marcspaz

No, I am not saying that 79 million people live above Line A. They would be packed ridiculously tight. What I am saying is, the total population of the northern states that Line A is present in, per the Census Bureau, is about 79,633,000+. That is enough people whom driving to or north of Line A is a distinct possibility, that they should be considered in a standardization proposal.

No, I'm sorry.. That is not what I am trying to say. What I mean is, none of your measurements are in agreement with one another.. Therefore I do not trust the 40 W reading. I believe that either you need to calibrate your watt meter, your amp meter, your volt meter, some combination of the three or all three.

@WROZ437... you are experiencing exactly what I would hope to avoid. Finding something other than 20 for "over the road simplex" would work much better in many cases. Maybe, there is no single channel as answer. OffRoaderX does have some entertaining content. Being a Jeep enthusiast, I love watching offroad videos.

Something I was thinking about with regard to Line A... 90% of the US population lives on the the US borders and coast lines. ~79,633,000 people live on the northern border. That means that Line A has the potential to impact communications for more than 24% of the people in the lower 48 states. As much as I like the idea of picking a channel, a channel other than 20 to avoid conflict with potential ORI type repeaters, a solution that potentially excludes almost one quarter of the population doesn't seem like a solution at all, IMHO. In fact, I would be more prone to encourage people to use 20 over 19, since many repeaters have light traffic and operators are supposed to be mindful of not causing interference as part of their license agreement, anyway. I don't know the right answer. Just thinking.

The meter should have come with a ground plate for testing HT's with antennas. I though the meter was at the base of the antenna. If you are 4 feet away, especially if the meter is inside the vehicle, that should be plenty of distance and shielding.

The number one rule of emergency communications is, the command center should never be in the affected area. If you are in the affected area, you need to have a radio relay system established to get the message to the appropriate logistics or CnC staffer inside or outside the affected area, to send help. So, if you are outside the impacted area, get the person's name, what the emergency is, where they are (to the best they can say). Basically the 5 W's. And then you or someone right next to you calls 911 and relays that information. If you are in the affected area, you gather all of the aforementioned information and then relay it through whatever stations needed or direct to CnC, logistics, or whatever unit has been established to respond to the type of emergency being experienced. If you are at an event that is just starting, you will likely be relaying that information directly to Incident Command. Yes! Exactly! Both fantastic radios. I am partial to the Icom, but you can't go wrong with either.

Eh... no one was looking for any of us. Honestly, back then it was common for me and a few friends to vanish for days or even weeks at a time while we were partying. Two days was not a red flag. These days, if grandpa is gone for more than 2 hours, my phone is ringing because the babies want to know when I'll be back. LOL

I'm going to throw this out there. I did about a year ago and it was not well received, but I hope this audience is a bit more open-minded. Just my own personal opinion, the best solution that has zero reliance on any underlying system is 40-meter Amateur radio. There are extremely lightweight, compact, battery powered radios. You can get a small foldable/roll-up solar kit for unlimited use. The antenna is just a piece of wire that only need to be a few feet off the ground. The best part is, depending on how high you make the antenna, you can talk everywhere from 1 to 10,000 miles. You are going to get help day or night and can actually talk to someone for health and welfare as well as status updates. I know we're a GMRS forum and there is some good advice on the satcom stuff, too... but I feel like they have dependencies that are failure points.

Are you using a grounding plate/shield to stop rf from the antenna soaking the meter?

@Sshannon If I were to guess, I would say it might be based on the minimum voltage needed for the radio to work. Given that they said it should be close to 8 amps (46w +/-) at full power and it has a 55% efficiency rating, the math would work out to 11.5vdc. That kind of makes sense... most 12vdc systems run on as little as 11.0vdc and max out at about 15vdc. So, you may be on to something there.

I wish I could answer that question accurately. Very little information about the radio that was given to me. As you noted, I'm not sure it matters either way, based on the math you shared.

No. Regardless of if you are using a dummy load or an antenna, there are 2 formulas used for calculating power, resistance, current and voltage. The first is Voltage / Current * Resistance. If you have any 2 of the 3, you can find the 1 unknown value. The second is Power / Voltage * Current. Again, if you have any 2 of the 3, you can find the 1 unknown value. We are going to use the second of the 2 formulas. We know you have 7.5 amps at 14.6vdc. We are going to multiply the two for a total of 109.5 watts of total consumed power by the radio. The transmitter has an efficiency rating of 55% (per the manufacturer, and a very common value). That means we are going to take 45% away from the 109.5w, being 109.5 * 0.55 = 60.225 watts out to the antenna or dummy load. If your meter is reading 40w, then either the watt meter is not correct or the measured voltage or current are not correct.

@Hunter399 at 55% efficiency, that puts you over 60 watts.

It reminded me of an old CB, too. There was just a channel dial, volume/on/off and a squelch. White plastic body and the face where the controls were had a slight angle so it was easy to see the channel selector while standing at the wheel. I am very glad I had the radio and my grandfather taught me how to use and maintain it. On an open vessel on salt water, there is a lot of different maintenance needed. compared to a land mobile or base station.

