Ian

Okay, so it's time for some necromancy... The Retevis RT-97 that's motivated this thread is available now in eight different versions, and two of them are tuned to your spec (UHF and VHF versions)! The boneheaded thing is that the split is backwards. This thing can only be programmed with the Tx above the Rx. So progress, perhaps, but the lunchbox repeater isn't ready for us yet. Personally, it looks kinda nice, given that Kenwood 820s on eBay lately have all been broken, were missing buttons, or have occasionally had their controller boards removed and replaced with plugs for an external controller. The GR1225s are routinely in better shape, but none of this has been in the budget for me lately, alas. (I keep hoping I'll get lucky at an estate sale or something.)

You'll find a lot of Australian hardware based around that form factor; it's very popular with their UHF-CB stuff. Toyotas as well can be pretty trivially fitted with the RJ45 passthroughs to make a radio install look like a factory option. I really like my MXT275, but the mic holders are garbage. I've gone through two, and they keep falling apart, and the adhesive fails repeatedly. Not the adhesive's fault, swapping it out for Command strips (which normally last at least a year holding my phone to the dash) resulted in a two month failure. I've recently been advised to look for a "buddy hook" and frankly, anything would be better than those things. Still, I love the form factor, and narrowband or not, I've had results hitting and hearing repeaters in the Space Coast.

It's not super-uncommon, unfortunately. There's one that I'd love to use adjacent to the local university, but the owner's not logged in here in five years, and his license has lapsed. D: It's still listed in the database here, though, but the comments make it abundantly clear that it's an ex-repeater.

They're literally the reason I got into GMRS, too. Any particular reason? From what I heard, they're building out a boatload of "excess" capacity for that network.

Honestly, if they thought of GMRS as a subset of amateur, where someone else (a ham, or a company) had to set your stuff up for you, and you were limited to "novice" bands, that wouldn't be so bad. If GMRS were bolted to business bands still, that wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that fragmentation of the bandplan - and moreso the market - means network effects can't take off. Even Motorola is pitching LTE as the new answer to trunked radio deployments. "Pay us a per-unit monthly fee, and we'll handle all the infrastructure for you". I can't help but wonder if this is aimed mostly at "FirstNet" users who don't need a smartphone, or who need something that can be operated without looking at it. The problem with that is, ultimately, that it's rent-seeking. I want to pay $40 per radio, not $40 per month per radio.

Emphasis mine. I'll second this sentiment.

Marc, that's because there isn't anything that … well, wide-band and new are basically mutually exclusive. BaoFeng is launching a new GMRS mobile, but I'm concerned about that for reasons of quality. It wouldn't be entirely wrong to describe legal and high-performance radios as lost artifacts from a bygone age. Unlike the fantasy version of that, you don't have to slay a dragon to get one, but you do have to know which compromises to make, which eldritch incantations (and what other "lostech") you need to program them to do your bidding, and if you don't, knowing someone who can is a good second-best. Like I said in the beginning, there -- there are only three legal, available-new handhelds available. There may be no mobiles or base stations that meet those criteria. If you can find legal-on-business-band gear, odds are it won't be both new and capable of working on GMRS - new and wideband is another nearly mutual exclusive set of qualifiers. It's still not something I'm happy about as another FNG, but I'm passing through the seven stages of irritation towards acceptance, and will likely be looking into used Motorola gear new enough to have wi-fi programming options going forward, as well as any other commercial gear that happens to catch my fancy. (So far I'm batting 0 for 2 -- one "cb" I bought is 900 MHz public safety gear, and the VHF I bought at another garage sale doesn't include the amateur __or__ MURS bands. Maybe 1 for 3, if you include the Radio Shack gear from eBay with big 'ol "blue dot" and "green dot" stickers on the box.)

You didn't overpay. I paid more for less radio only a few months ago.

Corey, that's incredibly awesome kit. That basically fills all of my weird-XXXuse-cases, and it's super elegant work. I'd love to read more about this setup!

"A repeater that is beneficial to the end user" can be quite limited in reach, if it covers a small, user-dense, area with no cellphone coverage, though. Low-altitude, low-power, and transportable systems can be extremely valuable. You just can't pretend you're going to blanket a whole ZIP code with two potatofengs. Understanding and evaluating your requirements is the first step in speccing out any system, be it radio, computer, or chemical plant, for that matter. Frankly, festivals and such are probably 30% of my use case, all of which can be covered by a truck mounted repeater without much trouble. (It helps that the fairgrounds slope away from the parking area, in my case - but again, understanding and evaluating requirements.) Mobile Repeaters can be done!

