RCM

No 69.3 Hz on Midlands... Hmm. That's good to know!

Yes, they do. But it is the manufacturers who actually sponsor the discounts. Not the sellers.

I'm not talking about repeaters. And for utility, mobile to mobile communications, skip is irrelevant at best and actually detrimental at worst. When I'm trying to talk to my buddy in the next Jeep, I'm not interested in having to compete with signals booming in from Florida or Texas. Even SSB is pretty irrelevant for that use. Just about all the Jeepers I know use AM if they use CB. In fact that's the only real advantage I see to using 27 MHz for trail communications: they're ubiquitous and dirt cheap. It's possible to have a complete mobile setup including antenna and mount, for right around $50 if buying brand new. In fact, going down that path a bit further, buying a brand new popular GMRS mobile setup including antenna costs $250. That's from a company that even CBers consider to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. I'll concede one thing: I would rather have a Cobra Model 19 (which can be found for as little as $20 new) and a 4 foot Firestik antenna than the aforementioned barrel-bottom-scraping GMRS mobile radio and antenna. And I don't know about 8x, but I don't doubt that that CB setup will beat that GMRS setup. But, again for trail communications, I would rather have a $100 pre-programmed for GMRS, 25 watt commercial mobile radio working into a $25 hard-mounted 1/4 wave antenna than any CB setup. That's assuming my buddies have similar setups. If all they have are blister-pack radios and are unwilling to let me help them get setup with a decent radio and antenna, well I might just have to revert to CB again. I have both, so it's no big deal. Now, if we're gonna talk about skip and working other states while mobile, I'm gonna bring up the subject of 40 Meters. I've worked quite a bit of 40 Meters mobile, mostly with the same or less power than the typical SSB CB radio. And with those setups I can work entire sections of the country, covering several states, all the time, every day. I don't have to wait for the skip to come in because the skip is always in on 40M. First time I ever drove across the country with a setup like that, I was driving from Alabama to Lake Superior with a 20 watt MFJ SSB Adventure Radio to a Hamstick mounted on a Hustler 5" mag mount. The entire setup was less than $300 brand new, and I was into a couple of different 40M mobile nets the entire way.

If they fixed those problems and lowered the price to the sub-$100 level, they might be worth looking at. The same basic radio minus overly-restrictive firmware and heavy marketing sells for +/- $100. Also I just bought a tiny 10 Meter ham radio for $60 including shipping, and it works great. It's probably made in the same factory as that "Midland." Basically, at the price they sell those radios for, they are a ripoff. To paraphrase Pink Floyd; even if they fixed it, I still don't want it!

GMRS is a general radio service. That means it is for pretty much any two-way communications use that individual licensees desire, as long as it is not used for illegal activities (a lookout for a team of burglars, for example). Your family is covered under your license, but that does not mean it is only for family use. Nor does it say so anywhere in the rules. Hobbyist use is more common in some areas than others. Nothing wrong with getting on there and trying to drum up some activity, though. I'm a ham (not HAM by the way; it's not an acronym) and have been for a long time, but I still enjoy playing with GMRS. MURS, too. Welcome to the hobby of GMRS. ETA: I think the future looks good for GMRS.

How so?

Setting the PL for receive filters out random noise as well. If you're scanning and you drive through an area with noise on one of the frequencies you have programmed, it will stop on that frequency and remain locked there until you either delete that channel from scan or travel out of range of the noise. As for scanning, yes it will scan the ham freqs you have programmed if it is set up for multi scan.

I might have mentioned that you paid a premium, but I didn't mean that as a bad thing. You got value for the premium you paid, for exactly the reasons you state here.

That antenna along with many others on the market, reminds me of something I heard about fishing lures: they're designed not so much to catch fish, but to catch fishermen. Generally speaking, the shorter the antenna and the wider its bandwidth, the less gain it has. A better way to state it is the more loss it has.

Last TK-880 I bought didn't cost much more than a PL259-SMA adapter. In fact I passed on some just last week that were $15 each. If I were you I would put the 880 in the UTV, get another one for the truck, and probably a couple more as backups. But that's just how I roll! I was actually thinking awhile back that I had several TK-880s. But I started looking for them and could only find one that wasn't already in a vehicle. So I looked around for some cheap ones and bought three more for just over $20 each. You're gonna need two for your repeater! What repeater, you ask? Just wait!

Personally, if I had already bought that I still wouldn't use it on the UTV. I would just save it to use at the house, cabin or whatever. The 13" of angle iron or aluminum will be enough ground plane.

I just looked through the MFJ catalog to see if they have something like that. They don't, although they do have some manual mic/radio selector boxes. I don't think it would take all that much to do it. Just some latching semiconductor switches, controlled by the COR from each radio. LEDs on the box to show which radio is active, and some momentary pushbutton override switches.

Dunno, but if not it should. The technology exists.

If you want to get rid of some, let me know!

You can do that on most of the Kenwoods. Here it is, in the TK-3180 manual: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1656566/Kenwood-Tk-3180.html?page=86#manual "This function allows you to change the Decode/Encodecombination of the QT/DQT Signaling without changingthe transmit/receive frequencies.This is used when there are several Talk Groups usingQT/DQT codes on the same frequency.You can configure a maximum of 40 pairs of OST QT/DQT Decode and QT/DQT Encode to the OST table. TheQT/DQT Encode/Decode pair and the OST table areswitched when the PF OST key is pressed."