GrouserPad

You guys are great. I thank you all.

I seen Arcadian and antenna farm. I googled antenna farm and Over on radioreference forum they absolutely bashed antenna farm and pretty much said stay away…..never heard of Arcadian. I will check them out. Thanks. And yeh I see there is PcTel, Laird, and Larsen offering 11m nmo mobile antennas but it doesn’t seem that there are alotnof places stocking them.

I have ordered gobs of things online and never ever had any issues for decades. That is until I decided to order an nmo cb antenna. First order was on ebay, for a 27 mhz nmo browning antenna. It got lost in the mail so I was told. So next I went on amazon and ordered a Tram nmo 27 mhz antenna. It shipped, and has been stuck in a different state now for 4 weeks. So its a loss too as Amazon said it likely won't move from that location. Placed another order for a browning low band antenna on amazon and it came bent in half and broken. So now I'm down 3 for 3 on antennas......and am wondering if you guys have any goto places that sell nmo type 11meter antennas!? So frustrating. I know I can get an nmo to 3/8" cb antenna mount conversion but I'm trying to keep the sleek low key look of the nmo style and that would defeat my purpose using a bulky adapter like the opek or other ones. Thanks.

In my neck of the woods alot of the in between gmrs freqs are taken up by school systems and school bussing and school janitorial.

Am I the only GMRS user who is kinda frustrated with linked repeaters on gmrs frequencies. The more I’m using gmrs the more I’m realizing the frequency allocations for it just doesn’t leave enough space for linking on this service.

Let me pile on a bit then; when you set a priority channel to scan in the background do you find it causes any incoming signals to have breaks in their transmission every couple seconds?

I’m fairly radio savvy, but I find the db20g to have an odd “cryptic” way of accessing features etc on the radio. I’ve had one in my truck for a few weeks now and i just can’t seem to get comfortable making sense of the button sequences to do certain things. The radio talks like a boss. I think the only way I’m going to like it though is to set it up as a base and sit at home playing with it a lot! It sure is not intuitive in the way it’s laid out. And the stock speaker is not near loud enough for a pickup truck. Don’t even think about having a window cracked and being able to hear the receive.

Why do some of the gmrs repeaters get what sounds to be a digital signal transmittting from them for long periods of time. Say 5 or 10 minutes at a time. It’s an awful sound annoying as all get out. What’s with that? Id imagine it makes using the repeaters(not that I use them but very very rarely) all but impossible when it is digitally transmitting …..

Same here. 27mhz makes simplex gmrs look like a joke in these woods.

Are you getting a tone or cw id or squelch tail back from the repeater with one radio and not the other?

I get about 4 to 7 miles simplex with 50watts and a Retevis rt87 base antenna ontop of my ranch house. Y’all be thankful you live in the open. I’m shouldered by trees and rolling hills covered in forest.

So then all tdh3’s come compliant for gmrs even one buys the ham version ? I guess I could look up the fcc id numbers but that would mean having to do a bit of research and I’m at work lol.

Is the gmrs version of his radio (tdh3) part 95 compliant ?

You can reset that radio to be GMRS. Just reset it and you will be gtg. I think you press the ptt and the blue key at the same time while turning it on. Then select gmrs.

I’ve always wanted to get the surecom version and test it so I could get a real feel of range in my areas as I’m rather new to uhf but honestly I’m leery it would make certain people mad and as much as I like to play radio with my family I sure don’t want to aggravate other users on the freqs. So I’ve not gone down that path and instead beg my wife and kids to give me radio checks ever so often

Can someone post a link to the Y adapter option for this radio? I’ve got two of them and may need to run an external speaker at some point. (posted to follow this) *edited

Bahahahah this is great

Unfortunately call sign has to be given in English. But you could use Morse code as an alternative to English phone identification.

Heck yeh man. I worked at mt baker when they broke the world record for the most snowfall at a ski area in world. Baker is so sick. Artist point. 542. One of the heavy equip operators got drunk one night, drove his 4Runner off the side of 542, stole the loader at 2 am which had square V log chains on it, and ran it down the highway to pull his runner out. The state police were looking for him the next day. Did thousands upon thousands of dollars of damage to the asphalt. Place was absolutely wild. Baker is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. Pure magical in the wintertime. This was before cell phones. The only comms I had when I was there was by letter mail.

I drive truck a few times a month. (Think CDL Kenworth t880’s mostly) I spent 12 hrs with my ht on scan during a day trucking in and around my capital city and I constantly hollered on ch20 and ch19 gmrs. No one is monitoring these channels. The only activity I got all day was when I passed construction sites where they were using frs to com with crane or equipment operators and laborers. Cb had all kinds of trucker chatter and useful reports. Overheard some locals chatting on a non gmrs frequency that the local gmrs repeater has gone down in use a lot in the last 4 years. Kinda bummer. But at the same time might be better for me as I only use it for my family coms and for that less random radio traffic is better.

Hahaha yeh if you lived on a lake or the desert. You gmrs users who speak like this make all of us who live in the more wooded foothills scratch our heads. We are lucky to get 4 or 5 miles simplex on a good day.

If your antennas are tuned well and the system is working right, then most of the time an antenna isn’t going to reflect much wattage and will have similar output to what a dummy load would. But if you’ve got a shoddy system with a sketchy antenna tune you could easily lose watts before they get turned into rf as they simply wouldn’t make it out of the antenna but would return to the transmitter in the form of heat.

I can’t hit repeaters 10 miles from me but I can hit a couple others that are 25+. I can talk to my north/northwest but talking south/southeast is impossible. Those Appalachian foothills are a bugger. Seems to me 462 mhz doesn’t work as well in the woods as 27mhz

CB absolutely does require grounplane and its radiation pattern is affected by it as well. But I was curious how the two difffering frequencies would see eachother mounted that close...... be cool if I could run both like that with no ill effects. I figure I'll have to do some real world testing.

I've always preferred to run my antennas center of the cab to give me the most omni-directional signal as possible. I have a pickup truck and was thinking of running my gmrs magmount 5/8over5/8 antenna infront of a base loaded wilson 2000 cb antenna. There would be about 1.5ft between the antennas loading coils. Does anyone know if this setup will cause one of the antennas to become a reflector of the other and make me extremely directional? What other effects might this cause if any? I'm more concerned about their proximity to one another negatively influencing my gmrs range, as gmrs is what I use to do coms with my home base often. And unfortunately it seems I'm always on the fringes of gmrs service so I'm pretty concerned about the negative effects if there is some. CB is only for interstate road trips and takes a backseat to my gmrs all other times. If this is more in-depth than gmrs ever was ment to be I apologize and you can leave this thread to die in the weeds of the forum. I know I tend to get a bit obsessive about details. I apologize.