So, in another thread, I've been told that high-performance part 95 gear has already all been discontinued. I think the Garmin Rino is the last of the wideband GMRS handhelds available. There's the BaoFeng, at two watts. There's the TERA, with one bank of 16 channels, and no way to program CTCSS in the field. Then there's the Rino 700 series, which do five watts, 25 kHz, and repeaters and tones can be programmed from the front panel, per the manual. Is this really the last high-performance handheld on the market?

I've got a GD-77s. At the moment, it's set up to scan the GMRS repeaters in the region, on the off chance - but it has happened - that conditions are ideal enough I can hear 'em. Even outdoors with fifteen watts, I can't get into 'em, though. :|

Today, Beekeeper's question E. Per HamStudy, I've reached 66% proficiency. In another week, I should be able to sit for my licensing exam.

To the best of my understanding, simplex receivers are kosher on the 462 repeater outputs. This requires parsing Federal Registers, though, so your milage should be expected to vary, and neither of us, I suspect, are lawyers. And this bizarre mixed-mode repeater is best developed on amateur channels, and only cautiously introduced to GMRS once the kinks are worked out.

Is the Rino repeater capable? All signs (and the manual) point to yes! This may be the most powerful fully-capable handheld GMRS radio on the market. I never realized people (who weren't birdwatching) might be put off by Roger beeps &c. I don't mean to be deliberately obtuse, but may I ask why you'd be upset by those? Also, what's MDC?

Actually, that's … a really interesting idea. A repeater controller that accepts input on the output frequency… but only when a particular tone code is used does it activate parrot mode. Very clever, but probably best prototyped with ham radio equipment and frequencies. Bet you could trivially achieve it with a Raspberry Pi as the repeater controller… My MicroMobile XMT275 doesn't do this. Unless they made changes since the New Years' sale, it hasn't been fixed.

Corey, an excellent point! In my wishlist going forward for HTs, I want them to transmit their callsign in a burst of fast Morse when you key up… but also include morse-decoding hardware and a minimal "who's talking now" screen. It should be trivial to integrate with hardware incorporating Roger beeps, but provide a lot more information. (It's part of my concept for a new car satnav; the Roger beep at the end of the transmission includes GPS coordinates in some other easily-decoded fashion. PSK or ASCII might be more efficient, but Morse has such a good heritage…) Why do they strip PL during IDing? That seems seriously counterproductive… As for most people not understanding Morse, anyone keying up frequently, like one might do while jamming a repeater, would tend these days to get recorded, and said recordings fed into one of the many cheap / free smartphone Morse decoders.

Fridge logic has struck me. In how much of the country is channel 14 being used? Microsoft is pursuing whitespace broadband designed to use under-utilized TV channels. I can't help but wonder if that will herald a loosening up of these allocations -- or a clamping down on our guard bands.

if there are no other repeaters sharing the channel, and especially if it's a new repeater, I can see the appeal of having the thing ID every fifteen minutes just to announce "Hey, there's an open repeater here!" Given that you seem to operate in a dense environment, that seems unnecessary - you can presume that there's a repeater available. On the other hand, I live in a coverage gap between three repeaters, and frankly I'm not even sure any of them are still on the air at all.

Ultimately, my goal with a garage repeater is essentially a chunky base station radio with a pocket-sized "terminal". But I live in a coverage gap between all the repeaters in the area. When conditions are good, I can occasionally hear one ID. 95% of the time, I hear nothing from them; 100% of the time, I can't open them up. I think there's a role for the garage repeater, but that role goes away if there's preexisting good coverage.

Per the comparison chart here, the UV-50X3 is indeed a part 90 radio.

How do you get in on this network? And are these point-to-point links, or some kind of national or regional network?

FCC regs specifically prohibit linking GMRS with POTS. Recent FCC opinions, since superseded by the PRS reforms, have said "Yes, but only if you don't get your internet from DSL". The PRS reforms have eliminated the exemptions - GMRS may not be interconnected with POTS. Here's where it gets hilarious. POTS is defined nowhere in the Federal Register (any more). Last time it had a published definition, though, the current global IP telephony system bore absolutely zero resemblance to the POTS network in question. Per basic Constitutional principles, what isn't prohibited is permitted, so…

First: Welcome to the hobby, welcome to the forum, and welcome to the community! Second: The Midland MicroMobile have some issues you should be aware of. https://forums.mygmrs.com/topic/1352-midland-mxt400/?p=10934 In short, they're narrower than narrowband, and are operating on a wideband radio service. Those running 25 kHz deviation will hear you very quietly, and those deviating near their limits on wideband transmitters will clip on yours.

I'll also +1 this - thank you guys, I never knew how the ± notation worked.