SvenMarbles

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..

You can give your call in CW, and it's not your problem if anyone understands it...

Is anyone else here running an H8 and randomly have the radio make a beeping tone and then display "P call" on the display? I see nothing in the manual that calls it out.

I can’t remember if I read about it somewhere here in these forums or on a FB group post, but someone was mentioning about, for example, a 6db gain mobile antenna. The way that it accomplishes that gain is by shallowing down that take off angle into something more narrow of disc shaped and really concentrating that radiation to something like a degree or two. And that’s great for ERP increases, but a mound of solid dirt in front of you at the foot of an incline on the roadway is just going to absorb it if you’re running 5 watts or 50. And in this scenario, you’re just beaming that signal nearly horizontally right into it. So if there was a receiving vehicle a mile ahead and already on top of that increased elevation, he may not hear anything at all. But now suppose you have a 3bd gain antenna which is a bit more Omni direction in the vertical axis, perhaps shooting as high as 10-15 degrees. It’s lower ERP, but would be casting signal into more useful directions in realistic terrain environments. When you first get into mobile line of sight radio-ing, one of the first things that you become more keen on is how the terrain lays out ahead of you as you’re driving. You see those high points, and low dips and you just know when you’re optimal for shooting out a nice signal and when you’re likely to get into a dead spot down in a hole. So with that being said, is a high gain vertical actually counter productive in mobile applications?

For sure, but,.. It's been my experience that it's gotten that way because of all of the hams putting the "ham flavor" all over the GMRS band.

So it was like,.. “Hey, anyone out there need any help?”,.. And 34 people responded on ham radio saying “Yes, I need some help over here!”..

You yelled for help on the radio to see what you'd get back? lol Alright then.. I guess every area of the country might not resemble the rest, but I can tell you for sure that GMRS far more active where I am. There's still plenty of 440 and 2meter stuff, but all of those guys are just also on GMRS. Not sure why so many hams do that, but it seems to be a thing.. The GMRS repeaters out here get way more traffic than the club ham repeaters.. But as for what's a better SHTF radio. Technically anything that works to reach your intended party is a good one. I will say this though. GMRS is SUPPOSED to be more for the family units to be able to carry on with more "familiar talk" with husband/wife/kids etc. Somehow though I think if it got used that way hams on the channel might actually accuse you of being in the wrong place, and that you're interrupting the "rag chew".. The irony.. Ham radio on the other hand is explicitly hobby radio. You're not supposed to use it for practical or "familiar comms". You're just supposed to go on there and talk to other radio guys about radio stuff. But I digress.. If i'm choosing the most appropriate line-of-sight band for what my idea of SHTF backup comms is, I'm choosing the one I get to have all of my people setup with, and not the one that is only supposed to be for hobby purposes.. Colostomy bag Larry ain't showing up with food and blankets for you..

Do you think you can try to get more recordings of it, maybe for longer? This sounds a lot like a data mode that isn't even in FM that's trying to be demodulated in FM.. If you do a lot of HF tuning, you'll know what I mean.. I wish i could be around for it and try to tune it on an RSP SDR.

It gets 12 watts on MURS. I actually have a little circle of MURS guys out in my area so it's actually something that I'm on a fair bit. Even went as far as to get an actual 6db MURS purpose made antenna mounted outdoors. So I can definitely vouch for the H8 being suitable for MURS.

Also, the good news is that it’s GMRS that we’re discussing here. No need to “dual band” anything.. We should enjoy the luxury of only needing to target one resonant frequency “chunk” and making the best of it… For 462-467 the quarter wave, purpose cut for that specific frequency (shorter) would provide a better balanced dipole to the radio body…

Thanks for this.. Makes perfect sense. Simplicity, balance, and efficiency.. Have you ever messed around with pig tail counterpoising for HT antennas? If it works, I wonder why manufacturers haven’t incorporated it as a standard design..

Yes I'm aware. That's not what I was point out though. The lower of the dual tuners is hotter than the top one. Specifically on VHF though.

One last thing to add. There's one thing that was encountered and I dont know if this was only in my radio or if this happens on all of them. The lower tuner/VFO is "hotter" on VHF. Uppper and lower will do about the same on UHF, but I do MURS too on this radio also. It'll do about 10 on VHF on the upper as well, but on the lower it does 12. Just a little quirk I discovered..

