SvenMarbles

I've got 1 Baofeng UV5R in particular that I bought in like 2013 and it's been my "knock around radio" since then. It was cheap and didn't care about it getting ruined. It's the one that got wet, dropped, given to people I didn't trust (), etc.. Guess what, it STILL serves that role after 11 years. The only thing wrong with it is that the backlight doesn't work anymore. I'd say I got my $17 worth in 2013 dollars. So, as far as "Chinese crap radios" go. That's a case study. I was an early adopter of these things and I'm still waiting for one to not turn on and work, even after abuse. The hams will get upset that they have harmonics. Whatever. The batteries are even pretty great. Charge one up and don't turn it on for a year, and see if it doesn't still have 4 bars when you do . It's a great radio for the "emergency kits". Nothing wrong with doing a Chinese radio thing. They do the radio thing.. And maybe they're not "as good" as some $150+ radios, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in real quick after $40.

No it's like a whole other thing. The Quansheng UVK5 series radios have user flashable firmware capability from the USB-C port so a whole little community of developers on github are developing new firmwares that really improve and open the radio up. There are some videos on Youtube about it. They're $30 radios like the Baofengs are, so it's just become a fun little side bar hobby to get one and play around with these different things people are doing to them..

Sounds like a ton of fun. I'm jealous. You'll do fine with GMRS radios of any measure on your property. If my mental image of your agricultural property reflects reality it's going to be no problem for a kit of straightforward HTs doing simplex. Maybe all choose an agreed upon frequency and a tone as a family, just to sort of have "a private channel". If you want to get a repeater up to get off of the farm and into town, just do that Retevis thing and make yourself a nice mast up high somewhere. It's all about height. Higher the better. If you want to get out further, figure out how to get it even higher. Don't sweat radio power. It's the most overly discussed aspect of things on UHF radio, and it's almost not even a factor. 5 watts up high beats 50 in a hole all day long.. Another option for an ULTRA cheap repeater is a simplex repeater. It's just a real simple deal. It's a box that connects to a radio that you just set out somewhere (again, preferably really high), and it'll just sit there in the middle of comms, and record everything said, then spit it back out afterwards. They can be annoying if you're in range to hear both transmissions, but they do work very well and the simple nature of it means there's not much that can fail. Easily and quickly deployable for temporary type things. It could be a short term option if you don't want to spend on that full duplex repeater box quite yet.. You could get all of this done on just a couple hundred bucks worth of Chinese stuff..

No worries man. I’m not going to bug you. I will say that I “got goofy” in the way I carried on. And,.. I probably wouldn’t choose the same language choices that I did before going forward. I carried some heat over from a completely separate discussion than was happening in this forum and brought it here. The context of it was entirely in my own mind, apart from anything going on here, so it’s no wonder why it seemed “extra”. Aside from that though, I pretty much don’t retract anything that I’ve said. Midland radios aren’t better radios than a lot of Chinese brands. They, themselves, are in fact Chinese radios. And not even the best ones of them. I don’t believe that you bench tested the MTX and a KG-1000 and that they had comparable sensitivity marks. What your motivation for claiming that is,.. I won’t speculate. But I also won’t be pain in your a** about it going forward. If you feel compelled to show something concrete about it (video), then I’ll gladly lay myself bare and all such things… But if not, also fine. We can just get on with everything else and we don’t need to even bring it up anymore.

Just curious . it’s become a bit of a separate hobby of it’s own with the aftermarket firmwares. Pretty cool.

Not anyone. But “some people”..

So here’s the deal. I genuinely don’t GAF about cliques in any of this stuff. Some of us can just stay out of each other’s way. Take the merch or paid speaking engagements from midland dealers. Enjoy… I’m just going to shoot straight as a person who uses and enjoys radios in my exploits for no other type of gain aside from personal use and enjoyment. To be fair, I’ll re-name this thread “I don’t think Midland Radios are very good”. If you want to fight with me over that, we can. But it’ll be risky.

Let’s just say that Midland’s pockets run deep and some of us here in the “influence sphere” are affected. Some people here are a part of the “Midland Ambassador Program”. And I made the mistake of pissing that off..

