Lscott

That would be interesting to see. I would guess some rather high gate count FPGA’s. They would be programmed to run DSP algorithms far faster than a micro could do it since the calculations could be done in parallel on the data.

And you thought Motorola and Harris was expensive.

I can see Putin's face as he craps his shorts when he realizes one of his new hyper-sonic missiles he ordered lunched is homing in on a GPS target location in North America. Oops.

I was doing some searching for general info on dPMR radios. In the course of that search I found some interesting info that at least a few of the Russians in the Ukraine are using a nice analog/digital multi-band radio. https://www.cryptomuseum.com/radio/azart/ I wonder if any of these have ended up in private hands for personal use.

Are you looking for a dual band radio for Ham use on 2m/70cm, or for just GMRS? Most new Hams start off with one of the CCR's, Cheap Chinese Radios, until they figure out just what they like as features and their operating requirements. Portable Ham specific radios can run anywhere from $25 for the CCR's to $700+ for some tri-band analog/digital radios. If you want to look at commercial grade radios, well that's a whole another topic. They are normally single band types. The multi band ones get rather spendy, even used.

The 1.25M band is sort of ignored by a lot of Hams. Most of it having to do with the fact the allocation is in ITU region 2, basically North America. Due to that few of the major manufactures make equipment for it. I only know of two that make radios with digital modes that will operate on the band, Kenwood TH-D74A and TH-D75A for D-Star, and Anytone D578 radios for DMR with the proper band settings. Don't try using the D878.

I'm really encouraged when I see young people showing up at Ham swaps. I would like to see more. It proves Ham radio isn't dead.

I would not recommend that one. I have something similar, but with a BNC connector on the end. There is no ground plane resulting in a bad SWR match. The crappy coax shield is used as the other half of the dipole.

Can you provide a definitive reference for the above comment?

You might getaway with slipping the payments past, but where are you hiding the "new" radio?

They can use the phone on board. https://weather.com/news/news/2019-01-07-astronaut-accidentally-dials-911-space-station https://youtu.be/3L82DHQfcF8

My radios were aways sent back to a manufacturer approved repair depot. They would have all the required test gear to work on the class of radios they have been approved to service. For scopes I would just buy one of the “cheap” digital Chinese ones new. Our company purchased a bunch of dual trace 50MHz ones from Rigol. They held up well considering how our service people beat their equipment up in the field.

Gets to be an addiction of sorts.

I've purchase many used radios on ebay. If you shop carefully you can find some good deals. Just make sure the seller has a return option. I did buy a few radios with no return option, however many sellers are HIGHLY motivated to avoid any negative feedback. In the few cases I got a bum radio, with a no return policy, the seller refunded the full, or nearly so anyway, the purchase price and told me me keep the defective radio. In that case I ended up sending it out for repair, which basically cost about the original purchase price. So, in the end I spent about the same amount of money, but ended up with a fully checked out, repaired and aligned radio.

One of the first commercial radios I purchased was a Kenwood TK-270G. It works fine on MURS. It's not Part 95 certified for it since the radio was certified in 1999, before the MURS service was created. My understating is it should be fine to use, grandfathered in, so long as the power, frequency and bandwidth are set correctly for the 5 channels. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-J/section-95.2705 https://fccid.io/ALH29463110 https://www.manasrekha.com/pdf/TK-270G-370G.pdf

My experience with Kenwood radios is it’s possible to operate the radio outside of its official band split a bit. With the lower official limit of 146 it’s likely you can get it down to 144. I’ve had better luck with the 40 MHz range in the band split than the 70 MHz or higher ones. Where possible I try to get the 400-470 split on UHF. That covers the Ham 70cm band, GMRS and the usual commercial frequencies. This range seems to be more common on the dual FM/digital mode radios. It’s much harder to find in the analog only models On VHF I love my analog only TK-2170’s, those are 136-174 split. Perfect for Ham 2M, MURS, marine, FM railroads and NOAA weather. These are the VHF version of the TH-3170 I typically use for Ham 70cm repeaters and GMRS.

Yes. Then it comes in two frequency splits to make it more interesting. https://two-way.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/TK780-specs.pdf If the goal was to get a 2M radio for ham it might be ok with the right spilt, 136-162, otherwise the seller is the one who got the steal on the deal. I always get the manufacturer’s brochure for any radio I’m interested in to double check the specifications first. A few that looked good initially I just forgot about it once I saw the specifications. The second thing is look up the FCC ID to see what the frequency range is. You can look up the official frequency range on the FCC’s database with the ID. Most sellers show the tags on the radio. If they don’t ask for a photo. A lot of sellers get the description all wrong. If they don’t have the ID’s or photo then forget it. There are some dishonest sellers out there trying to dump basically worthless radios for high prices.

Does anybody know of any use of dPMR, not to be confused with DMR? As a note dPMR has the same on-air modulation as NXDN, but the digital protocol is totally different. There is a “license free version” dDPMR446, but that’s a European thing. I’m looking at the licensed version of dPMR. https://dpmrassociation.org/dPMR-a-brief-overview.html I have some radios with this mode and haven’t found any info on line about Ham activity using it. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/500-ic-f3162dt-front-and-back-sidepng/ It doesn’t even appear as a “special” mode to search for even on “RepeaterBook.com” thus my question.

I have the software for the MTX400. Never tried it since I don't own any Midland radios. MXT400_Setup_1.05.zip

Unfortunately manufactures "assume" that GMRS repeaters are using the "usual" 5MHz so that gets baked in to the radio's programming software and or firmware. For the most part it works so it's a fair assumption and simplifies the radio programming. This seems to be the case with the GMRS specific radios being sold. The options to work around that is to to use a radio that can be unlocked so arbitrary frequency splits can be programmed, or use a commercial grade radio. The later option typical requires the radio tech to program in two frequencies, a receive and a transmit, there is no entry for a frequency split, or offset. When I first got into using commercial grade radios years back, and coming from a Ham radio back ground where the radios had entries for the offset, it was a bit of a mental adjustment to get use to the idea. You do have to pay attention to which frequency goes into which column. It's easy to switch the two around and end up transmitting on the output frequency and receiving on the input frequency, oops. This is one of my preferred analog only radios for GMRS. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/263-tk-3170jpg/?context=new This is a sample of the programming for a Kenwood TK-3170, which is what I usually carry around for Ham UHF and GMRS use.

You might want to look at something like the antennas in the below link. https://n9taxlabs.com/shop/ols/products/dual-band-murs-gmrs-slim-jim-with-10-or-16-foot-cable No ground plane required. You can try hanging it up on the window.

Oh, that won't be very popular.

Gee, that's might be hard to do. Have two radios and a cold beverage, but only two hands. Got to make a hard choice what to hold on too.

The interesting thing about the rules is it simply states that the repeater input frequencies and output frequencies have to be picked from the allowed list. Note the rules say nothing about any kind of required frequency shift. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E/section-95.1763 There is no requirements the input and output frequencies must be 5MHz apart. While that is the usual case it's not required. One could really frustrate users of preprogrammed, firmware locked, GMRS radios by selecting a pair of frequencies, from the allowed list for repeaters, that are not using a 5MHz split. Any talk about how that would affect channel sharing is another topic.