WRTC928

I'm going to second what @OffRoaderX said about the Midland Ghost antenna. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. It's not a cheap antenna, but it isn't prohibitively expensive either. The only reason I quit using it is that I got an amateur radio license and wanted a true dual-band antenna. There are some with the same form factor as the Ghost, but so far, I haven't found one that anyone will recommend. I've ordered a Compactenna which is taller (9") and more expensive (~$139) but has numerous favorable reviews/reports. Hopefully I can install it and stop looking.

With regard to radios and disaster preparedness, there are two major elements to consider. You'll need to be in contact with people in your immediate area and you'll need to be able to get a message to the world outside your immediate area. For the first, simplex is obviously the answer, ideally with a base station and a tall antenna (assuming the storm leaves it standing). For the second, repeaters are pretty much a necessity, with the same caveat that they need to be still functional. Yes, traffic will be heavy, but it's better than the nothing you'd have without it. Many years ago, I was in a remote village in the interior of Alaska when an earthquake took out all the communication for all the villages in a sizeable chunk of the state. Within hours, military aircraft with God's own comm systems were running laps around the state talking to anything that could send a signal -- marine, CB, GMRS, Ham. Unfortunately, that isn't going to be the case in the wake of most disasters. Just knowing that someone out there is hearing you improves your confidence immensely.

In my experience, individual radios have preferences, so it's not possible to predict which of a group of good antennas will work best with your radio. I have two identical Baofeng AR-5RMs and one of them likes a Nagoya 771 best while the other does a little better with an HYS. However, any of the antennas you have listed will almost certainly be a significant improvement over the stock antenna. My advice is to not overthink it. Pick one and see how it works.

Yes, the Arcshell AR-5s come out of the box with a mishmash of ham/business frequencies, some with codes, some without. Fortunately, they're dead-easy to program in Chirp. I have several which I bought and programmed with FRS frequencies for the U. S. Cavalry Association to use during events. They're surprisingly effective radios for the price. Selling them as "no license required" is a bit deceptive, though.

That makes a lot of sense. Likely I'd do the same in similar circumstances.

That should work. The fact that the repeater is only 5 watts shouldn't be a significant limitation. Radio waves travel in a straight line. if there's nothing between the two radios, you don't need much power. I can use a repeater 20 miles from my house with a 1 watt radio, but both the repeater and my house are on high points. Essentially everything between us is lower. The higher you can get the antenna, and the more gain the antenna has, the more successful your communications will be. Height is might and elevation is propagation. If you can get the antenna above the peak of your roof, that's ideal. Barring that, get it as high as possible. You might look into a telescoping flagpole to mount the antenna on. They're not prohibitively expensive and some of them will withstand 100 mph winds. If the antenna is elevated above intervening structures, you and your friends should be able to get a good 5-10 km with your handheld radios; possibly much more, depending upon the circumstances. Edited to add: Don't cheap out on the coaxial cable and keep the run as short as possible. You can lose up to half of your signal in 100' of coax and you don't have a lot of power to begin with. You can compensate for that with a high-gain antenna, but you still don't want to lose more than you have to.

I picked up that habit in the military. I was told that plugging or unplugging accessories while the unit is powered could be harmful. TBH, I just took it as gospel and never did any research of my own. It takes literally a second, so I don't see any need to change my habit.

Following with interest. I haven't experienced this problem, but I have two 5RMs that have never been unboxed, so it could happen. I'll be interested to see if anyone has figured out a fix.

"Let him who has never made a silly, bonehead mistake cast the first stone" or whatever it was Jesus said to those guys.

A lot of hams grumble about the perception that GMRS is "ham lite", but in some ways it is. You can gain comfort with using and programming a radio, basics of radio science, experience with repeaters, and more. Were it not for GMRS, I probably would never have been interested enough to go for an amateur license.

Height might and elevation is propagation.

That's a fair criticism.

I picked up a few of those a while back, and they had a variety of frequencies in them, but I didn't try them. I immediately wiped the radios and installed the higher-power FRS channels. I did confirm with my farz-o-meter that high power is 2 watts and low is 0.5, but I didn't try to enter any of the 8-14 channels, so I don't know if it would let me. Now I'm curious, so I'll probably give it a try. Edited to add: I just now tried it and was able to program in 3 of the low-power FRS channels and they Rx and Tx just fine. I don't know why yours won't. I think calling them "junky" is a bit unfair, though. I think they're now $10 each. Considering the price, I've been pretty impressed. I was able to easily communicate over a repeater 20 miles from my house and the signal report was "almost full quieting". I have very favorable topography, but still, that's not bad for 10 bucks. I don't know how much of a beating they will take before they fail, but I've handed them out at three horse events and none of them have quit yet. I put a drop of Gorilla Glue on all the antennas, so functionally they're the same as an FRS radio, albeit not type-accepted. I'm not really concerned that the FCC is going to raid a horse show and take me away in handcuffs, but if you give radios to non-radio people, it's probably best to minimize the number of things that can go wrong -- losing an antenna, for example. I programmed them with the 15 higher-power channels and the local weather frequency, since the weather is kind of important to event planners. TBH, I couldn't be happier with them.

