TerriKennedy

https://www.undergroundexplorers.com https://www.mojaveunderground.com

My interest in GMRS started when I got involved in a mine exploring group who used those frequencies for their comms. I got my GMRS license shortly after I met that group, so I could use my new radios aboveground as well. When you're 1000' deep in a lead mine, there's no RF escaping from the mine, so nobody uses call signs down there (for those that have them). I've built some customized parrot repeaters for use in mines, where a parrot makes sense - if you hear yourself back, you know you hit the repeater. And it keeps the size down (I'm using a UV-82HP w/ extended battery and a "backpack" with the parrot logic and a K1 connector). Aboveground, parrots are a nuisance if there are other people also on the channel who don't know there's a parrot operating.

That's why my GMRS repeater IDs in the clear and I suggest to registered users that they not set an Rx tone on their radios, even though my repeater does use a tone when it repeats. There's a lot of itinerant traffic on 462.700 on weekday afternoons - it seems to be simplex traffic between school bus drivers. So some of my registered users configure the Rx tone to filter that stuff out.

Not everyone who operates a GMRS repeater lists it here. They might desire to be "unlisted" or simply not know about this site. The only reason I set up a repeater is because the existing local one is defunct (the member who registered it last visited here 7 years ago, their license expired 4 years ago, and they don't appear to live in this city any more). I messaged the admins here asking what the procedure was to de-register a defunct repeater, but haven't heard back yet.

In case anyone is still interested, and for anyone who might find this in the future via search: I am bringing up "The New JC 700" in Jersey City, replacing a defunct repeater nearby. It should show up on the repeater map here. It is operational now at reduced range, pending a new antenna installation scheduled for May, 2025. More info is available here.

I'd prefer an antenna that had an SMA female connector on it than one with a BNC (or other) adapter. A properly-fitting SMA female antenna distributes the load (important when you've got a foot and a half of antenna sticking out) across both the radio case and the actual mating connector in the radio. The Baofengs don't have what I would consider a particularly robust connector mounting (two diagonal screws into the internal pot metal housing, and the center pin puts direct strain on the PCB). Note: There was a batch of NA-701G antennas that were mis-molded (yes, they were genuine) so the plastic base of the antenna didn't touch the radio case. Those all went back for credit. I believe they're all out of the supply chain now.

Welcome! First, what's your use case? If it's just to chat with others during "normal" (such as they are) times, you can get "radio-ish" apps for cell phones that give you similar functionality as long as you're within range of a cellular or WiFi signal. OTOH, if you want something more radio-like, but still easy, look at the offerings from Rapid Radios. I don't normally recommend them because they're just cellular modems stuffed into a radio case. For many of the use cases they seem to be marketing these to, they'll be as useful as doorstops when the power is out long enough for the cellular network to go down, and don't work where there's no cell service. I expect that after a natural disaster, there will be a bunch of unhappy preppers with these. If neither of those is what you're looking for, consider getting a pair of radios like the Baofeng UV-5G Plus. It's a legit locked-to-GMRS-transmit radio, so nobody will give you a hard time about using unapproved equipment. You'll need at least one GMRS license (entire family, 10 years, $35) if only one of you is going to transmit, which is fine for testing. Get a pair of GMRS-tuned antennas (Nagoya NA-701G is the normal one, NA-771G is the extra-long one), since even the Baofeng radios locked to GMRS come with the same "rubber ducky" antenna as the other Baofeng models which isn't tuned specifically for GMRS. Stand on your balcony and transmit to someone with the other radio (after making sure you're both on the same channel). They can phone you and talk on the phone with you while they try to hear you over the radio. If that works, consider just getting an antenna you can put on your balcony and a cable to run to a semi-permanently-installed handheld with a battery eliminator. If you have a use situation where a repeater would be useful (such as when you're not at home), first check to see if there's an open repeater or repeater club near you and if they're accepting new people. If not, then consider getting a repeater and a more permanent balcony antenna. But if they can't hear your 5W handheld when you're on the balcony, they're probably not going to be able to hear you with your 5W repeater. You may need to go higher than your balcony to get good coverage, which is going to involve a good deal more effort than just clamping an antenna onto the balcony railing. GMRS repeaters are not as easy as the sellers of dedicated units would have you believe, and even more difficult if you buy one of the re-purposed pile-o-parts units (separate receiver / transmitter, duplexer, battery eliminator) on eBay. For one thing, going up to the 35W / 50W power level won't do a lot if there's a building / mountain / whatever between your repeater antenna and whoever you want to talk to. Next, you need to put the antenna up as high as you can (practicality and regulations permitting). Then you should coordinate with people running other repeaters - with only 8 input/output frequency pairs, urban areas need a good amount of cooperation in order to not be talking over each other (even with the repeaters using separate tone codes, there's still only one channel that people are sharing). Even with a repeater that "fell into my lap" ready-to-go, I expect I'm in for another $2000 minimum to get the proper antenna, mounting it on my roof as high as is legal (I'm on a ridge in the approach path of a major airport), getting a custom-made length of heliax cable, lightning arrestor, ground rod field, backup power, etc. Probably closer to $2500. The only reason I'm doing it is that my city used to have a number of repeaters which are now defunct (offline for 5+ years), leaving none in the city. And this is in a "major metropolitan area". There are other GMRS repeaters operating, but one is limited to emergency personnel only and is usually silent, and another is barely in range and operated by a group that apparently isn't accepting new members and their web site and Facebook page haven't been updated in years. Their repeater is still up, but since it is announcing the time incorrectly (by 58 minutes), it seems nobody with management capabilities on that repeater is listening to it any more. Even with a temporary NMO-HDG antenna using my chain link fence as a counterpoise, I get a bunch of people "kerchunking" the repeater for no useful purpose, and I suspect it will get even worse when the real antenna goes up on the roof. I really don't want to have to maintain DTMF ident bursts for individual users, but I may need to in order to keep the kercunkers off the repeater.

