Ian

Think you just sold me an antenna! I want one of the red ones to match the car's paint… Looks like it'll do the job.

Been thinking about doing something like this. Where'd you get the parts?

Not sure what your experience is. I have two Retevis radios within a meter of me right now, and while the RT76P shipped with a fairly serious firmware bug, they fixed that. My experience with Retevis has been somewhere between generally and overwhelmingly positive…

I'm on my third. Bought an MXT-90 at Wal-Mart on silly good sale, got an MXT-100 on eBay as a spare for fifteen bucks or so, and upgraded to the MXT-275 ASAP when it came out. That is and remains my "daily driver" mobile radio and base station. Eventually it's going to be semi-permanently vehicle mounted with an Australian-style RJ45 passthrough in the dash. That's already bought and mounted, currently just struggling to find a minimally-invasive antenna solution right now. Best I can find is a $330 Sti-Co antenna. Currently planning on upgrading to the new second-generation units which can handle split tones and the new hand-mic with volume knob, but I'm in no hurry.

Well, all the other services available to me at the time would involve SOME form of freebanding. The most performant option I was considering was importing a European Midland CB with FM mode -- it isn't hard to find unused spectrum on there, and with FM for voice quality and CTCSS for squelch, it would have provided the most critical car-to-car voice comms that I need for the occasional road trip or cargo hauling. Instead, we went with an eye-wateringly-expensive eight-hour cellphone call, back when "minutes" cost money! Also, it's only EXTREMELY recently that good tac-net software (APRS apps) can run well on a $40 tablet, and car stereos can run said apps. Like, it was 2023 when Carpuride introduced a CarPlay retrofit display that could run Android mapping software natively. Because the Baofeng GMRS Pro is a type-accepted, software-locked version of that radio which I can hand to "limited users" without fear. I've got my GMRS license, sure -- but it motivated me to get my ham tech license not long after. My mother is interested in getting her ham license eventually, and was supposed to be looking at my study guide to help her pick out a broadcast TV antenna, but she's been doing that for the last seven years! No, the reason is sadder. I just lost a lot of friends to middle age problems, and now there's only one friend that I might want to communicate with via RF, and he'd be easy to persuade. Just normal shit like moving, incompatible work schedules, hobbies drifting apart. (In my case, I just can't afford to participate in Warhammer, which makes ham radio look CHEAP! I was gifted a Warmachine army by the friend who moved to New York, but I'm just barely getting into that.) Only now that the mobile clients have gotten good. Actually? The BEST match to my desires for a mobile radio that I've found so far is the Garmin Group Ride Radio… Problem is it's a $350 MURS radio which requires being paired with a minimum $500 GPS device. It'd be easier to convince everyone to get ham tickets than to shell out $850 + tax + shipping! And that's the small screen one; bigger ones go up to a $1500 bundle. Only since T-mobile got their 600 MHz spectrum are there no longer cellphone dead-spots on my weekly commute.

Let's make this question legal. You have access to a MURS base station and a GMRS base station. The GMRS unit is turned to low power, 2W. Both radios feed identical coax lines, leading to a tower extending 20' above your chimney (close to the limit for a MURS base station). Each is connected to a similar, functionally equivalent antenna of 3-5 dB gain. I still can't tell you without more specifics! In terms of range, Height Is Might. Now you have the same line-of-sight for both radios, and because of that, they'll both go approximately just as far. Depending on your local foliage, the VHF might have an advantage -- pine needles really interfere with UHF frequencies, so if you have to punch through a stand of pine trees, the MURS will likely have the advantage, for now. The other place it counterintuitively wins is with its poor building penetration. If you're trying to communicate with someone outside the building, you're swimming upstream… but that means all that RF energy bounces around INSIDE the building, leading to crystal clear radio calls between two people inside of the same stainless steel BigBoxMart building. Ultimately, I'm giving the win to the GMRS unit, since you can flip the power from "low" at two watts to "high" at fifty, and suddenly you're loud and clear waaay out at the distances where MURS is noisy and scratchy and you're mostly hearing the local Wal-Mart and not the person you're trying to communicate with. If we're going to play the two-watt game, the real winner might be the new FM CB radios; it's not unheard of (but not legal for) people to communicate across the Atlantic on four watts, if they have a good antenna and good conditions. 150 MHz and 465 MHz are both line-of-sight bands, whereas down in HF around 25 MHz you can start to get some ground-wave effects as well as being able to bounce off the ionosphere. Depending on sunspot conditions, this can increase your range __wildly.__ CB is in the region where it's also vaguely feasible to attempt near-vertical-incidence-skywave propagation, which again depends on near-perfect conditions, but covers the donut between simplex communication and sky-bounce propagation; this range donut is actually significantly important for deployed military forces. America's current method is to use a repeater in the sky, be it drone, AWACS or satellite, but historically jeeps with skywave antennas were used in this role. A surprising contender might be 900 MHz ISM radios; they're limited to just one watt, but if you struggle with intelligibility more than signal strength due to your local terrain and foliage, they will remain perfectly legible right up until the moment you go below a critical signal-to-noise ratio and fall off the "digital cliff". However, these radios can ping each other, so you can push a button and KNOW if you're in range, or not, with zero ambiguity. 900 MHz also has excellent building penetration, rather the opposite of VHF's problem. Sometimes, multipath "interference" is your friend!