The CTCSS and DCS only serve the purpose of "breaking things open". Both the repeaters and your radio. Once they have, traffic flows. Nothing is wrong with anything, aside from the poor coordination of the parties running those repeaters. We have a couple of repeaters doing that to eachother in my area as well. I think that the root of the problem is that when the FCC laid out the band plan for GMRS with the 8 repeater pairs, they didn't expect people to go "full ham radio club" and put things on towers that get out forever. So in some regions it's getting to be problematic.

I had every intention of offering the mia culpa. More information came to light and I've decided to sit tight.

As an aside from this topic directly. I've read that the ARRL lobby is working in the courts to make it illegal for HOAs to tell people that they're not allowed to have antennas. It could become a non-factor in the near future...

What sort of traffic is it?

I re-read your post and i think you're actually calling the tone searcher and bother-er the DH. Yes. You're correct and on my team..

It's not a d***head thing to be on a tone simplex.. People forget that the purpose of GMRS isn't the big social club thing. It's for parties to use, sometimes for practical things.. It's what most of GMRS SHOULD be.. it's. not. ham. radio. That reminder is needed more than it should be..

Radios are engineered to exist in uncomfortable heat. Regardless of the season and ambient temperature, they make their own heat.. It's why their bodies are heat sinks, and they have fans inside. Heat was a part of the plan. So ambient heat in your car isn't likely to hurt your radio. Before operating it, maybe be sure you've allowed the AC to cool the cabin for a few minutes though.. 140 degree interior car bake air being circulated amongst it's own heat generation isn't likely to help..

Baofengs are very commonly in use, even among some nation-state millitaries. You might think i'm being silly, but that's 100% real. Russian Federation units were pictured with them in the early days of the invasion as well. It's why they lost so many generals on the battlefield. Ukraine (U.S.) sigint was just listening along the whole way..

I think there is a sort of broad misunderstanding of what you can do on UHF, with watts and DB antennas. People want the 50 watters and the 9db gain antennas thinking that's the best way to operate. For your home setup, and with an antenna up high, sure... But it's more to do with the height/LOS. You could probably be achieving the same result with 10 watts if you're doing nice in that configuration. For the mobile side, you're a low plane level antenna. No matter what,... You can't punch through that dirt grade with watts. 50 or 5,000. The only thing that you can have control of is your take-off angles. The higher DB antennas are shallow. Give up on the watts or ERP. Just radiate more omni.. I've found that that it's been the solution. 5 watts can sound like 50 if it's clear to radiate. On UHF, you're due to lose the contact by terrain long before petering out on power. People CW on 5 watts across the planet. Power isn't the thing folks.. HF does it by ricocheting off of the ionosphere. Power only matters if you care to step over a guy. Do we do that in polite society?

I really hope it works out well for you. My only concern with these antennas are if the QC is such that no 2 of them are the same tune.

The NMO base is probably about 3/8ths, so the antenna itself is right at about 3 1/2”. Here’s how it sits on my wife’s car. Very subtle. It’s her antenna now because it’s the first time she would allow an antenna be put on her car, due to its small form factor. As for gain, I am sure it’s not more than a couple db. I’m actually in the process of re-thinking my strategy with mobile antenna gain though. I’m likely to replace my own with an intentionally lower gain antenna. I suspect that the shallow radiation lobes of the higher gain mobile antennas create dead spots around terrain height variations, whereas a 3db or lower, more Omni-directional in the X axis, performs better. With this antenna and a 4 watt UV5R, I get told on the comeback from radio checks into repeaters that are 10-15 miles away that I’m full quieting and loud. . Not sure if it’s just some kind of lucky anomaly, but this ultra cheapo setup ($50ish dollars all-in) just talks all over town quite nicely…

He’ll get a PM from me tonight.

Yikes… too many pops yesterday and got a little silly. Sorry folks.

I own that. I had an agenda going in. The title of this thread should have been “I don’t think that Midland GMRS radios are that great”. In fairness, it’s within the context of rebuttal of criticism of “Chinese radios”, from people that weren’t even here . So yeah I brought some heat that seemed like it came from nowhere.

Generally speaking, how do you find integrated radio-on-chip receivers vs radios with multiple IF stages to be, relative to eachother?

Well not really . Do you think because I got poked by Randy and his hangers-on that anything pertaining to the topic prior was satisfied?