SvenMarbles

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..