To be fair, there frequently ISN'T a service that does what we want. I mean, it's 2024, and only NOW is there an elegant way to put the radio I want in the truck I have, and I've been scouring the market since 2015!*** It'd be a buttload easier if all my family had ham licenses, but my mother, for example, has been sitting on the ham radio book I got her at her request for five years now. She never did get around to putting up the TV antenna which the book was supposed to help her pick, either… In total, I have one uncle with a lapsed callsign, and nobody else will even use Zello, for fuck's sake! My mother even resisted using radios back when FRS was new-ish and I scored a couple Radio Shack handies for an insanely good deal when we were trying to figure out which breaker in the box turned off the outlet we needed to replace. She just … carried the radio, but shouted across the house, then had the temerity to give me shit when I couldn't hear her. She's well and truly over that obstinate phase, but still won't put any cognitive effort into scrolling through HamStudy for an hour and taking a fifteen question test… *** PS: I'm not permitted to drill holes or fuck up the paint. That means I need a $330 drop-in antenna that replaces the stock antenna, and a Vero VR-N7500 radio hidden in the dash. The hand-mic will be run to a knockout panel in the dash with a CAT5 patch cable. The control panel for the radio will be provided by either a Carpuride CarPlay display which pulls double-duty as an Android tablet when no phone is available, or a Joying drop-in touchscreen head unit. Again, primarily CarPlay and Android Auto, but runs Android apps when nothing is plugged in. When you're not using the app, the radio wisely limits you to flipping through a single bank of sixteen preset channels, and turning the volume up and down; you shouldn't be doing any more than that while you're driving along at highway speed anyway! The final result is a COMPLETELY REVERSIBLE mod with ZERO drilling or wire splicing; the fist-mic either plugs into a jack next to the factory-installed USB charger, or is completely wireless and connected via Bluetooth. The software integrates APRS signaling; it may integrate with a turn-by-turn direction function, giving J. Random Ham (that's me!) the functional equivalent of a police dispatch system, so you can keep an eye on anyone you're caravanning with. Compare this to the (MURS-based) Garmin Group Ride Radio's functionality -- Garmin has absolutely the software stack I want to use here, but god DAMN is that expensive to install, and it's not compatible with the normal stuff I do on a car stereo. $350 for the radio unit, plus $600-1500 worth of fancy GPS navigator. And I'd still need a drop-in VHF antenna for it! So add another $330 for that. $1850 for an all-in Garmin setup to track people you're driving with, or $198 for the ham solution. Other per-vehicle costs -- $330 antenna, $30 dash passthrough, $?? fuse tap for power, are all fixed. Between $100 and $400 to modernize the car stereo which is really nice (but not quite mandatory) for the ham solution, but still required for the Garmin, since it won't do carplay. As it turns out, even the military couldn't get that technology for love or money until several years ago when they developed and open-sourced ATAK -- the Android Tactical Assault Kit, since re-christened the Android Team Awareness Kit, now that it's capable of operating as a full-fledged GIS and not just a blue-force tracker -- basically they added some really useful disaster-relief functions into the software! Amateurs had something like this using APRS, but historically APRS transmitters were small, "cheap", and easy to integrate but receiving APRS broadcasts required a dedicated antenna, radio, and a PC or Mac, which is … non-trivial to install into a modern car! A friend's father actually DID that, but it took waiting until retirement until he had the free time and money to do the necessary engineering work to make it happen.

