SvenMarbles

She didn't know about what kind of antenna she had and how much gain it had...

The whole reason why I'm even on this crusade is because of some goof getting on the radio and making my shy wife uncomfortable while we were trying to use GMRS correctly... Since then I've just been willing to let let people know where 70cm's is...

Has anyone else here found solar power to be a pretty fun "hobby"?... Am I a weirdo?... There's just something sort of gratifying from harvesting some completely free electricity. Even if it's just on 100 watts worth of panels into a power bank. It's fun knowing that you can harvest and store a functional amount of electricity completely non-reliant on any sort of subscriber infrastructure. Can keep some phones, handheld radios, a laptop, flashlights, and the bare essentials charged if the power were to not be available. I used to be a generator nerd lol. I still have my big 9500 watt generator, but all that those do is convert a stored energy source into another... Gotta have gas, and you're essentially just using jugs of gas as batteries, and the conversion method is a loud mechanical nightmare. So what's better than just harvesting LIGHT and storing that as electricity? The sun will always be around, and if not, we've got bigger problems anyway..

Are you sure that the people on that repeater WANT to hear you? Not all traffic on the GMRS is an invitation for a "chime in".

It’s absolutely the correct use. It’s not a coincidence that GMRS is Family Radio Service adjacent, and that a license is good “for a family”.

Not meant to be a divisive or abrasive topic. It's laid out pretty clearly what the spirit of GMRS is. Not 70cm lite.. Less for "rag chews" and "making contacts" and more for having radios in the family cars to home. Or a group or family on a ski trip, event, or off roading keeping track of eachother... Repeaters meant to be more local to get up over a hill... Not for yelling "WHISKEY SIERRA ALFA TANGO 423 Monitoring!". For people with some other stated goal and using radio as an aid, and not just "being on the radio". Functional use..

This is the entirety of what I can do radio stuff with… The good news is that it allows for short coax runs (I run them outside through the dryer vent cutout in the wall) and my mast pole setup is right there..

I'd do something like that if I had a bit better of a space circumstance. My radio desk situation is relegated to the downstairs laundry room lol. When the real estate/mortgage rate situation improves we'll definitely be getting a bigger house and maybe I can have a proper room office and have the ability of set up auxilary computers and stuff like that to host online SDRs.

No, having my own local outgoing scanner feed isn't going to do me any good. Are there such things as controllable scanner feeds? I've only ever heard one ones that are parked on set frequencies and just stream police, fire, or whatever.. I'd love to find a kiwisdr style thing for VHF/UHF, if such a thing exists I'd be very interested..

There are no such channel designations on GMRS because GMRS wasn’t meant to be a radio band to get on and reach out to random people.

I’m not an anti-Chinese radio type, but I had a similar problem with a Chinese off label antenna. SWR was being affected a lot by dampness and sometimes just by mystery… I ended up just taking that down and replaced it with a Comet antenna and was really sure to silicone tape up every possible ingress point. No more random bouts of erratic SWR.

LOL, I'll roll the dice. I actually posted the question to a Facebook GMRS group, and predictably the voluntary radio police had to let me know about type certification (I'm familiar). Some of whom are public and proud with their Kenwood and Motorola radios. I guess that type certification scrutiny doesn't apply to the higher brow LMR type radios... For some reason..

And it likely wouldn't even get to that point. The FCC is rarely compelled to enforce unless something is causing an actual problem, even in cases where rules are slightly bent. And I don't see how this would cause an actual problem for anyone..

Well just by virtue of the fact that ,yet again, the language is ambiguous it seems like it would allow for people to just go on ahead and do it just the same way that people just went on ahead and linked repeaters before..

So the online repeater audio monitoring on the MyGMRS map hasn't been functional for a while. I assume that it correlates with when everyone took their links down for repeater linking. But, if I understand things correctly, the language clarification was such that it disallowed linking machines to each other via the internet. But does that necessarily mean that standalone machines cannot continue to provide an audio stream to MyGMRS for monitoring? I'd kind of like to see this feature return. I actually had some pretty good utility for it (hearing your own incoming at a remote site to better understand how you're doing).

Does anyone happen to know if the VGC N76 works, or can be made to work on GMRS frequencies?

They do, but you have to be clear when you speak to them about what the issue is. You have to state that "you'd like to lodge a GMRS radio complaint".

Yes, but in cases like that it's actually best that you attempt to flag them down in the street instead of calling.

If you suspect anyone of an infraction as it pertains to the proper use of their GMRS license / callsign, you should IMMEDIATELY call the police. Do not try to confront the person or sort it out on your own as they could be dangerous.

That's the style of display that I've had bad luck with. Any of those orange dox matrix style displays. Yes, they freeze in the cold and slow down... After about 3 years of winter cycles, I find, they start to die...

The radios I used before perhaps were just not of a very good quality. Both were QYT KT8900 radios. It just seemed like the elements ate them up.

I love that install! I had a little flip down compartment like that on a previous vehicle that I never knew what to do with. Does that fold in and go away cleanly as well?

It's not a topic I see mentioned a lot, but I've gone through a couple of inexpensive mobile radios, I believe, due to the fact that they've lived outside in my truck under very severe cold weather conditions. The LCD display freezes and eventually the contrast of the characters dim to the point that they're not legible anymore. Also, the style of tuning knobs that use that sort of "clicky" method while spinning, will get to the point that the rotation clicks wont register or even run backwards while spinning forward. There's also the matter of the radio cooking in the interior of the car in the summer.. Every radio I've ever owned seems to have resulted in an abbreviated life span due to these type of issues. Do you guys take any sort of measures to mitigate these problems? I've had a DB20G in the truck since Christmas, and we've had a pretty severe arctic stretch during that period. This one seems to be holding up far better than my past mobile radios. The display just lights right up, and aside from the on/off volume knob feeling very stiff when first getting in the truck, it works perfectly cold. It also utilizes button presses to move up and down in channels, so that's one less failure prone component to worry about.... Maybe I've just had bad luck in the past and this one will serve me better..

Regardless of what you decide to do for a permanent base antenna, I'd recommend also purchasing an N9TAX slim jim style antenna and just having it put away. With that, you can have something that is field deployable AFTER whatever type of problem rolls through and busts things up. Toss a line over a tree limb, or something high, or raise a painters pole, and get it up in the air. You can screw it into whatever handheld you have, or even your base radio if you can power it (I believe they're rated to handle 100 watts). Also consider, for a base radio, to instead of buying a power supply box, get a 30ah Lifepo battery, a charger for it, and perhaps even a little solar power setup (harbor freight). The battery accomplishes all of the day to day powering requirements, and instead of having a power supply box plugged in, just have the battery on the plug in trickle charger all the time. This when when things go down you' have some buffer back up power time for the radio. I tested mine, and it'll run my radio with pretty heavy use for about 8 days at high power. This could probably be improved by bumping the power level of the radio down to medium or low power.

Lately, my favorite has been a simple DB-20G (unlocked) I put out in my truck. I made a post about it a couple of weeks ago. It just works perfectly for it's use case.