marcspaz

If you have a good, properly shielded antenna cable, running it next to the power lines, while less than ideal, should be okay. I would do everything you can to separate them by as much as possible. Otherwise run power and ground and twist the power and ground leads around one another. It will help keep RF off the power wires as well as helping prevent noise from the truck causing interference. As far as the antenna mount goes, what is shown in the picture is not a good spot at all. The light bar, rack and other items on the roof will act like a shield and you will have poor performance. I would recommend getting a lip mount and clamping it to the hood. Make sure it is about 12 to 15 inches away from the A pillar. It will work a lot better on the hood then where pictured.

Another quick update... I have to say, I do like the ease of the programing of the radio. The software is free, very easy to install and use. Also, being able to custom program channels 8 through 14 is a nice plus. I am currently setting it up to use channel 19 and 22 with 141.3 tone... and then used channel 8 and 9 for the 650 and 725 pairs for another PL so I don't have to change the PL when I want to move between the different repeaters.

No worries. I think with some of the shenanigans that happened in this form, it's understandable to question what I wrote. LoL

Dude... I didn't test on 2m. I used two distinctly different watt meters to confirm the numbers are correct. See? I tested on two meters, not 2m.

I'm not real good at detecting jokes on the interwebz... but I hope that's a joke. I mean, I am assuming its a joke.

Well, it's here.... After using a bunch of feature-rich radios I wasn't expecting much out of it, but this was pretty disappointing. The only feature difference above the MXT400 is the split tone and (maybe) the weather resistance. The biggest disappointment so far is they advertise this unit as 50w and its not. I bench-tested it with two different watt meters and it maxed out at 38 watts on the 462 MHz channels and 32 watts on the 467 MHz frequencies. I'm going to play with it for a few days and see if there are any other disappointments. I'll let you all know what I think after I give it a fair shot.

Most of humanity bases their opinions off of anecdotal evidence because those experiences shape our immediate reality. So, I try not to discourage sharing of personal experiences. I'm a scientist and there is an expression I heard long ago, when I first started my studies, that still holds true today. Nothing is impossible, just improbable

@gortex2 I think it has a lot to do with were you are and if you stimulate the traffic or not. In my experience, people meet there and then move to another frequency to leave the calling frequency open. Since VHF is still a LOS, you may just be missing the traffic if it is out there. I live near Interstate 95 in the DC metro area. I monitor with my base while working during the day and there is always traffic on 146.520, 147.525 and 446.000. They are well used by the locals and travelers who are making their way north or south and looking to chat. I even do it myself. Recently, I was driving from DC to New England, alone. The bands sounded dead, but during the day every time I called out on 520 announcing I was traveling through and looking for a contact, someone got back to me. One of the longest 2m contacts I had with a stranger was while I was heading north. I was just getting on the Cross Bronx and called out. Some guy in CT on a mountain top heard me and responded. I chatted with him all the way to RI. As we chatted, we had several other people hop in and out of the conversation too. I'm headed to New England this Saturday. I'm going to be using 20m and 2m for company since I will be driving alone. Between the two, I typically have company the whole trip.

It's okay for you and I to have a different opinion on that. I may make that urban test. I think 8 blocks is generous. Especially at night. LoL I just realized that would mean going to Tampa, Orlando metro or DC and playing in traffic, which doesn't sound fun.

@axorlov The point behind sharing my road test results are to demonstrate how insignificant a 6 dB loss is in the world of recreational family radio. In my example, it took more than a 7 dB improvement in power to add spotty communications for about 1/2 mile.

I fully agree. I segmented out the statements above, specifically to note that I used the radio's S meter as an example because it's an easy visual reference for people who don't have the knowledge and experience that a select few here have from working in some RF engineering related career. I definitely don't encourage anyone to rely on them for anything beyond decoration, in most cases. Especially in the OTC GMRS world.

To cut to the chase of it... concepts are the same, but every radio is different. Especially between GMRS and Amateur UHF/VHF compared to most HF radios. If you know how to use one radio, that absolutely does not mean you can operate any radio without firsthand knowledge or the owner's manual.

@axorlov As I mention before, I am not saying we shouldn't look for means to improve our losses. I am simply trying to stress that the increase of power, even at 4 times your base wattage, does not have the significant impact in range of which you are implying. For example, my son and I conducted real world tests in GMRS in 2020, while at our Florida home. Specifically, we decided to test this theory, due to a conversation just like this with someone else from this forum. We used a base antenna on the roof of the house, a mobile radio as a base station, 2 handhelds (1 base and 1 mobile), and a mobile radio in the Jeep My Jeep essentially has no loss (less than 1 dB measured) with a 1/4 wave antenna. At the house, I have measured loss of 4.1 dB going into a Diamond x300 repeater antenna which has a 6.9 db gain (tested) over my 1/4 wave antenna. Starting with using handheld radios and using 0.800 watts (measured), we got 8.5 miles apart before the voices became unintelligible. We switched to the mobile radios and upped the power to 5 watts (measured) and only made it to 8.8 miles before the audio became unintelligible. From there we jumped directly to 42 watts (measured) and we hit a maximum distance of 10.5 miles of usable audio. On that day, by increasing our power 53 times, we were only able to increase the usable range 2 miles, about a 20%. I used that as an example for UHF and GMRS because it is directly related. However, as we go lower in frequency, the performance increase becomes less and less because of how radio waves propagate.