@Lscott do you remember the old white Midland marine radio with the old channel numbers fixed and a click dial? I don't remember the model. This was in 1985. My grandfather gave it to me because I had no radio, and he had to have had it for close to a decade. I also had a 7/8 wave vertical antenna mounted on the back right corner. EDIT: Now that I think about it, it may not have been a Midland... It may have been a Motorola or a Standard. It was a very long time ago.

Agreed that the best way (only true accurate way) is on a resistive dummy load. I shot the video on my antenna out of laziness and not wanting to go back upstairs. I had a maximum of 2 watts discrepancy between the dummy load and the antenna. That is fine at these very low power levels and for the sake of displaying the point I was making.

Two things. One is that Midland has confirmed that some early release radio's have less than the advertised wattage. I measured as little as 32 watts on some frequencies, with a max of 38 watts on a 50 ohm load. My assumption is, accept the power level its at or ask Midland if you can send it back to get an alignment and tune-up done. I had to provide a significant amount of proof to Midland before they agreed. They may expect the same from others. The other is, it sounds like the the Ghost antenna isn't very good quality. I would ditch it for a better antenna. If the SWR is increasing because the load is going down (i.e. 25 ohms instead of 50), the RF voltage stays the same, but the current increases. The formula for calculating wattage is Voltage x Current = Watts. The problem is, you are not radiating more power in the form of RF signal into the atmosphere, you are just creating more heat and risking the radio being damaged.

No doubt. There is (or at least used to be) only about 5 foot of elevation change between the water line at high tide and the high spot on the sandbar. With zero shelter, 6 foot swells would have put the sandbar underwater and us in a dead-stick boat out in the Gulf of Mexico. There is very little chance we would have survived that.

I used to have a small boat that was big enough to go out into the Gulf on calm days. I took some friends out to a desert sandbar to party... most of them had there own boats. After partying all night, everyone split and left a huge mess on the sandbar. I stayed behind until morning and cleaned the place up. Two friends stayed with me and were going to ride back with me. Well, when we were done, my boat would start, but it would only idle. When I tried to put it under power, it would chatter really bad and sputter out. My friends and I where now stuck on a sandbar about 3 acres long and 1 wide, 20 miles out in the gulf. We had no clothes but the bathing suites we were wearing. No food, no water, no shelter, no clothes... just leftover booze and firewood. We were trying to call someone on marine radio for 2 days. Finally, some random dude who was out fishing heard my call and came to our coordinates. He was so hammered he could barely talk. He refused to tow us back and refused to give us a ride back. Being that he was the only person to respond to us in 2 days, I asked if he knew how to fix engines. He said yes and asked for $100 to look at it. I told the guy (again, was very drunk) that I didn't have any cash, just a few bottles of Rum and Vodka. So, he took the booze on trade and got my engine working long enough for us to get into the bay and idle back to my house. We were all very sick from dehydration and really bad sun poisoning. If it wasn't for the radio, the 3 of us would have died out on that sandbar. This is the very reason I switched to HF for emergency communications. We could have had help in minutes instead of days.

Fantastic Thread! I am looking forward to seeing the responses. I have real-world experience with an emergency situation that radio saved lives... but not in GMRS. It should be interesting to see who has had some experience.

@gortex2 Unfortunately, what you are saying about the Hams is all too common. I have seen some crap installs, gear not fired up and tested for 5 years or more, no one showing up for training. When they do show up, they will gab all day on the radio, but get mic shy when it comes to moving voice traffic. Almost none of them know how to align the parabolic antennas for the WLAN and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to troubleshoot if they don't link. Almost no packet/data experience at all. It's a struggle to get them to complete the headers on IC213 and IC214 forms correctly and use them. I am not going to name names, but I am part of 2 ARES/RACES groups. One of them exemplifies everything a well run ARES/RACES team should look like. The other team has 6 active members of which 3 are the EC and 2 AEC's. By active, I mean, show up twice a year for training. If I don't put a training session together, training for that group just doesn't happen, and I'm not the one who is supposed to be training people for that group. I pray the served agencies never call this second group, because they can't do anything. Myself and one other operator have amazing portable stations that can provide any service. I don't trust the gear in place at the served locations, nor does the other Ham... we both agree that if they ever call us, we are bringing our own gear and hoping the neighboring team can provide additional support before one or both of us pass out from exhaustion.

An external antenna will always be an improvement. For a time, I put a mag mount on the roof of my truck and with 5 watts, I was able to hit repeater 30+ miles away with good input. Some picket fencing when driving, but it worked well.

@DonErle Mine is at 6 amps... The radio has a 55% efficiency rating (which is really good, BTW). At 8 amps, as mentioned by the rep above, that would put us right at 50w at 13.5vdc. Overall, the power being down a little is not a big deal to me. I am happy Midland is willing to address it.

So far, I am very happy with this radio. Everything is consistent and working very well. Power output is stable over prolonged use and I am getting good audio reports. With regard to my concerns over the power output, I got this email from Midland today. I am extremely happy they are acknowledging this finding and taking care of it for me.

Good feedback. I appreciate you sharing. I'm on my phone right now, but when I get back to my desk, I have a very interesting update on the power situation with my radio.