marcspaz

LoL I'm pretty sure we've all done it.

The advantage of GMRS is that radios have a 50 watt cap, not a 2 watt cap. Also, you can legally use GMRS repeaters as a licensed user, which can extend your range to 60 or 70 miles, depending on your radio and location as well as the repeater and its location. Also, getting more distance being your goal, more power and things like detachable/exchangeable high gain antennas is the trick. FRS radios don't have removable antennas. Therefore you can't even use antenna tech to your advantage. With regard to HT's, unless you get legacy UHF part 90 radio, you are going to max out at 2 watts on GMRS approved hardware. Some legacy part 90 HT's go to 8 watts. Most are 5 watts. And again, detachable antennas allowing for performance upgrades are standard on part 90 HT's. There's more, but hopefully this is a helpful start.

My longest ground level to ground level simplex contact has been 5.5 miles. Which is an achievement in my area. That was ragged edge. My longest simplex contact, regardless of elevation, was 46.6 miles from Strasburg, VA to Second Mountain, mobile to mobile. It was full quiet. My longest repeater contact was from a mountain top near Glengary WV to Dumfries VA... 70 miles as the crow flies, but 77 miles for the RF path. Also full quiet. I was on a MXT400 with an MXTA11 antenna. Don't know what the other guys had. In the Amateur radio world, I have talked from Flagpole Knob VA (mountain top) to South Houston TX on 446MHz with a homemade 1500 watt amp and a beam antenna. I would love to try a high-gain beam antenna on GMRS, but I don't think its legal because of the limit on effective radiated power... I may research that a little.

Sounds like a void to be filled for an aspiring repeater owner. Get it 200' up and you can easily get a 50 mile radius. I have a duplex in Hollywood that I am on my way to. Stopping in St. Petersburg first, but I'll do some testing to see if I can find d anything when I'm here.

That's a handy tool. Thanks for sharing.

Good info. Thanks for sharing!

I think you are going to be hard pressed to find a current production raidialess dual-band mobile antenna that will go all the way to 470 and be under 2:1 SWR. The Diamond NR73BNMO is probably the closest, but you're going to be looking at 2.5:1 at around 467. Maybe 2:1 at 462.

Thanks.... I forgot. Old habits die hard. LOL

I love my Midland radios. I have been very happy with them. That said, there was issues with the Gen 1 MXT400's that had nothing to do with being narrow band. There was a problem with their repeater mode in general, as well as some overheating issues. Those issue are resolved with the Gen 2 radio. I also used a MXT275 on a repeater for the first time, tonight. It worked very well. When it comes to wide band vs. narrow band, the most noticible differences are the audio level and the signal to noise ratio. The narrow band signal is half of what the repeater receive is expecting to hear. Because you are only going to fill half the band width, your volume will be a little low and the noise level will be a bit higher... thought its not noticeable until your signal (generally speaking) is weak into the repeater input. I regularly talk on repeaters ranging from 20 miles to 50 miles away from me and I have many operators tell me they are shocked my radio sounds so good from those distances. I definitely would not disqualify the MXT400 or MXT275 because they are only narrow band. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think there are only 2 major brands currently making new FCC Part 95 compliant GMRS mobile radios. Midland and BTech (AKA Baofeng, Pofung, QYT, Luiton, etc. All the same radio.) After messing around with several BTech and Baofeng Ham and GMRS radios, I'll take the Midland all day long, every day of the week. Are some better performing radios out there? Sure, but it requires buying a Part 90 device and re-purposing it for GMRS (which is perfectly legal and pretty smart). Many people who are buying used Part 90 devices are having great success with them. There are some good radios out there... but I'll leave those recommendations to the folks who own them.

For the most part, yes. Though 8 through 14 are exclusively FRS and the GMRS repeater inputs are between those dedicated FRS frequencies. Power and radio type are (for the most part) the only significant characteristics that set them apart from each other.

That's going to end up getting people in legal trouble (maybe?). While the FRS frequencies are shared, the GMRS frequencies are not, and those radios definitely operate on the GMRS frequencies.

Hi James. Thanks for checking in. Some ares are very quiet. Especially because the band (frequency group) is somewhat short-range / Line of Sight tech. Unless someone is within a couple of miles, you likely wont hear them. The most I got out of my HT's are about 6.3 miles. Normally its 2 miles or less. Did you buy the radio for entertainment, looking for others to talk to or did you get it for another purpose and just trying to find users outside of that intended purpose? Also, not trying to give you a hard time, but the UV5R isn't approved for use on GMRS and FRS frequencies. You can listen with no issues, but they are Ham/Amateur radios, so you can't legal transmit on GMRS/FRS frequencies. They are capable of operating in unapproved modes, capable of using too much bandwidth and are not capable of going to a low enough output power setting to stay within the 0.5 watts on some of the FRS channels. I figured I would just give you a heads-up on those points.

I know it's not great to hear due to the cost... but if you want more power, it's going to involve spending more money for replacement radios. Per the letter of the law, altering radios (even making it so it has a removable antenna) makes it illegal to even just posses while being capable of transmitting on the low power FRS channels. Also, if I were a gambling man, I would bet the circuitry is not capable of more power without swapping parts.

