WSIZ258

Success! Looks like I may have not been transmitting with the correct offset! I manually input a repeater pair, and got a successful (though faint) signal check response. Excellent. I've just ordered a programming cable so I can go ahead and program in my local repeaters more easily. But, at last I know the radio is working. I appreciate the help and patience everyone!

right on. Time to start doing more troubleshooting. Appreciate the things to look into!

ah, it looks like that might be setup wrong on my radios! I'm gonna reset them and try to reprogram in a repeater pair by hand. Maybe that will help! One other thing I just thought of... the repeaters I am trying to access use DCS codes. would that mean that they are digital repeaters? If so, the baofeng radios are analog right? Would they not be able to access digital repeaters?

These are all helpful! Thank you! It's odd that it is on both radios... I would've thought one might be broken, but not both. How do I verify the offset?

Well.. tried again today when I heard some people jump on to do signal checks. A random guy jumped on asking for signal check, and another person answered along the lines of "I'm not sure if you're looking for someone in particular to confirm, but I can hear you just fine". Once they ended their quick back and forth, I keyed up asking for the same, but with no response. I'm certainly doing something wrong. I've got my "Receive Tones" off, and my "transmit tones" set to the settings provided me. There are no other codes that I can see on the repeater listing page. I can hear traffic, but can't broadcast in. I'm also not hearing a "kerchunk" when I hit the PTT button, so I wonder if I have a setting buried somewhere that I've messed up. I've reset both radios to factory and started from scratch... so, conversely, maybe there is something I haven't activated to be able to use the repeaters. Or, I guess I'm probably just out of range...

Hello all! New to GMRS, new to radio in general! I've got a couple of Baoefeng UV5G (PRO and PLUS) that I'm having fun learning how to use. Been working on pinging the repeaters for signal checks, but haven't heard back from the ether yet! I'll get there. Looking forward to learning this new mode of communication.

this all makes sense. I surely must've been doing something wrong. The folks I heard on the repeater were doing signal checks and jumping to other repeaters to see if they could hear each other on the other repeaters as well. But, perhaps they just didn't want to respond to an unknown either! I thought I had the correct tones setup from our local page, but I never saw anything for CTCSS or DTCSS, only receive and transmit tones that corresponded to DCS settings. Good idea to try without the Receive tone.

well.. some moderate success tonight. I heard a few more folks, one on a repeater and another on Simplex. However, I couldn't get a response when I asked for a signal check. I have my R and T DCS tones set, and I'm using channel mode (not VFO), but no responses. My daughter took one of the radios to another part of the house and we tried simplex, and that worked... I'll just keep trying the repeater over the next few days. Thanks for the help all.

Wow, this is great info! Thank you. I've just been testing my radios one at a time and seeing what they can pick up on the repeaters. I haven't tried any simplex between the two and have only had one active at a time. I'm not quite sure what "kerchunk" is... but I'll research it! When I go to get the info for my local repeaters from a site like '"Front Range GMRS" (as redirected from here), I just key in the frequency and then adjust the R-DCS to what is specified on the site. I'll run through all the local repeaters a few times a day, but I haven't heard anything. I'm sure I'm missing something. When you say "turn off the tones", would that be the R-DCS settings (sorry that is just the menu terminology in my radio), or is there another group you recommend? I'd eventually like to be able to use the radios with my buddies, but for now I'm just trying to get a handle on the ins and outs of how it all works. I don't think I want to get full into ham at the moment as I don't have the time/money/bandwidth to go that far. But, it'd be nice to have a tool for some crisis communications if I needed it, and for communicating with friends on trips when the need arises. The radio does have pre-programmed channels and repeaters (VFO/MR), but I've just been keying in stuff. Maybe I messed up all my settings and I need to factory reset to try again.... Thanks for all the info everyone, I appreciate it. it seems that "Front Range GMRS" does a thing on Friday nights on GMRS Channel 19 so people can check their radios and such. Perhaps I'll give that a shot tonight! Never have pushed the PTT button yet

Thanks for the input and guidance everyone. Maybe I'm putting too much faith in an antenna and I just need to spend more time adjusting my frequencies, making sure I have the right tones, etc... Outside of NOAA and FM radio, I've only heard one other person on a repeater. Perhaps it's just a VERY quiet area. Do I need to worry about offset settings or anything? I just key in the local repeater frequencies and add R-DCS codes that show up on the sites... I thought maybe a better antenna would help. Still learning! Thanks everyone.

Hello all, I'm new to GMRS, but I'm enjoying the journey so far! I recently got my GMRS license and a couple of radios ( UV5G, and UV5G+). They've been great for listening to NOAA, a few radio stations here and there (FM), and I even picked up some chatter on a repeater once! However, I think I should invest in some new antennas as, research has suggested, the stock antenna are okay but can be improved upon. Can someone point me to a good antenna for these? Ideally they wouldn't be huge whip antennas, but I'm not sure if there are short antennas that are powerful as it seems "bigger is better" in tis case. But, I'd love to have something that didn't catch on things as I walked around Thanks for any input! Still learning about all this and trying to figure out how to make it all work!