Ian

A buddy of mine flies drones. Be careful, left- and right-handed polarization are not the same! Edit: Yes, he learned that the crash way.

On the contrary, simplex has managed to turn screaming-at-each-other into smooth trips to the grocery store while caravanning, so I've gotten the utility out of GMRS I hoped for! Diabetes leads to "hangry" turns quickly to domestic abuse. I've managed to defuse at least three screaming sessions because UHF, so I've gotten my money's worth. Still, I remember hurricane Charlie, and when Verizon was the only network with generators on their towers… since then they've given me two hurricanes worth of disappointment, and my family switched. T-Mo is still crap in a pinch, but at least they can be bothered to ring my phone when I'm home! Okay, two big messages, I'll try to be thorough, but I appreciate the input! That's paraphrasing the FCC's justification for services. My justification is simple -- avoid getting screamed at. That's solved, but I could do better. (Though I've had to pull the Midlands out of service due to malfunction in at least one of them; one of the mag-mount antennas literally fell apart! I'm disappointed with customer service so far.) Truly is. I have to scowl at your luck with CB on I-95 -- what channel are you on? I tend to prefer night driving to daytime, to dodge traffic, personally, but even day traffic is pretty silent. GMRS is silent, but the SARnet repeaters are lively, and are motivating me to get my ham ticket. (Close…) I'll try and join the UCF hamfest when feasible, but I just buried my grandfather and my time is an ugly mess lately, so club meetings are a distant fantasy for the next couple months. Thing with ham is that the screaming diabetic family members are also dealing with "just buried my grandfather" and are short on "bandwidth" (and I quote). It'd be nice to be able to use the cheap radios, but I have some personal issues to deal with, and the rest of my family has more responsibility to the estate, so we'll see how it goes. Ouch. That stings! I'm working on my ham ticket, but it's not likely that I'm going to inherit my grandfather's Japanese-built WW2 VHF gear. Florida seems to be all in on UHF, though, so no large loss. Agreed on all points, alas. Thoughtful edit: If we sprung, as a family, for newer iPhones which supported the 600 MHz band, maybe we wouldn't have comms blackouts and I wouldn't have been screamed at for long enough to buy a radio license and hundreds of dollars of mobile and handhelds (MURS and GMRS) but then I'd never have discovered the amateur satellite field, which I'd be poorer for. Also I can't change other people, but I still need to communicate with them. That leaves not a lot of high-performing options, and I think I can't afford an itinerant license on, say, Red Dot.

If this is a hobby, I can't afford it. If this is a utility, I can't justify those prices. Based on my personal cash flow, occasional capital expenses are more tolerable than subscriptions, but scraping up $400 to buy a Drobo was a feat. I graduated into a ruined economy with a degree that isn't worth nearly so much as my college advice said it should be - would have been, if not for 2008 and the incredible vanishing prosperity. Combine that with the utter lack of chatter on the radio in Florida, and lowering the barrier to entry starts to seem reasonable to me. There are no repeaters reliably in range of my home, though atmospherics can do interesting things -- last week I opened a Jacksonville repeater from Cape Canaveral pretty reliably. Still, I'm elated when I hear a 5 year old talking to her grandmother on channel 3, because it's the only traffic I've heard on the airwaves that I didn't put there in six months or more. The purpose of GMRS is to talk to people on the same license. The purpose of CB is to talk to people on different licenses. They both stink, for one reason or another, at doing that down here. (Last thing I heard on CB was a year ago, a random contact imploring all listeners to "smoke weed every day". They didn't reply when I tried to respond.) The service is dead down here, and frankly so are all the other ones. Puerto Rico may see the point of off-grid comms, and K4SAT may see the point, but central Florida is generally a wasteland, both on simplex channels and repeater, too. Edit: Just in time to make me a liar, the CB finally lights up. Contact, but completely un-understandable.

Dare I suggest some radio direction finding equipment, and a high gain steerable antenna?

The emphasis was on mobile, rather than satnav. I'd particularly enjoy it if it was a double-DIN in-dash unit with CarPlay, but even a dash mounted display with a transceiver you could stash wherever under the dash (like a combination of a Garmin car GPS and a Midland with the handheld control head) would have me over the moon.

Oh, I'm well aware it's a ham repeater at the moment. I'm just pleased that someone's working on something that could be adapted to legal, off-the-shelf GMRS use for under a grand, new. Emphasis new. Sooner or later, the surplus will either run out, or get priced out of affordability as it gets scarce. Hopefully this sort of thing will be available before that happens.

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.