mire

Where are these 400 - 520 BF888 radios at? All the ones I’ve seen are 400 - 470, and a couple can go up to 490.

I’m aware of five models… Motorola MR-355R (I own several) Motorola MR-356R Motorola MS-350R Motorola MS-355R Liberty 500 All are discontinued, so you’d have to buy them used. They all come with the 121 standardized DPL tones and cannot do split tones. The Motorola MS series, they tend to be particularly expensive, even used. The MR-355R (I’ve never seen a 356) tend to be about on par with other radios from the same series price wise. Never seen nor sought out the Liberty 500. You could argue the Midland GMRS HTs are effectively warmed over blister pack radios.

This is why we went to split non-standard DCS tones in Front Range GMRS. You apparently can’t count on adults to act like adults. Wish they’d keep that trash on 11 meter, but unfortunately they don’t seem to be content with that.

It does. Are you dealing with a single CTCSS tone, a single DCS tone, split CTCSS tones, split DCS tones, DCS to CTCSS crossover…? If you’re only using a single tone, you don’t need to enter the mode… it’ll do it automatically once you enter a CTCSS or DCS tone. If you’re using split tones, you’ll have to go into Cross under mode and you may need to select the cross mode before you put the PL tones in (e.g., CTCSS - CTCSS, DCS - DCS, DCS - CTCSS, CTCSS - DCS). What hemmed me up the first time I tried using Chirp for programming a repeater was how you dial in the offset. With commercial radio software, proprietary BaoFeng software, etc., you enter the transmit and receive frequencies separately. With Chirp, you enter the receive frequency, then you go to offset, choose +, then you enter the actual offset in the column next to it, not the frequency. So if you were programming for a 600 repeater, you’d enter 462.600, choose + in the duplex column, then in the offset column, you’d type in “005.000”, rather than typing in 467.600.

I use Kenwood radios also. What I do as far as zones is that I’ll dedicate a zone to each repeater output, e.g., a zone for 550, 575, 600, 625, 650, 675, 700, and 725. I have travel tone in all of them and any other repeaters are categorized according to output frequency. I don’t program a corresponding TA with them because I assign a key for the TA feature. Then I assign a zone for any specific simplex frequency/tone combinations I want to store.

Is over saturation of repeaters really a thing, though? I don’t really get the impression there’s an abundance of them. Here in the Denver !etro, we have five, with one currently down for repair and another being a private repeater used by a group of local hams for rag chew. Looking through the list, NYC is really the place where this conflict might exist. I can certainly see potential problems with it, but not that high a likelihood. Even if GMRS did fully go license by rule, I don’t really anticipate it would lead to a flood of low profile repeaters. Even if you look at the intentional squatters thinking it’ll lead to UHF CB, they don’t actually want to put repeaters up themselves, for the most part, and those who do want them tend to want portables to bring on camping trips and such.

There probably isn’t any. I mean, you can find a number of commercial LMR radios with a remote head kit available, such as the TK-890 or TK-8180, but I don’t think that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Honestly, if you want a Midland, get a Midland. I don’t really get the impression of split tones and/or non-standard or inverted DCS octals being the norm, and it’s going to work for most repeaters. Might leave you a little assed out if you were planning on moving to Denver, but the busiest repeater here is a private repeater a bunch of local hams use for rag chew, anyhow. As for narrow band, it would be nice to be able to take advantage of 20 kHz transmission, but for just transmitting voice, it’s really not a big deal.

Some repeater owners also have theirs linked to Zello, so they might be well beyond LOS and transmitting on that repeater because they’re using an app and cellular data or WiFi. Northwest Indiana GMRS does it, our 600 repeater in Denver also is, there’s a couple linked to the USRC Zello channel (including one in Hawaii), etc.