When I was creating my Modified CPS for the UV-17 Pro GPS and related radio models (and later the official BF-F8HP Pro CPS), one of the features is a "Voice Pack Editor" originally written by Sander van der Wel and enhanced by me. It allows changing the various spoken prompts in the radio, but doesn't touch the various other sound effects (although it could). Letting someone change the roger beep would probably make people's heads explode. For example, if someone changed it to the Road Runner cartoon's "Meep! Meep!".

I think if burglars showed up for my radio equipment (or computers), my housemate would hand the stuff over and check twice to make sure the burglars didn't miss anything.

On my repeater-in-training* (The New JC 700) roger beeps are discouraged. The repeater sends a courtesy tone once it's done handling your traffic. It then sits for 30 seconds to see if anyone else keys it up. If not, it auto-IDs itself with my call sign. If someone else keys it up before the time-out and it doesn't get a chance to ID after 14.5 minutes of repeater duty, it will cut in and ID itself every 15 minutes until traffic stops. That seems like the best of all worlds, so it isn't pumping out its ID 24/7, but only IDs while it is passing traffic or after traffic stops. The repeater has one input tone, a different output tone, and sends Morse IDs with no tone. Right now the NMO-HDG antenna is using my chain link fence as a counterpoise. Once it gets warmer, I'll be running 7/8" Heliax up to the roof with a Commscope DB408-B on an additional 20' mast. That's as high as I can go without permitting and warning lights (approach corridor for Newark Airport). As I'm already up on the Kennedy Blvd. ridge in a 3.5 story building I should have pretty good coverage. I also need to pound a field of ground rods into the ground once it thaws for lightning protector earthing.

I think it's a combination of taking up 2x the airtime (plus a little more if there's a tail tone) along with confusing people who don't know there's a parrot. It's probably location dependent - I wouldn't run mine here in the NYC area because there's a sizable amount of GMRS traffic here, some of it with tones (so they'll see carrier busy but it won't break their squelch). Out in the Mojave Desert is another thing completely. When the nearest town (population 22) is 30+ minutes away by car there usually isn't anyone around to get confused (and if there is, I can move the parrot to another channel).

That's an odd one, all right. Did you save the original radio config .img with CHIRP before making changes to the radio? If so, try uploading that to the radio. If not, try doing a factory reset (usually somewhere around menu 40 in the older models) after making notes of everything you want to put back after the reset. There's only one audio clip of the roger beep stored in the radio, and I'd expect either a) what goes out over the air to also be corrupted (if it was a "wild write" - see below) or all audio coming out of the speaker / headset to be distorted (if something happened to the audio gain). My programming (CPS, firmware - not "programming" as in writing configs) experience is just with the newer full-color-screen Baofeng models, so the following may not be relevant... The radio allows reads of its configuration memory (that's how CHIRP, the CPS and the various commercial 3rd-party apps do their read / write of the user configuration memory). The radio won't allow reading of memory outside of the area for user configurations, but will allow writes to all of flash memory (which holds things like the startup image, voice prompts/tones, fonts, calibration data and so on). So a "wild write" can stomp on things by accident. It's also how my various CPS releases allow editing the startup picture and voice prompts.

