marcspaz

Yes.

Yes that is normal. Tone is tone encoding to open the squelch on the repeater, but it doesn't require you to receive a tone to open your squelch, which means you can hear everyone on that frequency. TSQL is tone encoding to open the squelch on the repeater AND your radio. So you will only hear station that have the proper tone encoding. The only way both fields will allow a value is if you use cross, which allows for split tones.

I am onboard with this. For Field Day, I was only 100 feet away from my co-operator, but we used HT's so we didn't have to yell between the two tents. This is how close we were, but the HT's made life a lot better.

I haven't. I have 3 radios in my Jeep right now. 4 on days I need the mobile repeater.

Sure... I have some saved on my PC. When I get home, I'll share a couple. I know Hackaday provides direction finding with a bunch of online SDR's. I don't remember the others. Edit- I just remembered... WebSDR has a whole list of services. Just pick a station that covers the frequency you want to use and be sure direction finding is one of the services.

What I wrote is all required by law to put up an antenna tower. It doesn't matter who owns it or what service/band its on. Even if someone puts up a Rohn 45 in their backyard, all of the things I wrote are required by law and FCC rules. If private owners choose not to, they are in violation of federal law. If someone has a private use repeater at their house or business and its mounted on a building not more than 10' high from from top of the roof, then I suppose it would not go through any of that... but it wouldn't be much of a repeater, either. I guess it would be okay for their HT's while around the house/neighborhood, but that would be about it. As far as finding a station (and owner) that does ID, that is actually really easy. There are free, online RF detection centers all over the globe. Especially here in the US. Once you have the address, you can lookup the land owner and you're done. I have a local UHF broadband repeater that started causing issues around here. I was able to find the repeater in just about 15/20 minutes. It happened to be owned by the local FD, so it was easy to find out who to talk to.

Depend on power levels, what bands you are setting up for and if you plan on using them both at the same time. If only one will be on at a time, as long as the antennas are not a wavelength apart (of either band) or wave length segment apart (1/4, 1/2, 5/8, etc.), then there should be no noticeable impact. That said, the further apart you can get them, the better off you will be.

No, but the Army and Air Force have been asking me to join every few months for years. I keep turning them down because I could be deployed outside the US. MARS doesn't pay, so I need to keep working while serving. I can do my regular job remotely while on a deployment (during down time) domestically, but I can't VPN in if I am overseas unless I get special hardware. My main served agency will only give me that hardware if they are the ones deploying me. So, no MARS or CAP service until I retire.

Repeater sites are (or at least should be) registered with the FCC. In order to put up a tower, there has to be permits issued, an environmental impact evaluation, an FAA Risk/Impact evaluation and a RF exposure evaluation, determining RF exposure health risk to people/animals in the area... and all submitted to the FCC as proof that you are in compliance with all applicable laws. Plus the FCC regularly does site inspections. These systems don't cover a tremendous amount of real-estate and there are not many of them in many areas. If a machine starts doing something stupid or is non-compliant, I promise you, unless the owner has completely ignored every single law and requirement, they know who owns what machine and where to find both the machine and its owner.

Per 47 C.F.R, Part 95 Subpart E, §95.1751 ( c ) states that the repeater doesn't need to ID itself if... (2) The GMRS stations whose communications are retransmitted are properly identified in accordance with this section. So, even if the license holder is not using the machine, if people that are using it properly ID, the the repeater is considered in compliance with ID requirements.

Wow! That is terrible. Glad to hear h made it. The worst I came across was a Copperhead infested shack. Fortunately there was plenty of evidence outside, before we even opened the door, so we were able to get past control out before we did. I have been thinking about building a self-contained repeater system that you can connect to any two radio and turn them into a repeater. Its pretty easy to design. I did one back in the mid-80's. I'm just so busy, I dont have time for it.

Not disagreeing there, but there are serious limits to crossband repeaters. They do have their place though. I have a complete X-Band repeater system that will work with any two bands, covering 10m, 6m, 2m and 70cm. Including antennas, a battery, diplexer, solar charger and the radio... it was about $700 for support of 50% duty cycle, 24x7. It is almost exclusively used for me, personally... not others. The model you discussed is known as ITDR, or Indirect Transmit / Direct Receive. An example of some problems you will experience with these types of solutions are limiting the users to only people you make aware of it (compared to known offsets for same-band), many times the repeater antenna is too close to the ground and other obstructions for any significant increase in coverage, and your receive is significantly hampered by the fact that you are listing direct on an HT. My gear supports ITDR and ITIR (Indirect Transmit / Indirect Receive). ITIR helps with both the ability to transmit and receive, but now significantly restricts who can use the repeater, normally being used/usable by a single operator to extend their TX/RX range. In general, they can be a great individual solution for Hams and (if planned in advance) be a marginal solution for a group of Hams with the correct / compatible gear, but not ideal for a true repeater service and definitely not legal in GMRS.

