TrikeRadio

Yes, certified FRS radios all automatically use the proper legal transmit power for the various channels. GMRS radios that also use these channels also are obey those rules for power output on those channels that they share with FRS (athough the power output levels differ somewhat to the rules for FRS.

I do too. My parents live in an area in central California where they have had to evacuate their home several times of the past 10 years because of fires. Thankfully they have not lost their home to fire ... yet. My father-in-law and mother-in-law did lose their home in Colorado to a wildfire 6 or so years back. I am constantly using Watch Duty and Flightradar websites to monitor fires... and also https://www.broadcastify.com I have not had my GMRS radios for a long time but I will be programming them for local emergency use like that when we are in their area up there. Thankfully I don't live in an area that is really threatened by wildfires... but big quakes are of course a threat and I keep my radios ready for those kinds of emergencies.

I have a macbook pro and I don't think you need to deal with "ports" on a mac. Chirp is not just recognizing the radio connection? I am not using your radio or a programming cable so maybe that is different. I have TD-H3 HTs and use the usb cable to connect... I didn't have to do anything special to make CHIRP understand where the radio was.

Convinced me to buy two TD-H3's

I'm pretty new to things around here and I would like to NODE more about this too... currently I do not NODE anything about NODES.

Awesome. Looks good. Give it a try. Enjoy

Correct. Once you put that in and upload to your radio.. it should be able to trigger the repeater - as long as you are in range and have good ilne of sight to it... probably not indoors if it is an HT you are using

one of the options on the pulldown should match your wanted tone... they are standardized

You should also be able to set it to HIGH instead of medium power, unless you have it set to medium for a specific reason Yes, if you want the CTCSS on BOTH transmit and receive you set the Tone MODE to TSQL and enter the CTCSS in "Tone Squelch" if you only want it on transmit to hit the repeater and leave receive as "open" then set Tone Mode to TONE and enter the CTCSS in "Tone" column

Yes "30" is the repeater channel for 462.725... "22" is just the simplex channel for that frequency. add your CTCSS 229.1 tone to you channel "30" and you should be able to hit the repeater if you have a good line of sight to it and in range.

oh yes... my typo

I put a Nagoya 771G and a shorter Nagoya 701G on my TD-H3s.

I am wondering if it is the #3 menu item... the "power save" setting... I think when it is in power save it might not pick up transmissions for a few seconds between it's monitoring timer. try setting it to OFF By default it might be on 1:4 or 1:3 which I think means it is only checking for activity every so many seconds.

Why do emergency services send vital data on frequencies that sit between publicly used FRS / GMRS frequencies? I mean yes radios should not be leaking out transmissions where they should not but every kid at the park with a walmart radio could be on the frequencies above and below where emergency data is being transmitted.

If it came with the GMRS channels pre-loaded as it should… then channels 1-30 should already be in. The last 8 of those are repeater channels. You can add tones to those for nearby repeaters if you want, or keep them as default open (no tone) channels and add specific repeater channels (with the proper frequencies) after that (basically duplicating one of the repeater channels with the +5mhz transmit offset) but you can name it as that specific repeater and add the proper input tone (TX tone) for that specific repeater. And yes the tx decode and rx decode are where you enter any transmit or receive tones to use with the repeater.

Agree. I played with CB in high school but stopped using it for years (and that was just an interest and a semi-hobby about radios) Currently I got GMRS radios to coordinate and communicate with other cyclists that I ride with as a group. I usually lead the group rides and another rider (who already had a HAM license) follows at the end of the ride group to make sure no one gets lost. So we are using our GMRS radios to coordinate and keep everyone safe. and... it reignited my interest in radio in general.. so yeah someday I may get a HAM license too, but for now it is an interesting tool to use with my hobby of cycling.

Agreed. That is a better indicator of how your radio is set.

I suggest you post a screenshot of Chirp and the settings you are inputing so we can see exactly how it looks. That might help us help you.

I ran into that too. in GMRS it seems that above a certain channel number there are issues of making it both TX and RX... at some channel slot it is RX only and I'm not sure why. I just keep all my GMRS channels below 100 and it seems to all work. Not sure if that is a "Bug" or a "feature". Only thing with using the NORMAL mode is that you do need to be very careful that you are programming things correctly for all your channels since it does not lock out some things that you may not be licensed for and/or could get into some trouble if you transmit on.

I have had two TD-H3s for two weeks, I am a noob GMRS user and have found them to work great. I've used CHIRP to program them, have used the face keyboard on teh radios to program them, have tried the odmaster phone app and... prefer CHIRP but it worked. I've dont the firmware updates - very easy no problem. as a complete noob... I have found them to be very easy to use and they have given me no trouble. Yes, there was a learning curve but I attributed that to my general noobieness. and yes there are a few quirks bout the radio that are a little tricky to understand, like the strangely labeled settings for listening to the A and B bands or setting it to show only one band, but on the whole I have found them easy to use and work with.

I left my original 30 GMRS channels set as they come from the reset without tones. Then I set up any specific repeaters in their own channels with their CTCSS or DTS tones and _5 offsets in channels after that. have not had any trouble with doing it that way.

HAM does not seem like it is much for chatting either. It seems like it is mostly a game of collecting QSO contacts (just the facts) I’m not HAM but that’s what it seems like from the outside.

Do you know the distance to the repeater and do you have a line of sight to it ? Do you know if the repeater only requires a CTCSS code on the TX and not on the output? If they dont repeat transmit with the same 141.3 code and you have it on your RX.. you would not hear it

Hard to tell from that... if you are using the same setup / radio... and the antennae is the only change... maybe the connection to the antenna is the problem? or the coax, or your radio just can't push enough power through that coax and antennae? can you talk simplex through the new antenna to any other radio (if you have two of them?

this is not JEOPARDY! ... I don't think they have to phrase it in the form of a question if we can figure it out on our own.