Pretty much amounts tp different ways of saying potato. Some never bothered to read the package, some read it and ignored it, and you’ll also on occasion run into people who think that, if they squat enough, we’ll end up with license-by-rule UHF CB, repeaters and all. That’s exactly what I say. And I feel there’s a segment of the population which wants to do that on UHF. They’re already most of the way there - all that’s left is the repeater inputs and use of repeaters. Not that I really think anyone aside from a limited number of those with garage repeaters would keep their towers up without switching to 70cm if that were to happen, Yeah, I know about Walmart and MURS. And it kinda was hidden in the shadows for some time. People of course knew at least something about FRS and GMRS, but MURS really took off more in maybe the last 8 years or so, especially once BaoFeng radios began entering the scene (amd people didn’t know, didn’t care to know, or just plain didn’t care about the illegal nature of using those radios outside of Part 97). The confusion was my doing. Yes… almost. I was running simplex, so no 467.650. Our repeaters on Front Range GMRS use non-standard DCS octals, so we haven’t run into problems there when using the repeater. Though once in a while I do get interference from a closer blister pack user on the same channel with a different DPL tone. That pisses me off. Yes, I understand it’s legal for them to use it now, but only because they squatted on those channels in the first place. I really find it hard to believe that the FCC couldn’t anticipate what was going to happen when they gave type acceptance to these 22 channel blister pack radios, and I think any semblance of the Open Repeater Initiative will eventually be killed off both by the BaoFeng crowd who think they can buy those radios and transmit freely wherever they want (just look at the questions and answers and reviews on Amazon pages for those products), not to mention now you’ve got Jeep pushing the Midland GMRS radios.

Which was exactly what I was referring to. They weren’t supposed to be on them in the first place, but squatted on them to the point that the FCC threw in the towel. Those of us who paid to use those frequencies lost out to the squatters, and just last Thursday, I was driving behind someone, using 650 and 151.4, and suddenly we’ve got a restaurant employee demanding we get off of “his” channel. So, where does it stop? When the BaoFeng crowd starts running simplex over repeater inputs because they don’t know better or simply don’t care? Just let them take that, too?

Not a stupid question. I believe you can also receive UHF signals in the 400 - 480 MHz range on that radio also. GMRS-V1 is a BaoFeng UV-82 with the transmission locked down to the FRS/GMRS frequencies. It may be possible that you’re programming based on obsolete and outdated information. A number of public services may still retain the same frequency/frequencies, but many have transitioned to digital instead of analog, such as NXDN or Project 25. Try those frequencies with no PL tone. Realistically, a frequency allocation for public services should be a regional one which they have exclusivity on. They should be the only traffic you hear, and you’ll hear them if you just use CSQ (no PL tone) on receive (if they’re running analog).

Are the Midland radios programmed with Squelch Tail Eliminate? Because if they are and the end user isn’t aware of it, it could mislead them into thinking they’re not hitting a repeater when they might actually be and there’s just nobody to answer.

The adage certainly fits. All the same, I don’t think I’m possessed of any particular savvy for it. The FCC site isn’t the easiest to navigate through… certainly not as easy as Google. You have this site, GMRS groups on Facebook, a GMRS topic on Reddit, etc. I don’t think it’s a matter of people being unable, just lazy/unwilling. Makes me think to when you had to seek out print fanzines to keep up with what was going on in the heavy metal scene, because MTV was hung up on glam crap, so you couldn’t count on them. Then came the Internet, and it became much more accessible, and more people got into it, but they never really had the desire to expand on it because it was all just dropped in their lap for them. The same difference between how someone who aspired to be a professional chef and went through the steps to get there will look at all things culinary in a much different manner than I will with my air fryer (that being said, I love my air fryer still). And here we are now. On top of that, you have a bunch of people who remain willfully ignorant, e.g., people who aren’t even licensed but they’ll set up a repeater and try claiming a channel is “reserved” for their use. GMRS has been one of those most abused radio services, and the FCC hasn’t been helpful in trying to mitigate it at all. Makes me wonder if they’re trying to see it done away with.

I wonder if that’s a regional thing? I programmed one of the zones of my TK-8360 with all FRS/GMRS frequencies with 67.0 and 141.3 tones. I hear a lot on 67, but rarely anything on 141.3. Another zone, I’ll do the same, but I’ve been switching up the tone for that one each day, and it seems like people here tend to stick to the first and last 20 tones from the standardized Motorola list here (fourth page).

Lo and behold, there is something we can agree on. I’m actually with you 100% on this one. I can’t speak for the people who do that, but I know others who’ve encountered it before. One guy I was chatting with on Zello said he sat about equidistant between two repeaters which used the same frequency and PL tone and that sometimes the owner of the one repeater would chew him out and say it’s a private repeater. I’d explain the situation and tell the owner ultimately, look, it’s another repeater I’m trying to hit, and you’re using travel tone…. maybe you should consider changing your PL tone or setting up your repeater to accept a registered list of PTT-ID numbers if you don’t want others on it, Beyond that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s their problem, not mine.