amaff

Yes. But you're responsible if they muck about too much and piss someone off.

I'm less "base station GMRS" and more "in the backpack and car GMRS" haha I don't really have any kind of antenna except for a nagoya mag mount on the top of a cabinet in my office. That said, I've had an HT with me all morning, and I'm up on the hill overlooking the valley so usually if it's out there and has decent punch, I can hear it, and so far I've got nothin.

Right, but breaking the links and running them as distinct repeaters seems like it's an option, ass-u-me-ing it's legit. ...................what?

Your Encode vs Decode is correct. You can leave Decode blank while you troubleshoot. Do you have the offset programmed in for the repeater? IE: Is it transmitting on the +5 MHz frequency?

I can pretty much guarantee that if you went to the store, found the owner / manager who set all this up, and said "hey could you not be on a repeater frequency" they'd say "...what's a repeater frequency?" They buy a cheap radio, set it on a random number that's quiet when they set it up, and never touch it again. Which, in fairness, is pretty much how GMRS / FRS is set up to work lol

https://youtu.be/HYiDSZxZa68? My money's on either they got trolled, or whoever runs the network needed an excuse to shut it down. That story is fishy as hell.

The comment section never fails to deliver

What was "it"? I didn't see this pop up anywhere else but here so I must've missed it

"Is the FCC that shut down a repeater for being linked in the room with us right now?"

2 KG-905Gs, 4 TD-H3s, antennas, charge cables (they can all take USB-C), and a couple hand mics.

We just got back from a week in Yellowstone with some family from France. My uncle was considering bringing his pair of PMR446 radios down. I explained why that was sort-of a bad idea (would it have bothered anyone with half watt radios? Probably not) ...but that I had us covered

Nice. I have the mountains above Magna between me and Promontory. But the Capital and Ogden repeaters I can get to easily with a handheld, along with all the other ones here locally in the valley.

Yeah I edited my post when I realized there was a Brighton location right by snowbird haha

That's likely the Intermountain Intertie repeater network. https://www.k0tfu.org/intertie/ Scroll down for the map. I have several of those repeaters in my backpacking radio for just-in-casies.

Did you start participating in their conversation? I'd love to hear that freak out

I had a weird issue on mine last week listening in on a few VHF repeaters. We were at Yellowstone and I had some of the park ranger repeater frequencies programmed to listen in on (166.375, 165.5875, 166.875, 172.500). About half the time, after a transmission the squelch on the radio would hang open (hooray deafening static!) until I cycled the MONI button on the radio, which would shut it up. The other half of the time it would work normally with a brief burst of static after a transmission as you'd expect on a repeater output. I listen in on VHF repeaters near home pretty regularly and have never had this issue, so it doesn't SEEM like it would be the radio, but it happened on multiple repeaters in different parts of the park. I turned the squelch up, I turned it down, I turned it medium, but nothing seemed to correct it. My working theory is they're using commercial gear which is transmitting a data burst after the operator keys off and that was screwing with this 100% analog radio? But that it wouldn't stop on its own (like, if I turned the volume down it would stay for minutes if it hung and no one else spoke) was very odd. Anyone seen (...heard...) this before and / or have a fix?

Keep in mind that it's GMRS, which a lot of people don't treat as an activity in and of itself, and often aren't just sitting on the radio all day waiting to talk to someone. In the Salt Lake valley, we have a handful of repeaters that are pretty much constantly monitored and often busy. And several that you won't get an answer on. This might be the latter.

Same question

I've always wondered what the "Call" button was actually for, other than to make the radio make more annoying noise than usual. Is it some vestigial option that used to have a purpose, but like an appendix, just hangs around for no real reason? Or is there an actual purpose that every H/T seems to have one? No amount of searching around has brought me closer to a satisfying answer. So I must ask:

This. With good line of sight, you can go 50+ miles with a 5W handheld and a stock rubber ducky antenna. I'd try and figure out what the issue actually is before hitting it with my purse.

"It depends" None of them, unless they're are on open, dead flat ground, will have a horizon that's a circle. The one further away may have a better, taller antenna, more sensitive hardware, or fewer obstructions. Or it's possible the one close by is down for some reason (maintenance, equipment failure, etc)

Are you able to hear other conversations on there? Are you hearing the 'kickback' from the repeater after your transmission or a station identifier (often in morse code)? It might be that your radios are set up fine but no one's actually listening when you're trying. We have a couple repeaters out here (Salt Lake valley) that you'll often not get an answer on (unless you catch the owner hanging out), and some that are pretty much always monitored.

It's silly lazy programming (HereWeGoAgain.gif ). There's no reason they should restrict how many GMRS channels you should be allowed to have, the radio should enforce its rules no matter what you put on any particular memory slot. I like to have "my own" set of channels with CTS tones for certain uses where we're not trying to hear anyone else, plus decent full set of 'open' channels, plus a bunch of local and regional repeaters, plus the 8 'open' repeater channels, I'm a good bit past the 52 that they deign I should be able to have. Which is dumb. So to configure the thing the way I want, I "have" to run it in "Normal" mode, and program in all the rules manually. It's annoying, but it seems to be the way on a lot of the 'cheap chinese radios'. Did the same with the DB20-G in my truck for the same reasons. The only radios I have that do it right, IMO, are a pair of KG-905Gs. They have, I dunno, a couple hundred channels? More than I need, regardless, and they enforce the rules for any particular frequency no matter where you put it, and don't limit how you can configure it (other than enforcing the GMRS power and bandwidth rules for each particular frequency)

Yellowstone was interesting. A whole lot of nothing (other than occasional traffic between us and the rest of our family in another vehicle), until we got stuck in a multi-hour Bison-fueled traffic jam. Then there was traffic all over. Mostly from a few folks near the front talking about what they saw. Tried to reach out but they were using PL tones so I didn't try and chase that down. Then listening in on the repeaters that the Rangers use. A few bear sightings, a few tickets and an arrest. But it was useful to hear where traffic was building up because of wildlife sightings.

I think we "know" the same guy