Ian

Since siting is so important to performance, this is the most exciting newbie repeater project I've seen so far.

So much for my MXT275.

Super cool, thanks! Actually, only one GD-77s. The other is either a Midland MXT275, or an Anytone TERMN-8R. Perhaps they're covering up for the weakness of the GD-77s' front-end filtering with clean output into a low-noise area? I know I don't have any repeaters nearby, the only thing I can hear from here is, occasionally from a hilltop, a Jacksonville repeater automatically ID'ing, so I suspect I'm in an unexpectedly favorable RF environment. Terrain is Florida, so flat as a pancake. I have a few repeaters handy when I go to the beach, but the middle of the state is a dead zone. Also, I'm the only one who ever uses those repeaters in Cocoa Beach, as far as I can tell; I like to monitor them and SARnet when I'm beaching it up. This place is just a dead zone, for the most part. Every third time I drive by a park, I hear DMR on channel 16. Occasionally a kid with a walkie-talkie after Christmases. But for all I scan, I don't hear much at all. Edit: Nah, you were right. I just checked the maps, and it's closer to 1.7 miles to the grocery store.

Are you thinking of the Dakota Alert gear? I’ve got four of the handies, three bases, and two antennas for them, and I can’t say anything unkind about them other than there should be screwhead-mounting-keyholes on the base for wall mount, and the handies don’t feel super sturdy. They take AA batteries, rechargeable, and are clearly designed for low lifetime cost of operation (you can use Eneloops, and only replace the one bad cell at a time). Proprietary antennas, sadly, but they’re replaceable. No scan function. No big deal. They’re serviceable workaday radios that don’t break the bank designed for rural living, not industrial abuse. I’m tempted to buy a few of their sensors, and build a perimeter around my house, but I know that’s silly and excessive, and it’s an expensive project that’s just for fun. It’ll wait until I have more hobby budget, though. On that topic, I’m pretty sure my mystery MURS message (there’s a Morse ID somewhere in those recordings...) is farm telemetry. Smack in the middle of Wedgefield Florida, with three big radio towers in view, is some kind of automated telemetry. Either a farmer’s, related to that tower, or maybe beamed down the high-voltage powerlines I’m about to drive under, it really seems like some kind of low-bandwidth M2M machine-to-machine telemetry.

I’m in the market for another MXT275 in the next several months. Glad I can support the forum while I’m at it.

Look, I know it’s an objectively bad radio, but it sat at the intersection of a Venn diagram that makes it uniquely compelling to me. Grocery store’s about five miles, and all I’ve known up to this point is bubblepack junk, a couple very nice Radio Shack FRS units, sadly underused, and now with PTT keys gone crunchy and disintegrated disabling otherwise sweet hardware, and Motorola Spirit SV-22 MURS units. Those are my favorite, but they’re heavy and can barely make it to the gas station, because VHF. I’m not saying that they’re good at receive desnsing, but if you want bad bad, you should look at the Retevis RT-22 and its clones. I’ve never gotten the GD-77 to desense, but those do it at the drop of a hat. I’m not hugely demanding of simplex comms. If I could find decent FRS, I’d be happy with that… except I have, in the form of the Motorola Sport 7. At this age, only about half of the ones on eBay work, and I’ve bought every one available, and I have two. They’re fantastic. Those Radio Shack ones are smaller, but they use AAAs (though they’ll charge them if you have a 9v adapter) and lack CTCSS, but can be set to any one of 22 channels with the DIP switches, whereas the Motorolas can only do seven channels, (1, 4, 8, 11…) and seven codes chosen more or less at random (set with a dial designed to be wrenched on with a quarter behind the battery compartment). As for the GD-77, I’ve bowed to interoperability and run it narrowbanded, since most of my fleet is narrowband-only, and only the Talkabout Distances do wideband. Ultimately, the project for which it was bought was to figure out who the heck was running DMR on channel 16 at the local park. Sadly, either the traffic’s encrypted, or setting up DMR is simply beyond me (for now…). Still, if I’m carrying only one radio, there’s a good chance that’s the one. After I lost one of my Anytones to a drop, I’m leery about carrying irreplaceable hardware into the field (even if it’s just Home Depot) without careful consideration. Commercial-grade Motos (into which I place even the Sport 7) are reassuring, as is “not irreplaceable”. I have a wealth of good radios to pick from as my needs evolve, and I thank you for your advice on them. CCRs have their place… which is “close to whoever you need to talk to.”