What are you doing that your 6" antenna doesn't clear something? I have an MXT11a on my Jeep, along with a 2m/440 Ham antenna and a 114" CB whip. I do some of the most aggressive trails in the mid-Atlantic and I have never bent, broken or lost an antenna.

All repeaters are privately owned. The only way to know for sure if you must ask for permission to use it or not, is to find the owner and ask. Some owners use sites such as this one to do unofficial coordination, to notify licensed operators what the purpose and the status of the repeater is. However, not all owners do. Your best bet would be to listen for a license ID to be transmitted or try calling the owner of the repeater on the simplex (input) frequency. Not sure why there is so much traffic on that frequency in your area. The only channel that I am aware of that has nationwide recognition is 20. I believe it is called the Open Repeater Initiative. You put your radio on repeater pair 20 with a standardized "travel tone" and as you travel around, you can use the repeaters that are using that combination.

I bought all of my working gear from Motorola. The first round of hardware came from Amazon, and I think they were counterfeit. https://midlandusa.com/product/micromobile-mxta11-6db-gain-antenna/

I forgot to mention; don't trust your SWR meter when you take readings at the radio. All that tells you is the circuit is balanced, not how well your antenna is tuned. This isn't an "I think" situation where I am applying theory and got lucky. I am using a $600 antenna analyzer to tune the antenna to a 1:1 match on 27.185 MHz. Just the mount and a straight 102" whip has a 2.8:1 match and a 108" antenna has a 2.1:1 match on the same frequency. I verified my analyzer against another operator's analyzer... getting the same results. I have personally done the same setup on 3 other vehicles other than my own, with the same results.

Okay... so, here is the dirt. Most antenna makers use the wrong velocity factor when calculating antenna length. They calculate it like a cable, which is totally wrong. Most makers either make a 102" whip or they load it like a 102" whip (Wilson 1000, Wilson 5000, 4' Firestick, etc.) The proper length for a 1/4 wave antenna is 114 inches. A few companies (such as MFJ) make a 108" whip, which if used with 4" spring and a 1" tall heavy duty stud mount gets you to 113", which is still an inch too short. It is really close, though. Also, when you install an antenna, you need the antenna to be as high as possible. The roof is preferred. Keep in mind, the lower the antenna, the more the body of the vehicle is shielding / absorbing the radio signal. If you have a van or SUV and you do a bumper mount, your antenna is worthless. Antenna cable length is also critical. Don't use small cable. An 18' RG58 cable with 259 connectors will give you the best performance. The best results I have acquired while stationary, is using a bracket at the top of the body tub, a Wilson heavy duty mount (stud), a Wilson 10" antenna extension (actually measures 12") and a 102" MFJ whip. When my SWR is properly set, the total antenna length is 113.75" AND above the body of the vehicle. I am using a Galaxy CB, which is the best in the industry as far as I can tell. I am able to talk 25+ miles with 1.5 watts dead-key, 2.5 watts modulated RMS. When skip is active, I can talk to Huston Texas. Now, here is the problem. The whip is terrible when your moving. The wind blows the antenna on a serious arc. Whatever is in front of you will be able to hear you very well and for a long distance because the antenna is bowed so the signal is directional. However, no one behind you is going to hear you because on the back side the antenna is point to the ground, right behind your vehicle. So, when you are on the move, the Firestick is your best bet for omni-directional comms. So, when I am driving, I use the 4' Firestick because it has 102" of wire wrapped around it. I take the Wilson heavy duty mount (stud), a Wilson 10" antenna extension (actually measures 12") and a 4' Firestick, and still talk about 18 to 20 miles. When skip rolls in, I can still talk to Flyin' J's just south of Huston. Just to let you know how good my setup is... completely stock, I get the same range out of it as 2 friends of mine using tuned CB's and a 450+ watt HF amps. Also, the rubber cap on the Firestick throws the match off. Just leave the cap off. Don't fall for the marketing hype.

I have 3 of the Motorola 6DB gain antenna's on 3 MXT400's in 3 different trucks... all the best performers of all the antenna's I have tried. I have been through 4 different ones as well. The 1/4 wave is also a great choice, but the Motorola 6DB just works better for me.

I think it was a bad mistake. Little kids and their families use these frequencies and all I hear from 7am to 7pm are flaggers at a near by construction site using profanity non-stop all day long. One dude literally uses more curse words per sentence than not. Every sentence starts and ends with an f-bomb. I'm so tired of hearing it. AND... there is no way the are compliant as far as radios go. They are 5 miles from me as the crow flies and they are using handhelds. I've been thinking about going over there to get the company name, take some pics, and do a little radiogate to send to the FCC.

Holy crap! I saw that video a while back. That was an amazing recovery.

That's a sharp ride!

The people I was talking to advised me that my signal and audio levels would drop lower after or during the first word. One person told me that before I would even talk, his radio would read 5 s units, and then instantly drop to 4 s units before I would talk.

Oh, wow... that is a huge difference. Basically everything is grounded separately. I didn't think it would be a ground loop after discovering is coming in over the antenna like recieved signals, not over the power lines. Also I had a battery go tango uniform while winching. I figured I stressed my alternator. I really think it's either this specific installation or the radio. I have had 3 other am hf radios in it, including a current dedicated 10m am rig currently installed, and it doesn't happen on any other radio.

Still haven't fixed it. I think I need a big cap on my alternator or I need to have the alternator rebuilt/replaced.