WSFG777

Call Hustler, they should be happy to sell you individual replacement parts, all cut to fit. It’s standard practice for antenna manufacturers to sell the parts, usually all the part numbers are in the owners manual. Years ago someone gave me an old 2m Ringo with a broken center insulator, and I bought the replacement part for a few bucks. If buying parts from Hustler fails, maybe you can straighten the wire and “Max Gain Systems” sells fiberglass tubing. hope that helps, Joe K1VW

I would suggest you go with something cheap for now, especially if it’s GMRS only. A Baofeng in the UV-5 ham family is not a deluxe radio, but it will work. Once you get your ham license you will start hearing about things like digital radio (DMR/Fusion/DStar), hot spots, and GPS/APRS, and you may yearn for a new radio which is more expensive ($100-$500). If/when that happens, you’ll feel better about not spending too much on the first radio. good luck! Joe K1VW

In theory what you want to do could work, but especially if the other party isn’t radio saavy, it’s likely not to work as slick as you hope (I’m thinking about my own family here). Let’s say you are on a repeater whose output frequency is 462.600, same as simplex channel 17. Yes, they could listen to ch17 simplex and hear you whether you were talking on repeater or simplex. The down side to being simplex on a repeater output frequency is then other people will use the repeater and stomp over your signal, and/or get confused with 2 conversations on 1 frequency. So once you can hear each other directly, you should both switch to one of the other simplex channels 1 thru 7.

I think anyone who has played with radio very long has done that. Not good, but the radio designers know it’s going to happen and try to protect against it. I have a Yaesu 2 meter mobile where I kept transmitting into an antenna which I didn’t know had bad connector, now that radio won’t receive… I’m not 100% sure it’s because I transmitted into an open load, but I expect it is. thank you Joe K1VW/WSFG777