Related to the Travel Tone, the Open Repeater Initiative is a program that lets people set up a channel 20 repeater at 141.3 for the use of anyone who wanders in.

Believe it or not, the GD-77S is my favorite radio at the moment. It solves practical problems by slinging squiggles, and it's even type-accepted as a business radio (No FPP). As such, it qualifies as the "surplus commercial equipment" that the 2017 memorandum stated was never intended to be banished from the GMRS, and I believe it's legal under the latest regulations. And at five watts, it's my most powerful cheap squiggle-slinger. Used with Motorola gear (2W) on both high and low (1W), it's absolutely comprehensible in two directions when cell phones aren't getting enough signal to send a text message. Is it "good"? Apparently not. Is it good enough? For me and those like me, yeah it is. (And if it gets dropped, I didn't just break irreplaceable hardware!) Edited to add: And at 5w back and forth, it'll reach from handie to handie all the way to our grocery store, and inside too. As far as I'm concerned, that performance is mind-blowing.

I missed that somehow!

It's split is backwards for GMRS, and frankly even ham conventions. Otherwise, I'd be rocking one with a balloon-lofted discone antenna for fairground communications.

https://www.retevis.com/handheld-gmrs-two-way-radio-rt76 New repeater-capable handheld, currenly in production, $31.19. Any experience with this, or am I going to be the one to write the first review?

Can't get blood from a stone. America frequently tries, which is how you spend twenty years in jail moving from trial to trial.

That's a really cool setup -- keep us posted on what you come up with!

Hey guys and gals! I've got a big pile of 90s vintage Spirits and Talkabout Distances. The antennas have all gone brittle, and are exceeding the point of effective duct tape repairs. There's a mixture of Spirits, model SV-22, running on MURS in blue and green dot, and Talkabout Distance and Distance DPS units. The antennas are all going, and the decay is accelerating. I like handing these out to nontechnical family members, because there's not anything they can screw up other than changing the channel unintentionally. But RF burns are a bad thing, so ... Help me pick out some antennae, please! Ideally, they'll be visually distinctive; Motorola's latest ones are stamped with UHF and VHF, which is nice, but I'm open to third-party ones and have a mild preference for silicone jacketing. Thanks!

https://forums.mygmrs.com/topic/1448-seeking-logical-rationale-for-type-95/?p=13112 I believe that using the UV-82C for GMRS would be legal, per the two-year-old FCC guidance linked here. Then again, the left hand seems unsure of what the right hand is doing, and there's a distressing lack of new-production GMRS radios capable of operating to the limits of permitted emissions. This'll be a good time to get the popcorn out... But I'm no longer afraid to transmit with my Radioddity GD-77s (which I've long used for scanning repeaters). https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/ea/presentations/files/nov17/54-Part-95-Misc-Eqpt-Filing-r1-TH.pdf

That FCC publication strongly implies that part 90 radios may be used on part 95 without specific certification; it also implies that 90/95 dual service certification will continue to be available. The way I see it, the golden radio is something like the GD-77s -- part 90 certified ham radios. They'll tune the whole 70cm band, and the 90 cert implies it may be used on GMRS, per that publication.

FRS and GMRS use the same frequencies, though.

https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/ea/presentations/files/nov17/54-Part-95-Misc-Eqpt-Filing-r1-TH.pdf Page 13, second bullet. Emphasis mine:

https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DXFRS800-Talkies-Business-Two-Way/dp/B07J2DGCLT DeWalt and others are selling FRS as "license-free business radios" now... Edit: Cobra too.

