marcspaz

Im not sure you can determine someone doesn't hold a license using this method. I only have two licenses under the FRN that my Amateur and GMRS licenses are under, but I have multiple FRNs. And unless you know what names are associated with my other FRNs, you're not finding them.

I think the stuff that he gets right is either because he got lucky and said the right thing by mistake, or he researched the hell out of it and somewhat properly regurgitate what he read, but doesn't actually "know" what he is talking about. I think this, because right after he says something correct, he will follow-up with an explanation of why he right, but that explanation defies physics. Imagine if I said that during certain conditions, if we shoot a GMRS single dang near straight up in the air, it comes back to earth and covers hundreds of miles in every direction. But then, instead of saying that it happens because signals can bounce off of planes, meteor showers, the moon or (more often than not) random weather anomalies... I say it's because the radio signal is so heavy, it's like launching a watermelon out of a giant slingshot. Its kind of like that.

What I don't get from SoCal is, he either says or has strongly implied that pretty much none of us know what we are talking about, always wrong, and a bunch of NotARubicon nut huggers (sorry, Randy. You know I love you).... and, he seems like he's always mad at us. So why the heck is he wasting his time and talent on this forum? I've asked him... but no response. Maybe it's like watching a car crash. Its so horrific that you can't look away. Anyway Guest PG3, just ignore the stupid stuff he says and try to pull something useful out of it. Honestly, recording the experience if it continues to happen and then filing a police report with local PD isn't a terrible idea. You just need some proof it's happening and you may get some traction.

You definitely got lied to. Every channel is free to use. No one owns a channel or has a channel allocated to them. Law enforcement almost never uses these channels for official business and when they do, you still have as much right to use the frequency as they do. Most of the time, when FRS/GMRS is used by the government, it's not police. Its typically a civilian liaison acting as a go-between for U/SAR volunteers or volunteers working in support of some type of remote response to things like mass casualty incidents. I'm pretty sure you would know if there was a mass casualty incident close enough that you can hear another user directly.

I agree for sure. Anything under 20m is very hard to get communications out of while mobile. 80m and 100% equal to QRP, for sure. 100w in for less than 2w out. If you are actually moving, that makes it even harder. I have seen some guys spend $2,500 or more for some of these high-power screwdriver antennas, but it's pointless unless they have a mobile 1,000w amp. Even then, the 1,000w to the antenna on 80m would be like 150w-180w to a proper vertical antenna (not even a dipole). That antenna would be hot enough to cook on. LOL

@Lscott I tested my screwdriver with a field strength meter and compared it to my dipole and my dedicated whips. On 80m, I only had a 1.8% efficiency rate. On 40m, it was about 30%, and on 20m it was about 50%. I switched over to Diamond mono band 86.6" whips and retested. The dedicated whip was still less that 2% efficiency rate on 80m. However, on 40m, it was 50%+ and 20m was almost 90%.

I guess not. Jack is the guy who submitted the Petition for Rule Making. Some of your posts lead me to ask the question.

That actually makes a lot of sense for those situations. We had something similar to that here in some localities, but with waste management. The counties that take a high volume of commercial waste have installed CB Base stations at the office and mobiles on some of the rigs on the landfill so they can talk to the commercial drivers and provide directions as they approach and move around the landfill. Those facilities that I am aware of did it on their own (per location) without getting the county government involved. It was just local managers that implemented it.

These are both wrong. REACT stopped monitoring 9 in the very early '90s. State troopers haven't had a tunable HF radio since Smoky and The Bandit was in theaters.

@Jaay are you working on this with Jack?

Generally speaking, if a repeater accepts a tone of 141.3 MHz, it's considered an open repeater. It was the "travel tone" Popular Wireless and the Personal Radio Association came up with when they came up with the idea of the Open Repeater Initiative (ORI). It was originally repeater channel 20 with 141.3 for the tone.

Make sure the meter is on and on the 200w scale. (Yes, it has an off button) Also be very sure you did not mix up the antenna connection and Transmit connection. If you get them backwards, the meter doesn't move. As mentioned above, make sure it's set to AVG and not PEP. If the meter is set correctly, the next thing I would question is the coax between the radio and meter having a short.

@Socalgmrs why are you still here?

Yeah, we have had that happen around here a few times when a new machine was stood up. It sounds weird when its understandable.

If the tones are the same, both repeaters would come up and 'repeat' your transmission at the same time. No loop could be created. If you set it to different tones, then the only issue to watch for is mistakenly causing interference. The users of each repeater would probably need to just transmitting a tone, but not using tone squelch. This way they can tell if the frequency is in use. Either that or they would need to 'monitor before transmit' if they have a monitor button on their radio.

