SvenMarbles

Order the Tidradio TD-H8. There’s a button press combination that unlocks it and it’ll do 10-11 watts.

I'm on the outskirts of the Chicago area and there's a repeater of some measure on every possible repeater frequency pair. Every area of the country might not resemble your area of the country. As I've mentioned in previous postings on this forum, I definitely do appreciate the efforts of repeater administrators. The time, money, and energy spent. I'm fortunate to have several high mounted repeaters in my area with great coverage. But I will say this,.. I don't believe the dynamic is entirely that the GMRS community at large just needs to kiss the ring of the repeater administrators. While it is your equipment, you did sort of help yourself to the frequency pair, which isn't yours.. And with the limited number of pairs, there should be some degree of good stewardship towards the GMRS users. I understand that you can't please everyone, but feedback should at least be listened to without smarmy reprisal. The vast majority of repeater administrators take it on well meaning and with good intention, but there are a few out there that do it with "I want to be the moderator of this forum syndrome". The band allocation and the users that wish to occupy it aren't your toy to do what you please with, as your equipment is.

Yes that's true. It's not binding until it's in the actual rule outline, not just published on an article. They're very legally careful to word things the way they do in those rules. The person publishing on a web page, who might be an FCC employee, isn't necessarily the authority to decree anything or they might not have been careful with their own language, or they could even be incorrect altogether. I'm a drone pilot as well and in that hobby the FAA is an equally inconsistent and often convoluted governing body. This kind of stuff is nothing new.. At the end of the day, i'm more in the camp of just go on ahead and enjoy the hobby of your choice and don't do anything obviously idiotic..

I think they have a place. I just wish they werent SO prevalent. If I could tune to one of my 4 or 5 local repeaters and have it be the linked thing, that's fine. But when it's 3 of the 5 all simulcasting the same rag chew from 3 states over, not so much.... I'm not in favor of any more additional government, but I almost wish we could have a sort of informal yet respected body that would sort of keep some order to repeater channel allocations for areas so that people aren't setting up new repeaters on top of others, and maybe additionally they could space out those linked things as well..

I've known about the section in part 95 that mentioned not "linking repeaters to telephone systems" and the sort of ambiguity around whether or not that would apply to linked repeater systems via internet. But this paragraph here seems to be pretty straightforward. Just an observation,.. Radio people seem to have a funny relationship with "rules". It's all ham radio decorum, say your call, use of proper equipment, and you'll be chastised for any deviation, etc. And then on the other hand, "yeah it states that in part 95 but it's not being enforced so,.."

I just read that this morning as well. I wasn’t sure if that was a new ruling or if that language was always there.

I came across this from the FCC this morning. (paragraph 3) It seems to remove any ambiguity from the language in Part 95. https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-division/general-mobile-radio-service-gmrs?fbclid=IwAR3boNx4H1NaI0AJDJgCvTIgCqrIs9Bru0DGkxxr66zRtQrUn-zXSWP0t9s#operations

It’s not distinguishable to the human ear as long as you’re assuming that both radios were already positioned in terrain to copy eachother fine. That’s not the exercise. In actual use cases of running mobile radio, you go up grades, down grades, back behind things, and all variety of constantly changing attenuating variables. The difference of being scratchy but readable in stretches, and not being heard. That’s the difference of a complete order of magnitude increase in ERP. Your conceptualization of point A to Point B radio coms sort of paints the mental image of 2 guys at a desk radio 4 miles apart. And assuming that, you’re not wrong. But there are all variety of use cases. Some like GMRS as a ham radio hobby facsimile, and some like it for actual in-field coms.

Got it. I guess it wasn’t registering with me the whole S-meter part. So what you’re saying is that 1 S-unit increment is very significant.

I’m confused what you mean when you say the difference between the two radios is a half of an S-unit. Which two radios? One with 6db gain antenna and one with 3? Is that in a hypothetical flat plane? The difference of ERP gain increasing by an entire order of magnitude is the difference of being heard or not in various terrain circumstances. I use a 10 watt radio at home. Through 50 feet of LMR-400. About 7.2 watts reaches the antenna for an ERP of 57.6 watts. When I plug in my 4 watt Baofeng with the same formula, the ERP is about 23 watts and I’m not heard in areas that I was scratching into before. Or, I’m scratching in where I was loud before. It matters..

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.