This would be acting as a cross-band repeater, which is, unfortunately, covered by that prohibition. Don't feel too bad, I have six MURS handies, three base stations, and a mobile from a similar project. Just … I would rather carry a tiny UHF radio than the brick of a VHF one. Still pull them out when GMRS is full of noise or when shopping, though! What might work, if you need a fully unlicensed or minimally-licensed system is using Motorola DTR550 radios for the backhaul. Sure, you're limited to one watt, but it's digital spread spectrum, interference resistant, and one watt into a tight-beam Yagi makes the EIRP a whole lot higher than one watt if the antenna is pointed directly at you. The DTR550 is an older radio, but it has swappable antennas, which makes it our Goldilocks radio here. You'll also want a couple DLR1020 or DLR1060 radios to monitor what's going out over the inter-site beam, plus you'll be able to use it as a compact speaker-mic to access your big fifty-watt base station radio from wherever you are in your house.

What's funny is at this timestamp it mimicks a traditional seven-segment-display layout like the Midland units have. However, at forty seconds: We can see that it's actually a matrix LCD, because it simply says "WIDE BAND" across the display rather than being some obscure numerical code. This makes the menus far clearer, and reduces the need to carry the manual around 24/7 in your glove box.

Shortlisted for future car mounts. I like that the LCD is much less cryptic than the Midlands!

The Ghost is perfectly fine for what it is -- the vehicular equivalent of a rubber ducky courtesy antenna designed for short-range simplex and ease of handling. That was ideal for my use cases, but the radio shop nearby had 3dB Tram antennas, so that's what I have instead of a Ghost.

Yeah, it took me two years of working and putting it off to finish studying up to proficiency. The time and motivation is really the killer here!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=retevis+rt-76p&t=osx&ia=web Retevis RT-76p. Never worked right, and updating the firmware just gave me a new and different set of bugs.

I bought four of 'em on eBay for the collection. They feel like cheap plastic crap, but they actually work really well over here. If you ever trip on 'em, I'll absolutely pay to have them shipped.

Yeah, it's due to the much higher insertion losses when their tiny duplexer is tuned for a 5 MHz offset, I believe. I'm amazed they didn't check to see if the VHF unit was operating in anything like a usable band configuration, to be honest…

Relevant to this, Sti-Co makes combined entertainment/2-way radios that hook into the car stereo and the UHF radio by way of a diplexer; this would prevent that exact problem.

I was wondering about that scenario a couple days ago. It says on the Baofeng 40-watt amp description that the analog models pass RF passively when the amp is off, and I was wondering if I could get away with a cheater repeater like this. Short answer? Not without replacing the duplexer with a fifty-watt model, sounds like. That's another hundred bucks on Amazon…

It's already reading 1.04, I wouldn't change a single thing! … But yeah, that would have been more elegant looking. Still, it's hard to beat free.

Mine was an early unit. It was a series of disappointments. If you're going to buy one, make sure you get a late-production unit; the early ones had crippling firmware bugs. Firmware fixes for the early units enable front-panel programming, but break programming via CHIRP or the Retevis programming software. WRQK522, you seem to be having the problem I had. Do a firmware update.

I use it pretty frequently, although recently I've enjoyed using my "unicorn" radios more often since my Motorola ni-cad batteries are shitting the bed.

Motorola Spirit VHF with 2 watts on "green dot" and "blue dot", selected via toggle switch Motorola Radius with two watts on one channel of the latter two Motorola Radius with two channels selected by a rotary switch, and support for CTCSS unlike the two-channel Spirit units Dakota Alert handhelds, which feel a lot jankier than the Motos, but take AA batteries. I feed them Eneloop 2000 mAh NiMH LSD cells. They also interoperate with Dakoda Alert's proprietary signaling and perimeter sensors, which I haven't had opportunity to fuck with yet. Anytone TERMN-8R And I listen to wal-mart on ham radios whenever I'm bored and in the vicinity.

God, ATAK plus a MURS HT would make a damn fine mobile "dispatch" terminal for the Group Ride Radio.

This … this is the grail radio that I would have loved like five years ago. Never gonna be able to splash out for one at this rate, but… Why did it have to be MURS? Why not make it work with the Rino series? Why not offer Rino radios in MURS, at the very least? It's got five data pins on the back of the 5" model, which is good enough to attach the Group Ride Radio; the 8" unit has nineteen data pins -- can we get a Rino compatible GMRS we can connect via those pins? It would fulfill the FCC's requirements, and Mic-E would be perfectly adequate for communicating data bursts over GMRS. (I imagine encoding callsign into the opening chirp, and location data into the closing chirp…) Bloody brilliant, and yet they're still trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…

I've never used a hotspot either. Right now I can't get my GD-77 to talk to my PC, so I'm in a bit of a pickle as updating it goes. Still, this bad boy has more than enough memory slots for all the weird stuff I could possibly need to scan!

Thank you, that's the word I was looking for! Mine just came in the mail. Do they actually use the same software and codeplugs as the GD-77? Oooh, I'll have to check that out, thanks!