Lscott

Thanks. I’ll look into that.

And at 0.5 watts, which was the power limit at the time on FRS, not terribly useful.

I'm going to the Hamvention in Xenia Ohio next month. I was looking to see if there are any usable open GMRS repeaters in the area. The closet one seems to be in Tipp City. One of our potential members going to the event only has his GMRS license. The rest of use have our Ham licenses. https://mygmrs.com/repeater/4895 The Hamvention site at the fairgrounds looks like it's right at the edge of the coverage zone. I was wondering if there are any unlisted ones that could be used with good coverage in the area. If anyone is interested in meeting up there send me a PM and I'll let you know what frequency and tone we will likely be using on 70cm analog for group communications. We might even use digital, DMR or NXDN. Two of us have radios for those modes.

They do. However the ones I’ve seen are designed more for boosting the power output from a hand held radio in the 2 to 5 watt range. I have one myself since I have a rather large collection of handheld radios so it works for me. As mentioned by others if you are using a real mobile radio your best bet is just get one with a 45 to 50 watt output and skip thinking about amps.

I don't know if that NXDN repeater is used much on digital. It's about 25 miles from my house and from what I've seen on the Internet it's not linked either. There are a few P25 repeaters around Michigan. The closest to me is the K8FBI machine on 70cm, which is about 6 to 7 miles away. I monitor it and most of the traffic is analog. US and Canada NXDN Repeaters - 20230113.pdf US and Canada DMR Repeaters - 20230119.pdf US and Canada D-Star Repeaters - 20230120.pdf US and Canada P25 Repeaters - 20230117.pdf

Yeah, I've noticed that frequently many of the commercial digital mode Ham repeaters are using the Mi5 network in Michigan. https://w8cmn.net/dmr/ https://w8cmn.net/p25/ There is nothing for NXDN on their network. In fact there are only two repeaters for the whole state listed in RepeaterBook.com that does NXDN. There is a nice linked NXDN network in west central Florida however. https://ni4ce.org/nxdn-digital-communications/

Which band seems to have the most activity for digital voice modes? Just looking through the listings in RepeaterBook.com most of it appears to be on the 70cm band. There are some repeaters on VHF 2M and a few on UHF 33cm. I don't see any listed for VHF 1.25M. There are some radios out there that will work digital voice on 1.25M but it just doesn't seem to get any interest. IMHO if anyone is looking at getting a radio for digital voice on the Ham bands your money would be better spent on a UHF 70cm radio.

Are the filters too tight to try and get it on the Ham 33cm band? At least the XPR6580's with a CPS in memory hack you can do it with no mod's to the radio.

Which are NOT Part 95E certified BTW.

If all he needs to do is simply boost the battery voltage the following item is what he's looking for. https://mfjenterprises.com/products/mfj-4416c For portable power where you need 120VAC I have one of the below 300 watt inverters. Some equipment will malfunction when you try to run them off one of the cheap modified sine-wave types. Mine is discontinued but there are newer models. https://gopowersolar.com/products/300-watt-pure-sine-wave-inverter/ New models. https://gopowersolar.com/product-category/inverters/pure-sine-wave-inverters/

What issue is the lower voltage causing you’re trying to fix?

As pointed out you likely need a real band-pass/band-reject type duplexer. The cheap simple ones are just band-reject. If your repeater is built using two radios you can add a band-pass filter inline between the RX radio and the duplexer. You can try an inexpensive one to see if that helps. https://www.409shop.com/409shop_product.php?id=125434

I mentioned in a previous post some commercial radios have a signal strength measurement feature, RSSI, built into them. This is NOT the simple bar graph display you commonly see. https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/302-nx-1300duk5-rssi-display/?context=new A number of radios have the ability to measure the RX signal strength during normal operation, typically for trunking systems with multiple TX sites. The radio can be programmed to use the site with the strongest signal.

Don't keep it in your back pocket. Also make sure you have the VOX feature disabled if you do.?

You might not need to do that. There are a few select radios that include a field strength measurement feature right in the radio. I'm not talking about the crappy bar graph display either. On some of my radios there is a "maintenance" menu where it will show the RX signal strength in dbm.

This is an old thread but a few more frequencies are mentioned in it on UHF for specific locations. https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/noaa-uhf-repeaters.253483/ Also I have a list of VHF frequencies used for weather broadcasts. See attached file. Two are listed for Canada. There is one for the US in the 163 MHz range you don't find commonly listed. I have no idea if that last one is really used. US and Canada Weather Channels.pdf

Well there is one other way to avoid FRS chatter that's 100 percent guaranteed to work. Find the power control button or knob on your radio and move it to the off position. No programming required.

Yup. When I was out of college for a bit I was doing field service work on the company’s equipment. I learned real quick if it isn’t broke and you start screwing with it then it will end up broken almost for sure.

This is just a wild guess but you might be experiencing a case of intermod, inter-modulation interference. https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-is-intermodulation-distortion https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53062f8de4b09e63a23ce552/t/532689a3e4b0825c71c80bc5/1395034531223/what_is_intermodulation_interference.pdf

Lots of money laying on the grass there.?

The official NOAA weather channel frequencies are on VHF. However some have discovered that the studio to transmitter site audio link at times is done on selected UHF frequencies. You can look at the attached file and see what kind of luck you have with it. NOAA UHF Weather Link Frequencies.pdf

I would HIGHLY recommend you read over the GMRS service rules. It will save you asking some questions later on. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E Getting familiar with the channel frequencies/channel numbers/power level allowed helps when reading various posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mobile_Radio_Service Finally getting the hang of how the whole repeater thing works helps a lot when trying to figure out how to program your radio. This topic seems to trip up a lot of first time users. https://woofthebeatenpath.com/how-do-you-use-a-gmrs-repeater-for-longer-range/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxbL2g4E7KU If you have any more questions we're all right here. ?