SvenMarbles

So I play with shortwaves, even more-so than I play with GMRS stuff. If I would recommend 1 thing, it would be to get a Belka. It’s that tiny black radio on the upper right of my photo. I know that it seems impossibly small to be anything good. It’s the best radio pictured there.. It can do it because it’s a self contained SDR radio. You can spin the dial right on the unit itself and tune things, or it plugs into a PC with IQ output and can be used with software. It’s the modern best of all things. The maker of these is in Belarus and you have to have it ordered from there. They’re a bit rare to get in the United States, but it’s very doable. I have 2. The one you see and one boxed and put away to be sure I’m never without one. They’re less than $200.

If your budget is 1,200-1,500 you should definitely go with ham gear. TCP or whatever his name is, is right. Get a nice Yaesu HF rig.

That’s ridiculous. Please don’t be a state to set this precedent..

Gilles is always going to give you the straight dope on shortwave radios.

SWL/HF monitoring is an adjacent hobby of mine. Let's set some parameters. Budget? Do you only want a newly manufactured radio? Do you want sideband? (be able to tune HF hams, military, and utility) Do you need it to be a tabletop or is a portable form factor ok? Add me to the "don't buy the Eton 750" camp. It's a big plastic box for no reason with the guts of much less expensive portable radio inside. You're paying for the garish plastic injection molded aesthetic. A Tecsun 501 for example is a superior radio to that for about $150 less. My radios pictured below. They are what I consider to be the best of each respective type/category.

I need to get that MFJ 1886 loop before they go away!

You'd think you would get some sort of piece of paper in the mail afterwards, but nothing of the sort came for me.. Just kept checking in on that broken website until it listed a call sign.

Weird…

I left my goat rope at your mom's house..

If you buy the $18 Baofeng and it does exactly what you hoped it did, there's definite case to be made that it is in fact the "best" GMRS radio.

Just the absolute best, regardless of money? Someone will probably say get a Motorola. Best quality/performance/price ratio? some would say the TD-H8. For more money, great quality but is a mainline locked up 5 watter? Wouxun KGQ10G. Best is going to be subjective based on what your parameters are..

V/M in the upper right of the face. It stands for VFO or Memory

Height is the main variable for improving your GMRS performance. The 5 feet could be just what gets you past a hump somewhere, or it could not matter at all, depending on said hump.. If you've got the coax coiled up, you might as well be up there the extra 5 feet.

You’re exactly right. And I’ve tested a variety of things in a variety of environments, on a variety of LOS frequency ranges. The lower decibel rated antennas round out the radiation pattern in such a way that a 30ft elevation change a mile up the road doesn’t just choke out a signal. Conversely, on a wide open flat plane, the higher decibel gain antennas “put the thumb over the garden hose” a bit for a little bit more punchy audio. It’s been my experience that, all things considered, it’s just never worthwhile to take that 2.3-3db gain off of the car in favor of the 6+. Because guess what,.. in that wide open plane, that lower gain antenna gets out as well. So why not just roll with something that gives you the best chance of WORKING all of the time? To not prioritize that over being able to “sometimes have punchier audio” seems silly. So everything considered, and just generally speaking,… The lower gain mobile overall just works better . Only if you’re just an absolute turbo-nerd about sounding the absolute best in modulation does it make it worth it to unscrew and rescrew something different. Or you want to be able to step over someone. You’re just as readable and intelligible on the lower power. Claims ERP or wattage being the difference of hitting a repeater or being heard by a station, on UHF, given the exact same conditions and terrain, are a fallacy.. I genuinely think many people simply don’t understand this about antennas, and always assume to buy the highest gain mobile antenna possible. Yes, for your base that you have up high on a pole, get the gain. Not mobile though…

Why

That all checks out to me. Install it, run it, and decide if it works well for you. Don't see why it wouldn't.. Stay with lower gain mobile antennas. I'll be the only one on here to tell you that probably, but trust me. Or actually TRY both and see for yourself. Everyone else is just reciting ideas.

k..

Well that's about all I'd hope to achieve with a power supply. In my case probably a 20-25 watt radio at most and maybe use the front receptacle to power a desktop receiver I have.

I decided I needed a power supply to grow with that’s higher in amps. I found this one on eBay and ordered it, but know nothing about it. Very little info exists on the internet. Just curious if anyone here was running one and what you think of it…

No man . The point is that I’m not doing that. It’s real life out here. If you spend any amount of time off of UHF FM. AM mode on VHF and lower. It’s noisy. The FCC isn’t going to show up in FCC vests and kick in any doors if I complain about anything. We do loops or do out best to set our wire back far on large properties if we have them. RF urban noise has just become a part of the fight.

We have this new 2020+ problem where us two people don't see reality the same.. I read the plain text of 15.5, and I reed gud. I have no idea what part of that says anything resembling what you're talking about..

Now listen,.. If I had a neighbor a house or two away from me who was doing radio as well, and he mentioned that he thought I was doing something that was giving him noise on something. I would ABSOLUTELY do what I needed to to squash that. And then he's also my new radio friend. But aside from that sort of circumstance. Nah..

So when I want to listen to 780 WBBM on my kitchen radio every morning with coffee, but I get the hashy noise because I have a neighbor with the cheap Chinese switching power supply, 15.5 says "sorry bud"..? I think I'm actually encountering "harmful interference". Any radio dork here who also likes to receive the HF/Shortwave band is a victim of it.. By the vapid population who surrounds us, who also don't realize that they're violating FCC regs. My point is,.. We who do the radio, should be the ones to curb our ability to do so, so that these goofs don't hear any noise? Even though they don't know the difference between radio or Instagram? K..

Read 15.5 to YOURSELF. slowly..