For what its worth, with both VHF and UHF, you can greatly extend communications well beyond the traditional LOS on the regular bases with the two stations involved being a bit 'over the top' for a typical Amateur or GMRS user. For example, if you have a 9 element or 11 element high-gain yagi on a 50' tower at both stations, you can reliably communicate 100+ miles with a 50w radio on VHF, and 60+ miles with a 50w radio on UHF / GMRS. If you happen to have your antenna somewhere comfortably above the average terrain, your station can talk even further. This is because the additional height above ground extends the LOS range a bit, but the magic is in the yagi antenna. Not only is the high-gain antenna able to pull more scattered energy out of the sky with greater efficiency, the fact that the beam is focused in a specific direction reduces the amount of random noise it pulls from the atmosphere. This allows the antenna to perform significantly better compared to a vertical antenna with the same gain as the yagi, for example. By reducing the total number of photons the antenna reacts to, you essentially improve the Part Per Million ratio in favor of the signal you are receiving. My radio club used this principle in combination with a propagation method called Sporadic-E (reflecting a signal off the E Layer) to talk over 1,500 miles on VHF, from Virginia to Texas. Our club had a stacked beam array and a 1,500w amplifier located on a mountain ridge in VA at 4,400+ feet and the Texas station had a similar setup in the western part of Texas, on a ridge line at about 6,000 feet. We were also running a UHF station with a similar configuration that same week. We contacted a station over 450 miles away. Though I don't remember the specifics of where the other station was for the UHF contact. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is, while refraction off the ionosphere isn't an option for mid to upper VHF or UHF... if we get creative with location, antenna and available forecasts of atmospheric conditions, we can bend or even break the commonly accepted LOS rules with our base stations, control stations and fixed stations. We just need to leverage physics a little better.

Are you talking about a "Current Choke" very specifically or are you talking about a "Common Mode Choke"? Many people use Current Choke and Common Mode Choke interchangeably. These are 2 of the 3 Common Mode chokes that I own... I also have a 100w LDG Current Balun for when I am in the field without the amp (it's not handy for a photo). I think with the ACOM 1010, the Palomar would be the best choice.

Oh! That's good to know. I'm running an OCF 80m dipole, too. There is a balun at the antenna, but maybe I need one in the house? Maybe on the output of tuner? I have 2 of them that i use when portable, but didn't think about trying one at home. I can try a couple different spots and see what works best.

I can't run more than 100w in any mode that I use my computer for radio control, because the RF messes with my computer. I think it's because of the USB cable, but im too lazy to go buy another one to test.

Something I always found interesting is most VHF stations were using about 3kw ERP. Some UHF stations were 150kw ERP, but high-power stations were 500kw ERP. Between the higher power and shorter wavelengths, UHF always had better image quality compared to VHF. I remember dang near every house had a massive TV beam antenna on the roof and a rotator controller on top of the TV. We had a list of what direction to point the antenna to watch specific channels, and we would kind of fiddle with it to get it just right. But the best was if you had a set of TV top 'rabbit ears' and loop. I remember (before we got a beam) we weren't allowed to move around the living room while mom and dad were watching TV and we all had specific spots to sit when we watched TV, because our bodies would impact how well the TV signal were received. Or we would stand there touching the rabbit ears so grandpa could watch the news. LoL

Yep... that is the site I use.

The numbers I provided are the RF horizon. But, yes, typically the RF horizon is about 15% further than the visual horizon.

In my opinion, it really depends on your expectations. 15 feet gets you about 5.5 miles to the RF horizon. 35 feet will get you out to about 8.5 miles. 50 feet gets you about 10 miles.

Just putting my two cents in, and reiterating what others have said... in the world of handhelds, GMRS and Amateur Radio UHF perform the same since they are in the same band and general frequency space. Again, specifically with handhelds, the lower in frequency you go (VHF and HF for example) the worse the performance will be as the antenna becomes less and less efficient. This is because the lower in frequency you go, the longer the radio wave length will be and the longer the antenna needs to be. Now, if you were to take an HF handheld and hook it up to a standalone antenna system that is the proper size, then you can literally talk around the world. The drawback is, the handheld is really no longer 'portable' for all intents and purposes.

Man... I remember when I first bought the TRASH80. So many people talk crap about it, but man did I have fun with that thing. I learned how to write shells and programs using that thing. Backup and restore to a cassette tape was too funny, too. Radio Shack was a great store for two-way radios all the way up to when computers, cell phones and satellite TV became mainstream. I literally bought components to do repairs if I had a customer waiting on a job and I ran out of resistors, capacitors and standard 3-leg transistors... occasionally ordering bulk ICs, and PAs for radios I was commonly repairing or upgrading. The good old days of peaking, opening up modulation, adding channels. Good times.