marcspaz

Hey folks, just some quick planning for Saturday... for those of you who are not familiar with the area or would like to caravan up to the top of the knob together, I will be at a Shell gas station at 3275 S Main St, Harrisonburg, VA 22801 at 8:45 AM and leaving there at 9:00 AM. It's about a 50 minute drive to the top of the knob. The Shell station is literally right off the highway off-ramp. On i81, take exit 243 and the Shell station is across the street from the bottom of the ramp. For those heading straight to the meeting location, I'll see you at the top of Reddish Knob at 10:00 AM.

Anything can be stolen if someone wants it. Ive have my car stolen so the thief could spend hours yanking my sound system out of it, and then dump my very messed up car in the middle of the street in front of my house just to be a dick about it. Just install it somewhere other than on top of your dashboard and don't worry about it.

Actually, if you look at RepeaterBook and MyGMRS public listings, you will see that use of CTCSS grossly outweighs DCS.

Details Event by Marc Spaziano and NOVA GMRS Reddish Knob, Saturday, March 29, starting at 10 AM. Public · Anyone Come join NOVA GMRS for a Radio Expedition up to Reddish Knob and play Radio for the afternoon! Everyone is welcome to bring their handheld radios, mobile radios, or "portable" setups and discover the amazing range of your gear that is associated with high elevation of the mountain top. Lets find out how far Your radio can reach! Reddish Knob is located in the George Washington National Forest, outside of Dayton / Harrisonburg, Virginia. While this is a knob on the ridge-line in the forest, it is paved all the way to the top. Any vehicle can comfortably make it all the way to the top without an issue. Along with your radios, bring a camera, warm clothes, and something to snack on for lunch. There is nothing nearby... so bring everything you need to be comfortable for a few hours. For those not familiar with the area, we can find a meet-up spot if you would like to follow me from town, up to the main lot.

Today was my first day reading this thread. Great topic and it was fun reading. I feel like it's pretty easy to use it properly. By definition, it's for facilitating activities of individual licensees and their family members. So, follow the rules and use it however you like. I realize some people don't like long-winded rag chew between a friend or three, and that's okay. You don't have to participate like that. If you are using exclusively for staying in touch with family, that is fantastic, too! If you're sticking to the rules, there is no wrong way. Me personally, back in the late '80's and early '90's, my family used to caravan up and down the east coast or out west several times a year. We used GMRS to talk RV to RV and around whatever park we were at. It was mostly to get away from what was (at the time) very busy CB radio. When my son got a little older, he started driving and asked me to get a new license and some radios so we could stay in touch while driving around or if we were using multiple vehicles to go somewhere. The last 6 years, I have also been using GMRS for communications with our offroad groups, using mobile radios for the extra power and no need for internal batteries that need regular replacement or charging. That said, I have a lot of friends in the area and I run a GMRS club. A lot of us use GMRS for staying in touch, filling in silence while we drive, and some people even use it to try to find new friends. I think all of that would be considered using it properly.

Hey folks... one of the big things many new users (and some of us old guys) enjoy doing is figuring out how far their radio can reach. It's always fun to contact someone from say 80 or 100 miles away on a handheld radio. In September of 2023, we went as a group up to Reddish Knob and played Radio for the afternoon. Everyone either used their handheld radio, mobile radio, and some extravagant "portable" setups to see what kind of range they could get from the mountain top. With GMRS (and some amateur radio) being a line of site service, its possible to make contacts from as far as 150-180 miles away while we are up there. I personally talked about 162 miles. We had a great time. Does anyone have any interest in doing something like this again this Spring? Just bring whatever gear you want to test out... you can try some of my gear, etc. It is paved all the way to the top of the mountain and any vehicle can access it.

Gifted, actually. LoL

@WRYS709 Lets take a deep breath for a second... I've been talking with people in this thread since April of 2024. We are all just having a conversation. I am cool with anyone having an opinion about anything. Honestly, I don't have a dog in the fight because I don't use GMRS radios any more, and don't really care who buys what. I'm not going to tell anyone how to spend their money nor what their opinion should be. I merely expressed why I think many people are willing to spend a bit more money for Midland Micro Mobile radios. If you disagree... I'm fine with that. That said, I made a statement "People are willing to pay for easy out of the box and reliable." Your response to my opinion was "Except that these "Midland" threads are about the "unreliability" of Midland radios for one reason or another!" So, you went from an opinion based conversation to expressing a supposed fact to rebuke my anecdotal observation. I simply pointed out that what you shared (including this thread) is indeed NOT a group of facts supporting your opinion. There is nothing in those threads (nor this one) that support claiming the statement that "Midland radios have a reliability problem" is a fact. The funny part is, the title of this thread says they don't think Midland radios are very good. There is a difference between good (a loose performance description) and reliable. I can have a poor quality radio that is reliable. Anyway. if you want to have a debate over the reliability of Midland Micro Mobile radios, I don't think either of us have access to accurate data to express facts to support our opinions. So, it would be somewhat pointless. If you are going to try to rebuke my opinion by sharing a bunch of links to threads, at least pick some threads that actually have something to do with the radios being unreliable and (preferably) abundant enough to at least anecdotally support your claim. Unless you feel like it's something you really need to do, I wouldn't waste your time trying to convince me. Like I said, I disagree due to personal experience with hundreds of radios over years of experience AND I really don't care. At least I don't care beyond the point of possibly helping the people here. I have no personal interest.

Out all the threads you quoted, one guy "may have" had a bad mic, but no resolution was shared. The rest of them were end-user problems. I would hardly call that an abundance of evidence that Midland products are unreliable. Especially compared to their reported revenue of over $19 million a year from their consumer markets. That's a lot of radios sold compared to a few threads from people who don't understand narrow band vs wide band, don't know how to use a computer, or no one will talk to them.

I don't recall seeing any significant amount of threads from actual owners complaining about reliability. I have owned and used several and installed hundreds of them over last 4 or 5 years. I haven't heard a single person complain to me. If they were really unreliable, I think their sales would suffer and as a person who deals with them regularly, I would have had at least 1 person complain to me. The reality is, every Midland owner who came to me for service, either had antenna or coax problems. I've never seen someone come back to me who actually had a failed radio.

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.