Ian

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!

The ISS is in the UHF/VHF bands which a mere Technician has privileges for. A tech with a BaoFeng can do it, but more fine-grained control to compensate for Doppler shift would be worlds away better. You'll also want a UHF/VHF directional antenna and a steady hand to keep the thing pointed right at the station. (I honestly don't know which ISS radios are currently active; I read that they recently got a new Kenwood VHF rig a few years ago…)

That'd be great, but I can't afford a Yaesu.

https://cryptomuseum.com/burst/ma4230/index.htm My holy grail of "learning Morse". Digital signaling is for machines.

CCRs were in fact my gateway drug into advanced radioing.

Ouch. Seriously, though, I collect "unicorns" -- things the FCC approved though they violate FCC rules. FRS radios with detachable antennas, MURS multiservice radios, type-certified DMR FRS radios, weird shit.

Only one I've dropped coin on so far is DMR, 'cause I could afford it. Also, some of it's cheap enough that I wouldn't cry if I broke my radio! I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't cry either. Still, I really wish I could find a cheap radio with a really good prolific mode. I'm reminded of Motorola Talkabout DPS radios -- put them in scan, and once they pick up something, you can key up, and the radio will mimic the channel and code of the last incoming transmission.

How would it work for cross-band repeater use? That's the killer app for these ISM radios for me -- connecting to a big chunky base station in one spot in the house from anywhere on the property with a little shirt-pocket handheld. Traditionally, this has been the realm of the garage repeater, but if I cross-band, I can transmit on repeater inputs from the big remote radio, which would be kind of a killer app for me. I'd just use MURS, but that's specifically forbidden from operating cross-band. Edit: They mention double time slots, AMBE, and color codes. Is this just a DMR radio? Crap, I wish they'd support AES256 or AES512. Not that I need that kind of encryption, but it definiterly makes my inner cypherpunk happy.

Not even to someone who collects failed techology like that? :3

For the love of Xenu, why isn't the 275 programmable like the 400? I should __not__ have to ditch handheld-control-head mounting convenience for the sake of PC programmability. For Midland, it would be easy to hide advanced features behind a PC programming cable, but for anyone __but__ midland, implementing them is simply __impossible.__ They're __so close__ to actually making a __really great__ radio, and not just "Eh, good enough" radios…