I'm not going to knock anyone for wanting the most out of their system... but what you're saying about RF signals in space is not correct. There are so many variables that are involved and some pretty complex math to calculate. As far as on earth, same thing applies. Space weather, Geomagnetic storms, and atmospheric propagation combined with good antenna design plays a much larger role than power.

Worldwide when the SFI is up and as we move into solar maximum. In a couple of years, you will be able to talk around the globe with a wet noodle and a watt.

I guess you're not going to buy a new Cobra / Uniden FM CB for $500, either? LoL

Thanks @DanW! And yeah, kinda strange to have limits on likes. I forgot about that.

I'm voting for 19 instead of 20 because (this is really not going to influence the nation, but on the off chance I'm wrong) road traffic on 20 simplex, will be competing with repeaters on 20, especially with the travel tone enabled. In heavily populated areas with many repeaters and overlapping coverage on all pairs, it will get ugly. As it stands now, we're so congested here, that on some pairs, if you are running the travel tone you are bringing up 3 repeaters and being heard for 180-200 miles in every direction. I can't imagine the harmful interference that could potentially be added around here by using 20 simplex with the 4a tone.

@DanW... what if we are happy hams? Can we still vote? LoL

A little history on CB, the reason truckers picked 19 as their channel is 100% technology driven. CB radios go from channel 1 on 26.965 MHz, to channel 40 on 27.405 MHz. CB radio's and antennas are covering 440 KHz, which is actually a very large swath of spectrum. Because the frequency range is so large, its not affordable to make a CB perform equally on all frequencies. So, the radio and antenna is tuned for maximum performance in the frequency range center, which is 27.185 MHz... aka channel 19. A common issue with the CB is, you can get close to full legal power limit (4 watts am, 12.5 watts SSB) on the center frequency, but on channel 1 and channel 40, your power will be low and SWR will tend to be higher, causing more losses. Also, over the many decades of servicing CB's, I have seen as little as 1.5 watts on AM and 2.5 watts on SSB with a 2.5:1 SWR. Well, no such thing as repeaters for CB and if you wanted to get the maximum mobile to mobile range, you would pick the center frequency for the full 4w/12.5w and 1:1 SWR. That is literally the only reason why 19 became so popular for truckers.

@mbrun I agree that many inexpensive radios don't have an accurate S-meter. I did put a caveat in there, but only a single line. Thanks for emphasizing that point. Side note.... I love to hear some people report "a real 59", not a contest 59. LoL

I wouldn't be too worried about leaving the meter inline. I leave meters inline on all my gear so I can monitor SWR and power while I am operating. Any loss is almost non-existent, basically has no impact on system performance and knowing if my radio or antenna is starting to fail real-time is way more important to me. A quick explanation as to why... lets say you are hearing a weak station and you only have 3 bars (or S-units) on the radio's receive strength meter. Assuming the radio's meter is configured correctly, you would have to decrease the receive signal to 1/4 of what you normally hear to have the meter drop to 2 bars. That would be a dB loss of 6dB. The same is true for your transmit power. If you are transmitting and the person on the other end receives your signal at 3 bars, you have to quadruple your output power to make that person's meter go up to 4 bars... or a 6dB gain in power. Now, lets say you are running 50 watts from the radio and you have a 6dB loss to the antenna, that gives you 12.5 watts into the antenna. It seems like a lot, but your signal only dropped one bar (1 S-unit). If you have a 3dB loss, you would have a reduction in communications so small, that your radio can't measure and neither you are the other station will be able to detect by ear (assuming all else is equal). So, if your meter has 0.anything insertion loss, who cares? It's not impacting your communications.

If you all don't mind me sharing an opinion... I didn't discuss this before my break for obvious reasons, but now that the KG-1000G is in production, I wanted to share some details. I was invited to be a tester of the KG-1000G prototype when there was only the single unit (the prototype) in existence. I spent a little more than a week running that rig very, very hard. It was a fantastic radio and I was really happy with it. If it wasn't the only one in existence I the time, I would have cut them a check instead of sending it back. Though I have never touched the final product, based on the prototype, I feel like you can't go wrong with the KG-1000G. Now that I have an MXT500 inbound, it should be interesting to see how it measures up to the KG-1000G. While I think the 500 will turn out to be a good radio, I doubt it will be as nice as the KG-1000G.

hahahahaha... Too funny. The comments on the video are ridiculous. Just my own opinion. It sounds like people are confusing the Open Repeater Initiative (OPI) and the "Travel Tone" with a "travel channel". The Open Repeater Initiative, which is long gone, was not the same thing as a "travel channel". There was a nationwide group of repeater owners who participated with the Open Repeater Initiative to set their ch20 pair (462.675/467.675) to use tone 141.3 (known as 4a). The idea was, to make the repeater open to the traveling public through common knowledge. If you found a repeater on the rCH 20 pair with a 4a PL, the assumption was to be that you don't need special permission to use that repeater. That is not the same as simplex channel 20 or simplex channel 19, etc., for just cruising around the country. Whatever most people agree on, who cares. Just talk. Again, just my opinion.

Thankfully the rule makers were smart enough to say (paraphrasing) "in an emergency, forget everything you just read." LOL