SvenMarbles

It's where 90% of people go wrong. The coax type is no trivial thing at UHF frequencies. The losses are alarming. Most people don't understand that MOST of the power is lost through a 50ft run of RG58 type coax. All of these people buying 50 watt radios just to warm up some coax lol...

It's a cross tone repeater, so use the menu 12 for input 116N, and menu 13 for 103.5hz output. save.. should work.

When you're looking at a radiation pattern diagram, it's usually represented as a sliced side-view. Everything that you're seeing as a lobe is actually meant to be conceptualized as a 360 degree pattern. What it's showing is precisely the take off angles. Usually there's come little packing slip in most good antennas like Comet or Diamond with an illustration of some kind of the radiation pattern.

I wish I could be standing in the area that you're trying to set up, because every terrain circumstance has it's own unique optimal scenario. If you have general line of sight, but varied elevations of desired contact, and are trying to remain in solid contact of simplex hikers around the trails around you, I'd stay at about a 6db antenna for your base. Think of gain in terms of 0 gain being an apple shape, 3db a bit more squashed than an apple, 6db being about a donut, and increments ascending resulting in a frisbee shape. Roughly.. This isn't exactly scientific, but just a sort of way to conceptualize what you're doing with gain. So with that being said, if you're doing a lot of local communicating but at sharply variable elevations, you might want the lower gain options to have the more vertical take off angles.

Power is probably the most over emphasized part of VHF or UHF radio comms. There isn't much practical difference between say 20 and 50 watts assuming that the coax feeds and antennas were the same. VHF and UHF being mainly line of sight bands, terrain becomes your limiting factor long before power does. 50 or 500 watts will not defeat the mound of terrain between you and the receiving station. Only getting your antenna physically higher will. But once you've accomplished getting your antenna up into the clear, again, it doesn't matter if you're running 20 or 50 watts. It'll get out and sound essentially the same. Heck, even 5 watts if you're getting it through your coax feed enough to have a reasonable amount of it left to squirt out of the antenna. Consider this. Voyager, that is now hurdling through interstellar space, is equipped with a 33 watt radio. And is currently still in touch with Earth. When you conceptualize that an antenna in the clear, is an antenna in the clear, you'll understand that it doesn't even matter if you're running a 15 watt GMRS radio or a 50 watt one. I see a lot of people wasting a lot of money and energy buying 50 watt GMRS radios and dealing with the hardwire install needed for the amp draw needed to run it at 50 watts. It's largely a waste.. Concentrate on your antenna, geography, and coax. The actual radio part of radios (generally speaking) are interchangable appliances. The science of success in radio is entirely done at the antenna level..

Could be..

I purchased my first Tidradio TD-H8 nearly a year ago and have loved it for a GMRS radio. Set it to unlocked, and ran the power tune tool with 255’s in the high power setting. It would produce 8-10 watts on GMRS frequencies. Well I bought a brand new one and it arrived today. Same firmware. Uploaded the identical power tune file as the first, and same Chirp memory file. It should perform exactly like the first one. But,.. it doesn’t. Something is different about this example of the radio. GMRS peaks at 4 watts when set up precisely the same as the first.. Disappointed.. So just a warning to anyone who liked this radio for the same reasons I did. It may no longer be the same radio…

Completely separate from my radio tinkering, I’ve also lately gotten into playing around with small solar setups. In doing so it lead me to trying running my radio from it (obviously lol). Well it works great! I’ve got a 30Ah LifePO4 battery wired to a small solar setup, as well as a standard pug in charger/maintainer box wired in as well in case solar just isn’t available. All neatly packed into a box on the floor under my desk. Eliminating the solar component entirely, this battery and charger would seem to me as a great solution to completely replace power supply boxes. The cost is comparable if not cheaper. And it then allows for you to have a margin of backup power on your radio where a power supply box would simply be dead should the mains power become unavailable. Should people be exploring this option instead of power supply boxes altogether?

Well I won’t tell you to do anything you don’t feel good about doing, but GMRS being used on all varieties of radios is pretty ubiquitous. People love their Motorola LMR radios, also not type certified..

I just got one the other day. I typed the mars code in and put it on the meters to see what it does at GMRS. Full 5.5 watts! And still clean. Seems like a very viable radio for someone who wants something very small and of good build quality..

Yes I’m aware. This post is basically predicated on the understanding that you can GMRS on the FT-4X

“what does it matter if some one else is using it or how they like it” Pfff what? It wasn’t mandatory to reply to my post here..

If so, how do you like it?

So I’m tired of being yelled at by boomer hams for having Chinese crap radios. What’s a good non-CCR GMRS radio to get?

That kind of puts things in perspective as people fuss over .2 in SWR lol. I suppose that radios nowadays are robust enough to just pretty much handle anything..

.....but. lots of us also DONT want them linked.. Believe it or not, there's lots of us out here who appreciate and find utility in a 30-50 mile radius repeater, knowing that the traffic on the repeater might actually be a real and useful person. So all of this "let's get signatures to allow linking!".. You're rallying only part of the GMRS user base. We're not all Team You on this... And, I mean as long as "linking anyway" is an acknowledgement that they're operating outside of what is allowed, there's lots of ways people who don't appreciate a linked system jamming up RPT channels can render their system unusable "by also doing things that aren't allowed", and with far less of an investment required.. Just don't do it... Go be ham radio people on 70 cems.. It's right there for ya. This thing is a utility service with wives, kids, groups doing recreation,.. Less as much for hobby radio, or radio for the sake of radio. Some people might once in a while want to erect small repeaters for temporary use and such. It's more in the spirit of what the RPT spots are for.. You all have been a much unwelcomed guest .