I'd also add the Radioddity GD-77s; it's a display-free version of the GD-77, and was in fact the first DMR radio without display or keypad, if I remember correctly. It has quickly become my favorite handheld, especially for handing to other people. When programmed for MURS, there's really not a lot of trouble they can get into -- channels 1-5 are carrier squelched, 6-10 are 67 Hz, and 11-15 are 141.3, with 16 scanning weather. (Obviously, TX locked!) In addition, it's not intimidating. You just tell them a channel number, they turn the dial... Basically the same UI that made me pine for 1990s Motorola.

N4gix, do you have any supporting information on the RT-97 being GMRS capable? Because the way they sell it, you'd have to listen on 462 and transmit on 467. I really hope that you're right about this thing...

Yes -- that is a goal.

Nice! Now I have to bug my uncle to renew his amateur license since he's got a 2m rig gathering dust...

Happy hunting, Thames -- I look forward to your inevitable success, new friends, and new skills.

That isn't the stated purpose of the radio service, but I think it's a better use of the band too. I've reached out to random contacts, but usually they just stop transmitting. D: I wasn't doing anybody any favors dancing around the issues. I'm aware my desires are idiosyncratic, and I'm sometimes prickly. I look forward to devising clever solutions to my weird problems, sharing for the world to see, and making friends with the people who have similar problems. I'm really tempted to put another Midland 275 in the family ragtop, after the 100 freaked out. I'm super not impressed with their mag-mounts, and I'm trying to get Sti-Co to talk to me after early negotiations; I want a fender-mounted antenna that doesn't require any new holes for each of our cars, but they went silent when I pointed out that the sales agent was looking at roof-mount "sharkfin" antennas and I wanted their higher-gain fender mount. Irritiating, but unsurprising. Given the family friction, reversible mods are definitely favored over drilling holes, which is me-having-a-long-sigh motivating, but it is what it is. Fortunately, Ozzie UHF-CB enthusiasts have embraced the handheld control head with 8p8c jacks -- ethernet. So I'm looking for a good way to hang a few handheld control heads in a Tacoma's cab, and moreso a late model Miata. Midland's mic hangers are too deep, and give the weight too much leverage to rip the sticky off; command strips with hooks and "buddy hooks" were quickly winning, but in flor-I-duh, the heat and humidity will melt command strips too! Not quite back to square 1, but it's frustrating. At least the buddy hook lets me stash the speaker-mic on the E-brake while driving, but you really can't see the display from above (stupid calculator display!) I'll probably try to get the rest of my "minimally-licensed" radios bought or installed, and I've got like three cubic meters of the lights and luminaries of genre fiction competing with the ham study, which is the real limiting factor once I get done with estate work. I'm leaning toward Uniden CMX-560 and 760 radios, but I really resent that you can't get a SSB CB in a handheld controlhead form factor. It's stupid, but it's a big reason I hesitate. Given the resemblance between the HHCH radios from Uniden on CB and Midland on GMRS, I really have to suspect a common cheap-chinese-radio source behind them, and wonder if I should go there. Speaking of estate work? My grandfather had one heck of a run, a long and happy life, and a short illness at the end - just enough time to come to terms with it. Ideal, in most people's estimation, but I still miss the man. Can't say he didn't do it all right along the way, though. it stung at first, but the more I tried to reach out to contacts, the more I realized that most of them were FRS users who were freaked out by sharing a channel than GMRS users trying to make contact. I've got a ... (goes out to garage) Midland 70-1336b 2m rig waiting for some love. (It'll need a lot of bias resistors replaced to access the A range; the B range is very much business only, if my memory is correct) Thank you! Just need to find some me-time where my brain hasn't been reduced to runny jello first to polish off the studying and take the silly test already! Anyway, I'm out of brutal honesty, and need some sleep. Edit: Oh, Berkinet? GMRS isn't really dead in Florida, I just live in a big hole in repeater coverage, and those I can hear are boring to listen to. I gotta believe they're run by snowbirds, who only use them seasonally. Otherwise, it's hard to understand why tower leases are maintained while everything's abandoned. I look forward to our resident mad scientist and his Oviedo project.