SvenMarbles

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”.

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.