I'm literally doing this right now for my whole town. So far 100 members are involved in the Facebook group for it. Monthly radio checks on a certain day and time..

Would my signal not inversely travel the duct just as it were traveling to me?

Yeah I'd heard of tropo before but never developed an great understanding of how it works or what causes it. But I guess I just had a first hand experience with it...

So my 2 year old son woke up in the middle of the night last night (after 2am), which caused me to be awake and not be able to fall back asleep. I decided to just head down to my radio desk for a little while. I switched the radio on and hit the scan button, not actually expecting to actually hear much at that hour. Within one cycle of scan it lands on Channel 15 and it's a full quieting conversation between two guys (about radio stuff). Channel 15 is .550 and we also have a very prominent repeater on Repeater .550. So I automatically think, "this is the Joliet .550". I tune over to where I actually have Joliet .550 with the appropriate tones and shift in case I might want to chime in. It's not there.. Signal bars are full scale, but it's not tone-opening the audio... Now I could tell that this conversation was being had via a repeater by the way the transmissions were tailing out. Well that makes no sense... I'm aware of all of the repeaters in my region, and there isn't another .550 repeater in range, and frankly it wouldn't be wise to put a new one there in this area because the existing one there is a monster. Long story short, I listened for a while trying to identify a call but within a few more minutes it started just sort of fading out like you might hear some shortwave or AM radio station from far away do. It was some sort of propagation anomaly, and I was hearing a very distant .550 repeater. I didn't know that this was possible at the UHF level!! No joke, at one point it sounded like my local machine, and then it faded away into nothing.. Has anyone else had this happen?

That's exactly what I use it for as well. A pretty useful piece of test equipment. I like that it can be set to make an "announcement" at an interval you determine. I'll record that locally before I leave for a road test. This way I'm hearing what the home radio is sounding like with it's own full audio in addition to what the "bounce back" audio sounds like from the remote station. I recently got of the mind that I wanted to get my GMRS simplex situation beefed up and not just be reliant on repeaters. I went and bought at GP-9, got it nice and high, new antennas for the mobiles, and I've been doing a fair bit of testing in various directions from our home radius to understand what the capabilities are. This tool has allowed me the ability to really do a lot more. Additionally, should I ever need to, I could set this thing up in an emergency repeater configuration. I figure this device, any decent handheld, an N9TAX slim Jim, some para-chord and a throw weight pretty much complete the kit of a very capable hill-top ad-hoc repeater setup.. Throw it all into some type of nice weather proof box..

I don’t know how many people here play around with these sorts of devices, but I recently decided to purchase the Argent Data ADS-SR1. Previous to that I owned the Surecom SR-112 simplex repeater box. They’re pretty useful things if for no other reason than to test your own equipment. They can serve as your helping hand on your remote station to key you back and let you know when you’re still hitting the home station. And to play back a recording of how you sound coming in. The problem that I always had with the Surecom version is that it just didn’t work sometimes . It seemed like it made a bad connection in the audio jack, and it could be solved temporarily by just unplugging it and plugging it back in, twisting it, or just otherwise agitating the connection in some way to re-gain electrical contact. Then it would work again, for a while.. Additionally it had a tendency to chop the first couple of seconds off of the transmission, so I had to be in the habit of keying up dead air for the first second of every transmission. It just wasn’t reliable. Cheaply made, and you could feel it by holding by the box. It was just kind of junky. But, it was $60 and the Argent one was $90 and you had to purchase the connection cable separately ($10 more). So about a week ago I had a use for the simplex repeater that I had for a test that I wanted to do, and found that the Surecom box was dead. No longer held a charge on the internal battery and the way I needed to use it required it be on battery power. At that point I just trashed it since it never did work well in the first place. So that’s the end of that thing… I placed an order for the Argent Data version of this device as well as the appropriate cable. Firstly, the best part about this one is that it just simply works. It uses an RJ45 connection at both ends which isn’t really susceptible to a “bad” contact like an audio jack type connection could be. No chop off in the recording. Basically this product is the version of the thing that I think all people are trying to get when they buy these things, that actually just WORKS as intended. Buy once, cry once. Get the Argent Data simplex repeater. It’ll actually do the thing you’re trying to accomplish with it..

How’s this for an idea… -DJI Mavic Pro -Twine and tape -Baofeng -Chinese simplex repeater box You probably have about 15 minutes of flight/hover time lifting the payload. You can have 400 feet of elevation legally, and as much as 1,600 if you’re a rebel

It's part of the whole category of reseller/marketer radios. A fancied up Chinese radio with bold marketing claims and a 100% price mark-up.. This one seems egregious. That thing looks like something from Aliexpress for $35 and you get a pair of them.... BTW, I'm not knocking Chinese radios. I use them exclusively for the most part. But I also pay for the $35 version lol.

Yeah that's an amazing set of circumstances. I'm 635 feet above sea level here. Nothing goes much higher than 700 feet here (Chicago area) but those spots are enough to muffle me out completely.