I'm a budget minded radio hobbyist, which means that I'm an avid consumer of the "cheap Chinese junk". I've possessed all variety of Baofeng, Quansheng, QYT, Talkpod, Radioddity, Retivis, etc. My experiences have been mostly positive. Some QC issues occur at a higher rate than higher priced "known quality brands", but they all DO essentially work. When factoring in the price/value ratio, there's simply no debating whether or not they're worthwhile purchases. Furthermore, when you move away from the $30 category into the $50-80 tier of such radios, It's been my experience that they're mostly excellent, especially when accounting for the value relative to the $200+ options. (Secret time,.. Those radios are made in China too). And say what you want about the Chinese makers of radio equipment, they seem to be very active in being a driving force in innovation and care about what people in the space ask for, and then they do their best to bring it to market. Quickly. If you choose to not be a consumer of such products, that's ok, but you should at least appreciate that they're there applying pressure in the market. Anyone who follows the radio YouTube space is familiar with how often these guys are being sent radios for testing, get pretty honest feedback about the shortcomings, and then revisions are made to solve the problems. That's a pretty remarkable thing for a market sector in the US that if left to the mainline brands, we'd be pretty niche and neglected. A prime case example is the TidRadio brand and the TD-H8 model. A relatively new entrant in the market. The early versions of the H8 had problems, honest feedback was given, and revisions were made. I've waited until I've reached a bit over 30 days of ownership to write this review. Initial impression: Very good build quality. feels "weighty" and stout in the hand. Powers on to a standard logo screen and defaults to a dual VFO display screen. One pet-peeve I have with some of these Chinese made radios is the font choice of the characters. Please stop using seriffed fonts. It's an odd look for a display that should only emphasize utility and readability. Another thing that I found to be a bit of a detraction was the mushy feel of the PTT button. This is less of an issue for my use case because I have my example of the radio mounted down statically and operate it with an external speaker mic. But if I used this radio daily in HT only form, I'd probably really have an issue with this. On day one, when trying to use the bluetooth programming function, I found it to be broken because it wasn't properly saving my repeater shift information. I later found that it was my mistake because I wasn't doing so with the "repeater designated channel" but the simplex one. I now know that the bluetooth programing of this radio does work perfectly fine, but I'll stick to the Chirp method just because of the ergonomics and familiarity that I have with the format. After prolonged use: The handful of cons listed above seem to be the extent of anything wrong with this radio. It probably should be mentioned HOW I deploy this radio. I've made it my primary home "base" radio. It's mounted statically on my desk, with a hand speaker/mic, and via LMR-400 coax to a 9db gain GMRS yagi outdoors about 17ft high and rotatable. I have my reasons for wanting to operate this way. A low power draw radio that operates from a self contained battery. I don't require a high amp power supply that requires mains power to operate. I could even get it charged with solar if need be. Maybe you're getting the idea of why that might matter to me and why I'm of the mind of wanting that. So with that being said, I've been in search of an HT style radio, but, one that has a bit more balls than the standard 3-4 watt options. Anyone whose done the same thing might be familiar with how frustrating that search is, with all of the gaudy and fake Aliexpress (false) advertisements of 8-10 watt HTs. The TidRadio TD-H8 is genuinely a 10 watt radio (picture below). Which means that it straddles the line perfectly between a more powerful mobile and a less powerful handheld. With a 9db gain antenna and 1.4db loss across a 50ft run, it provides for an ERP of 57.8 watts. Which has been good enough to simplex my mobiles solidly in a 12 mile radius, and reach repeaters full quieting at least 50 miles away. The way that I have things configured, for my needs, I give this radio two very big thumbs up and recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone trying to accomplish a similar thing. ::Edit:: I neglected to mention one important thing. There are two variants for sale of the H8. The GMRS and Ham versions. The GMRS version of this radio will be software locked to transmit at 5 watts. Fortunately it doesn't matter which model that you buy, because there is an unlock method that simply involves a button press combination at startup to toggle the radio into operating unlocked. You'll need to do this with either model to get it to both operate on GMRS frequencies, and also at the higher power. Ham mode will be the higher power but wont allow operation on GMRS, GMRS version grants the GMRS frequencies but at low power. Unlocked mode is the third mode that allows both and both variants of the radio can be toggled into it..

I have to agree. As soon as you blend the "radio thing" with an internet connection, it lost the plot right there. I got my jollies talking to internet strangers in 1997 on AOL chat rooms. It's not what I'm after in 2024.. Don't shoot me but I'm a bit of a... ::whispering voice:: Prepper. I want my radio to be it's own backbone. If you're 80 miles out and I can't reach you, I don't need ya lol. Laugh if you want, but when the phone towers and repeaters lose power, I got my house and cars and neighbors on the phone within 10 miles,.. When everyone else is sitting puzzled looking at their phones not even getting info from something as simple as an AM radio. Yes I'm the deep freezer with 12 months of meat and fussing over backup power type..