SvenMarbles

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”.

I'm really trying to figure out how to articulate this in a way so as not to come across as a jackass. Let me preface this by saying that I appreciate what the custodians of some of these high mounted and well maintained repeaters do. I'm fortunate to live in an area that is well covered by such repeaters. But,.. It's getting a bit tired when I tune into 3 different repeater frequencies and am hearing the same conversation being had by a handful of guys in metro Indy. Nothing against them. They sound like swell guys. I'm personally not super interested in "making contacts" on ham radio, and to extrapolate that sentiment, I'm especially not interested in "making contacts" over VOIP. It's already a bit of a concession from my sort of "radio hobby mission statement" that I'm using a local repeater to begin with. But,.. They're there and they boom the signal out nicely across the Chicago metro area. But that's KINDA where I wish it would end. If we're going as far as to route radio voice comms through the internet, my GMRS radio just became a cordless phone handset. To me that's just sort of antithetical to the entire thing that interests me in this realm. Having a resilient mode of comms that's peer to peer, achieved by my equipment to yours, with radio,.. Now I already know that some will be quick to point out that the repeater in and of itself is already a 3rd party backbone that I can't have control over. I recognize the slight degree of hypocrisy. But it's a tolerable concession to make knowing that these systems are often on managed towers with backup power and often times set along side public safety radio systems and would likely enjoy the same resilience and backup measures that are likely in place to keep those systems online on a bad day. I think like, perhaps there could be chunks of hours during the day that these links go active? But then the remaining time we're working within standalone repeater range only...? I dunno.. Where do you guys stand with this? I just kind of think it only serves to "clog up" the repeaters.

It’s for sale now.. https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/alo-dj-g46t Honestly, I don’t see anything super special about it. A pretty plain 5w handheld. No mention of superhet circuitry or anything.

The more succinct answer is that repeater antennas are up high. If your friend with his handheld was dangling from the same tower, he'd hear you fine on his Baofeng too. It's about line of sight. But at that same distance if he were standing down on the ground, probably not.. So yes, they increase YOUR capability of reaching them because they're up high and listening with relatively clear line of sight.. It's why we all try to put our VHF/UHF antennas up as high as we can. When you get up on your roof, how far can you see on a clear day? And how far can you see from the sidewalk? It's basically that simple.

How about 10Mhz wide? SNR is outstanding. I’m properly antenna’d outdoors . Not listening to my refrigerator indoors with a ducky…

Noise floor? not on my SDR. The biggest curse are the pagers. I get a low ambient noise floor here in a major city. 2 watt murs here gets out.

I came to this idea because I really didnt want to screw anything into my house. Didn't want to compromise my newly done roof or siding despite all of the reports of it being "fine to do". Just needed a stout structure to bolt onto that I didn't care much about, and a 4x4 from the big box home improvement store concrete set into the ground seemed like the perfect stout base to use. As I said, this has been up for years now in the further southwest suburbs of Chicago. We get severe storms in the warmer months. a bit of sway but it's very stout. no guy lines. I actually have a second version of this a bit moved back on my property to support the high side of an HF sloper. That one is with an all PVC mast. Again, all good. I'm actually considering adding another section of mast pole, because this amount has been so problem free. I could probably peek up another 10 feet. The only thing holding me back is that I'll need to sort of finesse all of the coax feed line to accommodate it.

This is what I erected several years back and it's been rock solid for me. -10ft 4x4 wood fence post, $10 -A sack of quick set concrete $8 -Some RCA TV antenna mounting hardware, $13 -4 sections of RCA mast, $56 ------ $87 (add more or less sections of mast to your liking at $13 each, but 4 or less need no guying) There are 2 $40ish antennas on this mast. A widebanded discone that does just about everything acceptably well, and an Amazon yagi for GMRS that really blasts out directionally, but good only for 467 transmit. Add about $15 for some PVC to replicate the little manual rotation contraption I've made. I use this setup with a Tidradio TD-H8 GMRS (That I've turned up to 11 watts VHF 8.5 watts UHF) and it get in full quieting to all of my repeaters, some being 30+ miles away.

Here’s what I’ve set up at home. Discone atop about 21ft, and a yagi directional beneath.

I’ll show you some pictures of my low cost “tower” if you’re interested.

Absolutely. Get a high gain antenna, mount it as high as you’re capable. It’ll result in vastly improved simplex range between that station and HTs around. Repeaters are great, but they’re not yours. How they function or whether they function is ultimately out of your hands. I like best to control all of my own radio capabilities. Just remember height is might. Make use of your highest structure, and then put another 30 ft of mast on top of that . You’ll be surprised what it’ll do even with a 5 watt radio connected.

VHF is such a great slice of spectrum. I can’t understand why it wouldn’t be used more fervently.

That's essentially all that I am trying to sort out. I have both this discone as well as a yagi with a perfect 1.0 dip RIGHT at 467.55. I use a repeater about 20 miles out and I can hit it with both types of antenna. The discone comes in a bit fuzzy and the occasional drop out. The yagi hits the repeater full quieting. It's just that I have to physically go out to my mast to rotate the yagi in the various directions that I'm aiming to target. I have a repeater that's actually excellent in my area that I'm fortunate enough to be 2 miles away from, which is where I stick around on mostly and for that my discone hits that rock solid and full quiet.. Additionally, the discone sits atop my mast about 21ft high, and the yagi is further down the same pole only about 12 feet up, and it still gets out 30+ miles fully quiet with about 7.5 watts. I'm just doing some anecdotal testing of the antennas I have access to. Seeing first hand how antenna design, decibel rating, and lobe patterns really do translate into empirical results. I didn't know much about this end of radio stuff beyond a year ago despite having been involved with it since a young age. Just sort of going down a rabbit hold of antenna gain and the capabilities that can be achieved on the antenna side of things even with low power by paying attention to how things radiate. I think a lot of people get hung up on sheer wattage power, when your radiation efficiency is a far bigger factor.

It matters a good bit on VHF and UHF but you desire a more shallow angle. Every bit of RF that is radiated into a wasted direction is inefficiency towards your "fars capability". Good 9db gain omni verticals will squash the radiation donut into a thinner pattern in vertical diameter. My suspicion is that the radiation pattern from this discone is apple-shaped. For HF, that's fine to shoot your RF up at a high angle for ionospheric reflection. But as we know, UHF is just going out never to return.

Yes, the antanna can take the RF input and has perfectly adequate SWR, but my question is what that radiation pattern is like.. If the radiation take off angle is such that an equal about of it is radiating at 1 o'clock upwards as it is 3 o'clock, that's not very good. my question is if that's the case? Unity gain?

The simple answer is yes, but with all use cases in radio YMMV. Depending on your unique terrain and challenges. In a sterile "laboratory sandbox environment" where you're in open space, there actually is no difference. Unless you want to get into lightyear distances with redshifting because of the radiation spectrum difference and blah blah. VHF has properties that can more "contour" to terrain rather than just beaming into a hillside and getting absorbed like UHF tends to. But at a general rule they're both line-of-sight. But a slight nod to VHF (murs) if you had equal wattage for it's terrain managing characteristics. Conversely, it's also said that UHF has an advantage of being able to more robustly punch through obstacles. Not elevations in terrain itself, but mad made structures, trees, and such. So there's something to be said for both bands, and depending on your environment, you might make an educated preference for one versus the other.