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mcallahan

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Posts posted by mcallahan

  1. I'm also in Arizona and the GMRS repeaters on those peaks are great offroad! I was once able to hit the White Tanks repeater from the Mogollon Rim, sitting on Rim Rd at about 34.425 -111.331. It's about 90 miles line-of-site from my 5W Kenwood HT to the White Tanks, and about 3000' higher. I've also heard people on GMRS from Mt. Lemmon on the White Tanks repeaters too. Kinda "cheating" going from peak to peak like that, but the repeater coverage you have while out off-roading in AZ is really reliable and such a good thing to have. There are many places where cell coverage is not available in AZ but 2m/70cm/GMRS repeaters is.

  2. The revamp of the MyGMRS forums looks amazing on desktop and functions very well on mobile. However, these "Open this topic on..." nag screens that pop up every time on mobile browsers are very annoying:

    LtgMX0M.jpg      zU6joEb.jpg

    There doesn't appear to be a way to permanently disable this as every time I navigate to the forums page I see it. "Chrome" is always shown as the option for all Chromium-based browsers, and this yields a confusing UX. Who even uses Tapatalk anymore in this day and age of mobile-first web development? So many forums I subscribe to have dropped support for this app long ago, RadioReference included. Anyway, my 2¢...

  3. "Most GMRS radios are designed for simplex operation and can't transmit on these frequencies. Which mostly doesn't matter because there are very few GMRS repeaters out there."

     

    idk if I'd agree that there are very few GMRS repeaters out there when this site lists over 1700 repeaters. Even if only half of those listings are accurate and active repeaters, that's still not an insignificant number of GMRS repeaters.

  4. I have heard what sounds like Morse code, specifically on 18/19. What is this?

     

    This is most likely a repeater site ID'ing - while repeaters on GMRS are not required to identify themselves at regular intervals like other radio services, many do this as a courtesy to let other users know that there is an active repeater on that channel/frequency.

     

     

    I have also checked on the repeaters map and saw that some have “travel tones”.  Can some one explain this or point me to a link that will?

    The "travel tone" refers to 141.3 Hz, which is commonly used by GMRS operators on repeaters and/or simplex.  Here are some relevant links that explain in further detail:

     

    Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System

    Digital Code Squelch (DCS)

    CTCSS and DCS Tones -- What's the difference?

  5. I made a blog post a while ago about the history of the Travel Tone on GMRS:

    https://seesharpdotnet.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/the-history-behind-462-675-mhz-and-the-travel-tone/

     

    The Northshore Emergency Association has a very nice history of GMRS (formerly known as UHF Citizens' Band):

    http://www.nsea.com/nseainfo.htm

     

    Here's another interesting read from Doug Smith at Popular Wireless:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20130320034445/http://www.popularwireless.com/gmrs1413.html

  6. They also used to (maybe the still do) sell radios preprogrammed with what they called "race channels" which were a mix of frequencies from the business and public safety pools. They did not make it clear to the consumerthat appropriate FCC licenses are required to operate, and that the risk of causing harmful interference was very high. Not a reputable company, in my opinion.

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