LeoG

It's a legal term Defined by legal means.

Shall doesn't mean must. It's more determinate than that. Must has ambiguity.

Shall is a legal term without ambiguity. Should has a lot of ambiguity. You were reading the rules on my repeater and it said the repeater should be used with a 0dB gain antenna. Which of course means you can use anything you want. If it said you shall use it with a 0dB gain antenna there is no interpretation to that, it has 1 meaning. Having so many regulations that can be interpreted so many different ways is close to meaningless. And you can get into a lot of trouble when you think it says one thing and can explain why you think that and the FCC says they interpret it in a different way. There should be no way to interpret it except in the way it was meant to be. And it's nearly impossible because there are always groups of lawyers out there paid to find loopholes in regulations their clients want to get around.

Yes, all FM radios need to have a fully variable squelch, analog not digital. Or like the power settings are individually saved for each channel slot the squelch should be too instead of a broad squelch over the band.

Ding ding ding We have a wiener.

Words like "shall" and "must" could be used instead of recommended and should.

Take them out of the scan list. I do that one one guy decided he's going to blab all day on the repeater. On my radio it's just an on/off toggle on that channel slot.

I actually read it so I didn't perjure myself. By the time I was done doing the license I had 8 tabs open. Nice efficient govt website eh?

Well we have one guy who likes to drink and talk to himself and gets upset when no one wants to talk. I don't think he realizes that people have jobs.

Over use is just a factor that most GMRS messages over the airwaves are very short. Usually there aren't long conversations. It's "Honey I'm coming home, over" or "Where are you now and how long will this take, over". And then the call sign. It's rare when you have 2 people jabber jawing for more than 15 minutes at which time you should announce ID. Another reason is to get the other parties attention. It's not a telephone that alerts you a call is coming in. It just comes in. And if you aren't paying attention you might miss it. So announcing your call sign, then saying their name and maybe doing it twice because of no response from the 1st try you get multiple instances of IDing. And if the person fails to connect they'll usually sign off with their ID also. And that might just be the last ditch effort to get whoever you want to contact on the other ends attention.

Could be a lot of trees in the way and they're using a more powerful transmitter and antenna. Maybe your signal isn't strong enough to reach them. They might be using a Rx tone and can't hear you. Or they just don't want to talk to you like OffRoaderX said.

I was going to mention that specifically but I mentioned it in an obscure sense when I gave my microwave example.

You call Guido and Vinny. They'll have a talk with him.

M2 self tapping for plastic.

So 1 watt with a 3dB gain antenna.

Way easier to answer when I didn't

I cheat on my diet.

Ever see fixed microwave stations? Same thing. One place communicating with another on a consistent basis would be my best guess. In lieu of telephone lines.

Simplex?

A fixed station transmits and received from another fixed station. It doesn't talk to mobiles or HTs. Usually they have line of site towers so 15 watts is usually more than enough for good communication.

Well 100% reliable as long as you have internet.

Not so sure about bigger better antenna doing anything to the immutable impenetrable hill. But getting it above said hill will do the trick.

Roger.

Recognized.

One of the bad things about people writing manuals to operate things, they are the people who know how to operate them already. They forget about the simple little things that they take for granted that clueless new operators don't even know about. So to the guy who has made this and operates it on a daily basis and he goes to write it all down to explain it to someone who's never operated it and they miss little in between steps that they've just taken for granted that everyone knows how to do. I've seen it in lots of manuals where to get from one step to the next there's something missing. And that something missing is often really simple but you can't get from here to there without it. And because you've never operated this thing before you are clueless as to what this simple in between step is that the guy who is writing the manual takes for granted. This is what I mean by stupid people. You can't have the guy who is fully experienced on something write instructions about it because they take for granted that everyone knows what they know and eventually skip steps to do the process. Where as the "stupid" person is clueless and when they would right a manual they include everything to the point it's annoying to a person who knows how to do it. But manuals should be written to the lowest denomination in most cases.