I'm not sure about the GMRS Pro as it's built for BTECH by a different manufacturer, but the BTECH BF-F8HP Pro (and other Baofeng models with GPS) don't retain the almanac across power-off/power-on sessions. They're radios that have a GPS receiver inside, not full-fledged navigation devices. I agree that the documentation and on-screen reporting of a bunch of these radios could be improved, and that might happen in a future BF-F8HP Pro firmware update (as I mentioned, I just have a GMRS Pro and don't work on its software). I'd also point out that my Garmin InReach Mini personal tracker / SOS beacon intentionally does not maintain any record of its position across power cycles (and my BF-F8HP Pro acquires faster when they're side-by-side). [I'm not a BTECH employee, just a contractor, and nothing I say should be construed as an official position of BTECH.]

I'm only about 30 miles away from you, so if you're having trouble setting up a radio and it's one of the models I know, I could walk you through it. OTOH, if your question is about repeater access, they're likely too far away from me. If you can explain more clearly what you're having trouble with, I'll try to help.

I use it above ground to talk to family and other GMRS license holders. Underground (mine exploring) I use it to communicate with others in my exploring group. I have a parrot I set up in the shaft when underground, and it does ID with my call sign at the required intervals. Not that any signals are making it out very far from inside a lead mine. Occasionally I'll hear someone announce their call sign requesting a radio check on the channel I monitor, and I will answer those in kind. It's mostly quiet here except when a local taxi company uses the channel in their rotating "frequency of the day". There are a few repeaters that are barely in range, one of which does some sort of chime thing and announces the time with ~58 minutes of error. I assume that this is a repeater that hasn't been reset since DST ended for the year, along with accumulated clock drift. I guess nobody using it knows the repeater owner, and the owner isn't monitoring. There are a few (possibly including the one I mentioned above) that Morse their IDs. They barely break squelch most of the time and cut in and out, so I haven't been able to copy their full IDs.

[Edit - I just realized I'm responding to a 12-year-old thread that I found via a web search. Sorry for the thread necrophilia.] I have one set up piggybacked onto a UV-82HP extended battery for underground (mine exploring) use. If you hear yourself back from the parrot and topside can also hear themselves back, you know you can talk to each other. And if you don't hear yourself back, you know you're out of range. Aboveground they can be pretty annoying. Out in the middle of nowhere (Mojave Desert, up on a mountain) I was reaching Dumont Dunes with it, and it confused a bunch of off-roaders with a bunch of "What? What?<beep>" going on as everything the parrot heard was retransmitted.

The issue with phone support was that people were calling for help with all Baofeng radio models, not just the ones that are sold by BTECH. This is at least partially because Amazon lumps many Baofeng product listings in "Visit the BAOFENG Store" without distinguishing between sellers. That took time away from actually helping BTECH customers, and the choice was apparently between either discontinuing phone support or hiring someone to answer a phone and tell most callers "Sorry, we're not the Baofeng you were looking for". On the BF-F8HP Pro I do CPS development and co-manage the radio firmware requirements and bug list with someone at BTECH (I'm a contractor). Even I don't call them - I send email to the same customer service email address (not posted here to prevent harvesting by bots, but available in your manual and on the BTECH web site) that you do. If an issue can be resolved faster with a phone conversation, customer service will either pro-actively contact you or you can request that they call you. If you feel you got an inappropriate form-letter reply, let them know in your next email. Since this is one of my first posts here, let me emphasize that nothing I write should be considered an official statement / opinion of BTECH.

You will need to use the CPS to update the firmware (or the startup image or voices). It is unfortunately Windows-only. You might want to give it a try - you can use it or CHIRP, writing to the radio with one and reading it back with the other, etc. It is not the usual buggy Baofeng CPS - it is supported by BTECH here in the US (I should know, I wrote it ). CPS new feature requests or bug reports can go through BTECH, or you can reach me here or on Facebook. I'm also happy to pass along radio firmware feature requests or bug reports (for the BF-F8HP Pro only). It should be possible to write a firmware update utility to run under Linux and if there's enough demand I'd consider doing it. The existing one is Windows-only because it is built using the same framework as the rest of the CPS. Support for MacOS is extremely unlikely, not because it's more difficult but because the Mac I use for development is old and doesn't receive updates any more, so it can't run modern Xcode. Since this is one of my first posts here, let me emphasize that nothing I write should be considered an official statement / opinion of BTECH.