I'd settle for just as good as a 771. What brand do you have?

I like the idea of a 15" antenna that can be folded up and carried in a pocket or in a small radio bag behind the seat of the truck, but would it really give me any improvement over the 8" 701-type antenna? I can definitely get a bit better performance from a 771 over a 701 in some circumstances, but the "tactical" antennas seem a bit gimmicky to me. If it's no better than an 8" antenna, there's no point. Does anyone have any personal experience they can share about these?

I do it. You have to be sure to check SWR all the way up and down the bands because some antennas aren't tuned well enough to the 462-467 MHz range. I've had good results with the Comet SBB-1 and SBB-2 and the Nagoya UT-72 and NMO-72 antennas. In terms of getting good SWRs all the way up to 467, the UT-72 gave me the best results. Some folks say the Nagoya 72s are trash, but I've gotten good performance from them. I'm not trying to reach ridiculous distances, so YMMV.

Okay, but that's pretty minimal and you don't even have to do that if you don't want to.

If you want to go the easier but more expensive route, BTech has a plug-and-play repeater system. It's not cheap, but it's literally all you need except the antenna and coax. It has all 8 repeater pairs and includes an auto-ID module. Put up your antenna, plug it in, and you're up and running.

Hi-Point is the Baofeng of the firearm world (although less ubiquitous). Cheap, fugly, not respected, but it puts bullets downrange and if that's all you need to do, you'll be happy with it. Baofeng is cheap and not respected (not necessarily unattractive, though), but if all you need to do is put signals downrange, it will do the job. There's a lot of talk on the ham forums about how lousy their signals are, blah, blah, but every single time I've requested a signal report on mine, I've been told it's strong and clear. I don't know anything about Midland, but if it puts out a strong, clear signal and has all the features you need, it's a good radio. For someone else, it might be a lousy radio. Okay, actually I do know one thing about Midland. Their Ghost antenna works far better than I expected it to. I wish they'd make one for 140/440.

Serious question -- Is 16 the agreed-upon channel by off-roaders across the country, or are you using "official" in an ironic way?

You do you, boo. The repeater I use most often doesn't have any sort of signal to let you know when it's available and it's not unusual to walk on each other. If everyone had the beep enabled, it would work just as well, but getting 50+ frequent users all on the same page about that seems unlikely. I don't own a repeater, so it's just hypothetical, a thought exercise, if you will.

I think if I were setting up a repeater, I'd incorporate a courtesy tone and ask people not to use the roger beep. What I really want to know is when the repeater is available for transmission and with the tone incorporated into the repeater, everyone knows regardless of whether the sender has a roger beep or not. But with your repeater, do whatever you like.

The "book answer" is that moisture and precipitation have little effect on VHF and UHF signals, but I've definitely observed that it can happen sometimes. A few days ago, we had very heavy fog and drizzling rain and I couldn't get through to my usual repeater 20 miles away with a HT. Even with the base unit, I had to punch it up from 12 watts to 20 to be understood clearly. That's the first time I've had that happen, but it wasn't the first time we've had fog and rain around here, so there must be some "perfect storm" of conditions to make VHF/UHF noticeably attenuate due to precipitation. The problem with "book answers" is that my radios didn't read the book.

I just received mine yesterday. The first thing I did was download the factory configuration file. Then, I tested power output at all three levels on different parts of both bands and recorded the results. I then uploaded a CHIRP file using the BF-F8HP profile and retested the power. It remained the same after programming as before, so whatever the problem is, apparently I didn't get one that has it. I was a little disappointed that power maxed out at 6-7 watts, but it's not all that big a deal, I guess. I'll probably never notice the difference, but if I buy a 10 watt radio, I'd like for it to actually output 10 watts.

Okay...not trying to hurt your feelings by asking something obvious...but are you sure you have the transmit power turned all the way up? Either you're not reaching it or it's not hearing you. The most likely reason for the first is not enough power (assuming you're using it from the same location you used your other radios), and the most likely reason for the second is tones either not set or set incorrectly.