Don't get me wrong... I was taught that the two main objectives of Amateur Radio was to promote international good will and to further the technology. The only limits on tech that I am aware of is that you are not allowed to run encryption or anything that is designed to hide the true meaning of the communications and your new protocol(s) need to be published publicly before they are used beyond development. Beyond that, the sky is the limit. The fact that you can do it is pretty cool. It took some sharp and creative people to come up with the idea and bring it to life. But as an RF communications person, I have been groomed (and been grooming others) to no be reliant on underlying sub-systems for communications, because those systems fail. For two-way peer to peer radio to fail, we would have to have a catastrophic atmospheric conditions that would kill all carbon based life on Earth, before radio completely stopped working.

For a small part of the path to the repeater... that's it. That's not real contact. I had someone bragging to me about a 2m C4FM contact to an operator in Japan over a digital group and he logged it as a JP contact in his log. I told him to give me a break. If using my radio to go 2.5 miles to an internet-linked repeater and digital chatroom counts as a JP contact, I may as well just call a random person in Japan on the phone and count that as a JP contact, too.

I'm not an old Ham... but if you're talking to someone over the internet, that isn't radio, in my opinion. The whole point is to use airways to talk. If you are using the internet, you may as well be on a computer or smartphone. I especially feel this way about people using their smart phone to get into a group and they aren't even on a radio. If 2 people are using their smartphone to talk to each other though a Fusion or WiresX web app, how the heck is that Ham radio? If that counts, anyone who talks on a cell phone may as well consider themselves a Ham. LOL

Had to edit...quoted the wrong person. LoL I thought the HTs would be good for me too, but my family has a tendency to be spread all over the county, during the day. Ended up with a Diamond x50a on the roof of the house and mobiles in every vehicle. We all got the bug pretty quick.

If McAfee was flagged... its may be the antivirus software preventing access to your local drive. Try temporarily disabling McAfee and see if it works.

Blister packs are gateway radios man... just say no. Just one outing and you will be jonesing for more power. Before you know it, you're going to have a Rohn 65 holding a rotating beam in the front yard fed with 100' of hard-line and you family and friends won't even be able to recognize you.

I own a server and just hot-pink. What issues are you having? Any errors? Where does the issue occur?

This year is going to be my first year activating with my son. He is 21 and just got his license in November 2019. We are going to have 3 stations and 3 operators. We got permission to activate in a national park, in a place surrounded by colonial period homes that are now preserved as part of the park. It's going to be a blast. I think on Saturday we are going to focus mainly on HF. Sunday I may stuff the repeater antenna in the air and see who is around. There are a lot of GMRS operators around here. I am a bit hesitant since many of them don't even know what the ARRL is, but some folks may be listening in for contact from home and willing to respond in the interest of the day.

One of the other members can correct me if I am mistaken... but I believe an official opinion from either the Secretary or a Branch Chief of enforcement issued an official opinion that part 90 commercial gear was grandfathered in. There are several repeater owners here who have commercial, part 90 repeaters who have had many FCC site inspections and were found to be in compliance at every inspection.

Still a no go for me. Not sure why. I didnt realize the URL was outside the US. Most of my contracts are US DOD and Federal Law Enforcement. We're not allowed to use foreign resources (with extremely limited exceptions). Likely I never have.

He is in the south west corner of the state, near the NC/VA line, west of Martinsville. I don't recognize the URL and the page won't load o my PC or phone. So, I can't really say for sure.

Hmmm. I doubt anything will change anytime soon, but when the rules come up for re-evaluation, I wonder if it would be worth it for the Amateur Radio community to request a hardware certification exemption if they have both licenses and the equipment is capable of operating within the rules?

Me personally, I think the restrictions of type certified radios for free/public (not business or government) is completely stupid. I feel like most people don't know what is what and can easily end up breaking the rules by mistake. The truth is, I believe that while most ham radios are pretty cheap in quality, they are way better than any new part 95 product on the market today. Many of them are more than capable of performing inside the restrictions of GMRS. People should be allow to use them. That said, if someone is using one for GMRS, I couldn't care less, but I wouldn't go on the internet putting in writing that you are doing it and if someone asks me for advice in the forum, there's going to be a "by the book" response from me.