Lscott

Think about the logical contradiction. And yes there are Hams that do just what I’ve mentioned.

Hams are cheap. They will complain about the cost of the BT remote mic, $150, then go out and spend $10K on a fancy HF rig they use for nothing else but contest work. ?

I find they are irritating but they do serve a purpose. Using a repeater with a long hang time and several participating in a round table discussion the Roger Beep lets everyone know the repeater is available for the next guy to key up to use. Some repeaters use a "courtesy tone" for this but many don't. I've stepped on others and had the same happen to me, you're not sure the other guy is finished talking or just pausing for a few seconds before continuing.

I can understand why some people seem to be put off by Ham radio. It's more of a technical hobby and attracts these type of people. When you have a group like that it's inevitable there will be egos and attitudes on display. It seems to be associated often with people in technical areas. You should sit in some engineering design review meetings if you think the on air stuff is brutal! Hams are also very protective of their "turf". When you consider how much spectrum they have free access to and allowed power they have a lot to loose if the FCC gets a bug up their back side. That's not counting the commercial interests that look at Ham radio spectrum as "easy picking" when they petition the FCC for spectrum for their new service they want to roll out. It's basically a non stop assault. The ARRL even has a special spectrum defense fund, and people, dedicated to just this issue. I agree with your point about GMRS being a middle ground. It's low pressure and the only cost of entry is a cheap radio and $35 for the license. No tests, CW etc. thus nothing to brag about or try to use as a right of passage. Other than the frequent questions about antennas, coax and installation/programming issues one can "buy a box" and setup a functioning system fairly quickly. GMRS is far friendlier for non technical people to use. MURS isn't that popular since not many are aware of it and the lack of extensive equipment to use. Not having access to repeaters doesn't help either. I'm going to guess many people who do use it are employing old Part 90 VHF radios reprogrammed to meet the frequency and bandwidth requirements. I'll also wager those radios are running more than the allowed 2 watts, likely in the 5 watt range since that's typical for Part 90 VHF HT's. CB radio seems to have gotten a bit better since the 70's and early 80's. Even so some people won't turn on the CB if they have their little kids in the car. No licenses, no accountability and mostly no FCC enforcement are mainly responsible for the present state of CB radio. If people aren't careful GMRS could end up the same way.

There are different types and levels of encryption. How much of that is operational with other radios and manufactures?

A lot of Hams, many won’t publicly admit it, have their VHF/UHF Ham rigs with the MARS/CAP mod for the same reason. Oh, on VHF some have the marine channels programmed in too.

I’ve never found them useful. With a radio hanging on the belt the wrist strap has a nasty habit of catching on crap as you walk close by things then rips the radio off your belt.

Is there a lot of Ham P25 activity in your area? You have a ton of equipment for it.

One and the same.

Oh well, call signs nobody cares about, at least some have expressed that opinion. It would have been nice if they did ID. Then one would have a chance to contact them and get the problem resolved.

OK. "Morse Code is used exclusively by Electronics Based Life Forms to communicate among themselves using advanced Organic Digital Signal Processors, running state of the art Artificial Intelligence Software, to perform the highly complex transmit encryption, receive decryption and error correction functions."

As sophisticated as the radios are becoming I just wished they would do one with voice commands. They have that now with the systems in modern cars. Then second thing is provide an option to plug in a mobile radio to the communication network in the car so the ubiquitous info screen can be used to replace the front panel on the radio. Then you can stash the radio body out of sight and not screw around running cables all over the place, drilling holes etc. to mount it or the remote head. In place of that more manufactures can do what Anytone has done with the D578 buy offering a BT remote. It's about the size of a cell phone. I have one on order for mine. https://powerwerx.com/anytone-bt01-bluetooth-mic-d578uv

That's why repeaters use PL tones for access. You can have multiple repeaters on the same frequency, but using different tones. Not really an issue unless the repeaters are being accessed at the same time. Per the rules all frequencies are shared so nobody has exclusive use of them. Any interference has to be worked out between the users involved.

