I've been interested in radio communications since I was in my early teens and citizens band was in full swing during the seventies. My brother had a citizens band radio and never let me toy around with it, which just made the "itch" just that much harder to scratch. I eventually went through the citizens band radio phase and graduated to the amateur radio urge. I've had that license since the early nineties. I became interested in the gmrs service a couple of months ago and finally applied for my license. Although I am new to this spectrum of radio service, I am quicky learning that gmrs in nothing like amateur radio. In my opinion it isn't even close to amateur radio. I live near a big city in Texas and there's not even a repeater in the entirety of the city. There is one to the east of the city that barely covers a very small portion of the far east portion of the city. I live west of the city about twenty miles and there's nothing at all, as far as repeaters are concerned, for over a hundred miles. I would have thought that gmrs would have been organized at least to the point that coverage wouldn't be so sparce. Amateur repeaters are everywhere, but not gmrs repeaters! I have a fifty foot Rohn Tower beside my house that could house a repeater, but I'm at the point that I'm pondering the real worth of continuing with the gmrs service. The kicker is that several gmrs related websites showed a few repeaters that covered the area where I live, but I later found out that they had been turned off for some reason. So, now I have a license and the option to simply run in simplex, build and install a repeater or throw in the towel. But I don't give up easily, so I figure I'll explore every possibility before I finally call it quits.
