places that they can live) all along the way maybe about 15-30 miles apart, then you could have something. This is going to be more of a texting back and forth type thing though, but it would be off-grid, reliable, and doable...

Did you really? Wow I was only kidding. It was only a $250 radio as of very recently. Well disregard that recommendation, unless you find a better price.

Wow you're right! they seem to be VERY RECENTLY discontinued. Not in stock at DX engineering, where I got mine less than a year ago. Well I'll sell you mine for $2,500.

If it's a bad USB it could likely be handled by a general electronics repair guy. There's a few remaining..

I’m probably a strange example of someone in the radio hobby. So get this,.. I’m a life-long radio hobbiest, who has no interest in being a ham.. I like radio, the science of it, antennas, tinkering, and the ability to posses an end-user only method of relative long distance coms for PRACTICAL purposes. I don’t really care to “make contacts” or chat with randos.. I COULD pass a ham tech exam on any given afternoon with no need to study. But I would have to actually make time and arrangements for doing so. But frankly GMRS is better suited to my needs anyway. GMRS is essentially 70cm ham radio, and the call is good for the family. There’s repeaters and everything . It’s a practical service that allows utility coms and not just “say your call, chat with other ridged ham guys about whatever”. You can actually use GMRS for actual practical coms to the wife for a grocery list, or whatever.. Ive got the big house radio and our cars equipped. It’s a complete domestic radio situation. Our local repeater is 2 miles away and covers 60 miles.. There just isn’t another radio service that works this way..

Are you trying to listen in on a digital system? Pickin’s are slim for those. Limited to Uniden basically, which sucks because they aren’t good radios. They’re $600 for a decoding codec in a radio with a silicon labs radio chip and bad front end, all housed in sub par plastic injection mold casing.. I’ve been a hold out for that reason.. If you’re interested in an EXCELLENT and modern (still in production) analog unit, look for the Alinco DJ-X11. Triple conversion superhet. Shortwave all the way to 1.3ghz. Built like a Motorola.. Won’t overload connected to big outdoor antennas.

I’d be interested to know what the character limit would be. Depending on the “data mode” it could be enough to send a reasonable message. 1 per 30 seconds isn’t a terrible limitation

So anyone familiar with part 95 knows that there are some rules variances between what you can do with mobile, HT, and “fixed station”. If you’ve got a handheld, take it in the house, and screw it into your home mounted antenna, do you then have to treat it as a fixed station? Screwed into your car antenna, then it’s a mobile? Is it always still a handheld?

Has anyone tried the GMRS texting functionality? I believe the GMRS-Pro is the only model currently in production that supports it. But under Part 95, it is permitted to transmit from an HT your GPS location as well as a “brief text message” via a data mode. Typically narrow banded data can have a longer functional range than phone. If FT8 can be used to send short data messages narrow banded on low power across the world, I’m interested to know what 5 watts can do to send a data burst. Could be a really nice feature to use with family if the coverage area is decent. Anyone here played around with it yet?

It’s worse than that. The FCC likely has no interest in getting involved and the end result in 15 years could resemble the babbling idiots on CB channel 20.

Someone touched on it a bit, but it was going to be my follow-up point. While the sentiment might be “it’s their repeater to do what they want with”.. They’ve also sort of helped themselves to occupying one of only 8 available repeater positions on the dial.. As far as I know, there’s no governing body that allocates these places to someone looking to erect a repeater. So with that being said I do believe there is SOME responsibility of good stewardship to the GMRS users at large when it comes to how you’re doing things. Tones don’t really matter. If you plop two blow torch repeaters on the same frequency, the tone will open the repeater and let all traffic in. So the idea of “well I’ll start my own repeater then with my own rules” isn’t really possible if your local repeater spots are spoken for.. And you don’t want to just have an arms race of repeaters just trying to squash out the next…

I’m not on a crusade to garner support for a stance. I only asked who already shared the same point of view, and I’m not sure if you’re keeping score but so far it’s looking like I’m not in a small boat all by myself over here. Thanks for clarifying the whole “which things I own and which things I don’t” thing. That really needed to be laid out plainly.. But thanks for sharing. I’ve got you down for 1 “I disagree”.