Lscott

That really sounds like a MUCH better way to program DMR. Cuts out a lot of stupid duplicate programming.

I've done the same. It's even more fun doing a digital radio. In that case I've spent a day, or more, just building the "prototype" code plug for a few hundred channels. Then tying to get all of the options configured is even more work. The worst ones are the Anytone DMR ones. The number of options, many I don't need or use, to configure is just mind blowing.

FRS-GMRS Channels Layout.pdf

Except for the ridiculously huge antennas to get any kind of reasonable range out of a portable radio. Somehow a 102 inch quarter wave whip antenna on a hand held radio doesn't sound very convenient. Not to mention the size of the required ground plane to go with it. At FRS/GMRS frequencies a quarter wave antenna is about 6 inches long. The metal chassis of your hand held radio is about that size making for a reasonable ground plane.

Well when they get saturated with baby monitors, wireless intercoms etc. those radios you spent a good chunk of money on you’ll regret the purchase.

You would be surprised just how well it works. The match is far better than the screw-on antennas you can buy. Look at the simulated SWR match and the measured results. This shows a simple 1/4 wave ground plane has enough bandwidth to cover the typical usable range on the Ham 70cm band through the full GMRS range. That was the goal of the project. I’ve used this on a couple of trips to the Dayton Hamvention the past few years. Running my NX-1300DUK5 DMR radio at the 1 watt setting, on simplex, results in solid communications while keeping the RF exposure to about 0.5 watts average due to the TDMA nature of DMR.

The higher up you can get the antenna the better, even on a hand held radio. Just have to get a bit creative about how to do it. It’s a 1/4 wave ground plane zip tied to a baseball type hat. The antenna is only a touch more than 6 inches tall for the top element. It’s made using nothing more than a cheap female PCB type BNC connector and 1/16 inch diameter buss wire. Then I used about a 3 foot adapter cable, BNC male to SMA male, with real skinny coax for flexibility and a 90 degree BNC male to female adapter.

The FCC can just dispense with the license like they did years ago for CB 11M and just let people do whatever they want. The FCC screwed up when they allowed the sale of combo FRS/GMRS radios while requiring people to get a license to use the then at the time GMRS only channels. Almost everyone ignored that requirement so the FCC just changed the rules and gave FRS access to the GMRS channels with out the license requirement. As a reference point Australia has a UHF 80 channel license free CB radio service WITH repeater access. So it can be done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHF_CB

Nope. Otherwise why bother with getting a license, much less having to pay a fee for it too.

Thank GOD for that. The gym is way too crowded right now. It should thin out in a month or two.

However FRS is an UNLICENSED service which would be causing interference to a LICENSED service in this case GMRS. I would hope the FCC realizes GMRS users paid for the use of the spectrum and should have some reasonable protection from an UNLICENSED service interference.

Somebody else likely did, and your luck would be they live just down the street from you.

It's a repeater output frequency. Yes you do have to share the spectrum, however having a 24/7 signal doesn't qualify as "sharing" the frequency.

On a GMRS repeater frequency? Well see how good a 50 watt radio does compared to a low power FRS signal. I'm sure when the new parents are getting quizzed on what the kids name is on the receiver end, reminding them it's due for a diaper change every 15 minutes and asking if they can repeat their credit card number with the pin since you missed it the last time they will likely turn the D**mn thing off and get rid of it. Nobody wants something in their house that lets the whole neighborhood spy on them. From time to time this kind of crap gets imported and missed by the FCC. I remember when there was a rash of "high power" cordless phones showing up on the Ham 2 meter band. You could hear the things from several miles away.

All the BNC antennas I've ever seen use Male BNC connectors on the end, not Female types. The BNC adapter that screws into the radio uses a Female BNC connector as seen in the attached photos. Many of the Chinese radios use the same format as the more expensive Kenwood commercial radios, reverse polarity Male SMA to a standard female BNC.

MDC is useful if you know how. The linked thread on another forum has some of the details. https://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=41389 As a further note a number of my Kenwood HT’s have MDC built in, so it’s not limited to strictly Motorola radios. For example my NX-1300’s support MDC1200. https://comms.kenwood.com/common/pdf/download/NX1K_Specsheet_K.pdf https://forums.mygmrs.com/gallery/image/290-nx-1300duk5/?context=new

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.