This link gets a bit technical but covers other factors that affect range. https://vu2nsb.com/radio-propagation/free-space-propagation/

When you're there have you tried to monitor 446.0 to 446.2? That's the European PMR446 license free band there. Likely foreign visitors bring their PMR446 radios with them not realizing they're not legal here, and are in fact operating on the Ham 70cm band. They operate narrow band FM and or DMR! Some will do a mode called dPMR446, which is very similar to NXDN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMR446 https://kenwoodcommunications.co.uk/files/file/comms/uk/pmr446/PMR446-White-Paper-V6_18AUG2016_JT_KB.pdf

I typically use my HT's for scanning. The one thing that helps a lot is setting the scan resume delay to 5 seconds or a bit longer. The cheap radios have a fixed delay whereas the commercial radios you can program it. The delay is so the other party has time to hit the PTT button before the radio resumes scanning. That way you don't keep missing part of the conversation because the radio hasn't gotten back to the active channel. On some radios they can also be setup where a very quick press of the PTT button will drop the radio out of scan mode and leave it on the current channel. That way if you want to joint in on the conversation you don't have to manual stop the scan then scroll through the channels to get to the one you want. Later you can just resume scanning with a button press on the front panel.

You can use an external unit that doesn't require a specific radio type. https://www.argentdata.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=98

The NXDN does sound a tiny bit better. It's a subtle difference to my old ears. Less mushy sounding. It's amazing it sounds as good as it does in the very narrow mode, which consumes less bandwidth than P25 does.

I have a TH-D74A as well. It has a complex menu system and can be a bear to learn how to use. Because of that it mostly just sits in a box. For the most part around my area it looks like more people are moving towards DMR and YSF (C4FM) and away from D-Star. Another reason why it doesn't really get used. Personally I would love to see Kenwood replace the now discontinued D-Star TH-D74A with a tri-band version with DMR. Of course they would be competing against the cheaper Chinese radios, like the D878. I think if they had a rock solid radio without all of the firmware and radio programming bugs the D878 versions have people would pay the extra money. They were already paying over $600 for the TH-D74A. Now discontinued they are selling used for way more than they cost new, up to a $1000 in some cases!!! Somebody is buying them. The one thing I don't like about YSF is there currently exists just ONE vendor that makes radios using that mode. I like to have choices.

If you're looking to get some detailed info the below site has a lot to look at. It would be worth your time to check it out. Also people here that have been down this road before can supply good recommendations. http://www.repeater-builder.com/rbtip/index.html

I frequently read similar comments, but doesn't really make sense. DMR, P25 and NXDN all use the exact same codec namely the AMBE2+. When the data rate is the same there should be no difference. Any difference you do hear most likely has to do with any pre and post audio processing done in the radio and not really due to the mode in question. One of the chief problems has to do with ambient noise on the TX side. I've read about plenty of complaints, mainly by fire fighters and police, where things like sirens and other non human spoken sounds cause issues. The codec is HIGHLY optimized for human speech only and anything else will really muck up the encoding. The railroads found out that a lot of their equipment is controlled by DTMF tones that don't encode well with NXDN, and the have to switch back to analog FM when they need to use the tone controls. Because of the above just about every commercial grade digital radio has some kind of audio processing before it's applied to the codec to eliminate any sound that isn't in the range for human speech.

True. As long as the mode details are published it doesn't count as a "secret code" and you're free to use it on the Ham bands. BUT you can't use the encryption feature in those modes! I think another group is trying to come up with a public domain digital voice mode, M17. https://m17project.org/

How much did Kenwood charge you for the license keys for the different modes? I have a buddy that was gifted a NX-1300, the non display model, with NXDN only. I understand another license key, for DMR, can be loaded into the radio and the DMR firmware flashed. Then to switch between modes you have to re-flash the mode specific firmware. I was told the license doesn't need to be reloaded. I have the firmware for both. I have the programming software now I just need to find a display version of the radio, preferably DMR, but if not and it's NXDN I could switch it so long as I don't get raped on the license key.

D-Star and YSF (C4FM) are specific for amateur radio. Everything else is commercial.

I have radios for D-Star, DMR, P25 Phase 1 and NXDN (6.25 KHz and 12.5 KHz) in both VHF and UHF versions. I don't have anything for C4FM yet. I've been looking for a dPMR radio, which seems to be fairly common in Europe, and may start seeing in North America.