marcspaz

People are willing to pay for easy out of the box and reliable.

My pleasure. I'm glad you had a chance to check it out. Reach out if you have questions. I'm always around.

I am out and about right now, so I can't look up the actual code. The rules very specifically state who can use (share) your license/radio, being limited to immediate family.

I'm pretty sure Steve is correct on this one.

That is not correct. A 5 dB loss for the total length of cable with 10w in would be 3w out. That is a lot of loss.

5 dB is more than double what it should be. It should be about 2 dB of loss. I would think something is wrong somewhere along the setup.

I have a base station, currently, but for more than a decade I would use the crossband repeater in my Jeep to talk on the repeaters. It was kind of a pain to go outside to switch repeaters, but it worked pretty well.

I would love to help you, but it varies per radio. If you could tell me what make and model radio you have, I could likely assist.

What radio?

That radio is a clone of a Yaesu FT-8900r. It does 2m/70cm/6m/10m. Diamond made an antenna especially for the FT-8900r, call the CR8900A. I had the setup and the antenna worked great on all 4 bands. Th only thing I didn't like was that if you wanted to use the radio on the top end of 10m, you had to shorten the whip, and if you wanted to use the bottom end of 10m, you had to lengthen it. There was no such thing as putting the adjustment in the middle and getting a good match across the 2MHz range. Also, the whip wasn't long enough to cover 26MHz. So, even though it was a good radio/antenna combo, you either need to be flexible about tuning it manually or spend a few hundred $$$ on a 12v automatic tuner.

Hmm... no output tone. Interesting. That could cause an issue for TSQL users, for sure.

Yes, that is correct. That is a distinct possibility that is what is happening. It happens on some repeaters here fairly often. Many of our gmrs repeaters are set up with 141.3 as the secondary tone for emergencies and then another tone that's used for local daily communications. The repeater owners around here coordinated that on purpose because there's so much overlap with multiple repeaters on the same frequency. This way in an emergency everybody can go to 141.3, but for day to day use neighboring repeaters on the same frequency are not interfering with each other. Sometimes that causes confusion with the users. Especially new folks that don't quite understand how tone works compared to tone squelch.

Something that is commonly overlooked is many repeaters can use several different tones to open the repeater, and can transmit different tones based on what tone was received. For example, on one of my repeaters, there are two tones that can open the receive. Either 141.3 or 156.7. If 141.3 is heard on the input, the transmitter will encode the 141.3 tone. If 156.7 is heard on the input, the transmitter will encode the 156.7 tone. The 141.3 tone is for everybody to use, but if I want to chat with someone and not hear 141.3 traffic, me and the person I am chatting with will switch to the 156.7 tone (which isn't advertised for use). Some GMRS radios don't have the ability to only transmit a tone. So they are limited to a tone squelch that is both transmitting a tone AND requiring a tone to be heard before it opens the audio for the receiver. Still other people will program their radios with a tone squelch. What is likely happening is, if the GMRS repeater you are trying to use is setup the same way as my repeater, the one person who could hear you was probably operating in monitor mode (only transmitting a tone) and can hear everything, while everyone else was using tone squelch on a different tone. So, that one person hear everyone, but is the only person that can hear you.

That is what we do with our Ham club repeaters. You unkey and after 1 seconds, there is a beep transmitted to show that the timeout time has been reset. The repeater stays transmitting for 5 additional seconds to give someone a chance to start talking again, without the repeater going down and up over and over again. Of course, you are going to want a commercial grade repeater to tolerate the potential 100% duty cycle.

Obviously this doesn't speak to everyone's use case... but my experience is based on Jeeps and ATV/UTV use. So, my results could be anecdotal. While offroad most Jeeps have non-coductive tops or no top at all, windows rolled down or no doors at all, some ATVs/UTVs don't have windows, etc. So there is no interference to an HT inside the vehicle. Again, science aside, im just looking at my real-world experience and the use cases my family and friends have, to draw an opinion, if that make sense.