JeepCrawler98

That machine is one of mine - it's not well documented, but if you use app_rpt (asterisk/allstar/hamvoip/etc.) as the repeater controller it supports MDC decoding and can be configured to behave accordingly. The software can map MDC to DTMF instructions and macros, and DTMF codes can be used to establish an access table (dtmfkey=yes), so that's how you get the two systems to work together. It can also do things like automatically link or reconfigure based on MDC statusing, so it has use cases outside of access control. Use of MDC was encouraged; the member website automatically generated random PTT ID codes for every member (existing and new), and automatically uploaded the keylist to the repeater system every 15 minutes. Users without MDC capable radios were able to use DTMF PTT-ID which worked too, just slower and not as reliable in noisier signals. The area that machine covers had a lot of issues with bad behavior on high-profile repeaters, so this was our way to send a message and clean things up fast; it worked very well for that. We had it on for about a year, and its since been disabled to make programming easier for new users, its stayed relatively clean since. Once you have it configured it's really easy to turn on-and off, literally one line of code, we had considered propagating to the rest of the repeaters on our system but haven't had a real need to just yet so make life easy for the non-problem areas it was kept off. The other benefit is that every user's keyup is logged; it made it really clear who some of the chronic kerchunkers were and they were contacted directly to knock it off (wait you can tell it was me?? :shockedpicachu:)

While it's a good courtesy, realistically monitoring for co-channel traffic works for backyard repeaters, but as soon as you put up even a standalone machine on a mountaintop with a 100+ mile footprint, no user can adequately monitor for co-channel traffic on any significant area of the total footprint. Of course linking makes the monitoring footprint bigger and thus enhances the issue, I'm not saying there's no correlation there, but it exists on just about all repeaters to some degree and especially so for high-coverage machines. By nature repeaters exist to cover areas that you cannot monitor with your HT/mobile/base alone, and most repeaters (being duplex) cannot do BCL on their own transmit frequency without some external receiver that interlocks on the transmit frequency (which has other technical challenges, such as locking out on natural interference, or self-interlocking with its own carrier). The monitoring rule is intended to have users avoid getting a repeater to step on another station elsewhere in the coverage footprint by monitoring first, but this cannot be realistically ensured for even a decent standalone repeater, so this issue is not exactly linking-specific.

At first, yep, but we changed it so check in process was delegated to the local regional nets to queue people in line for the National nets (which is why they occurred before the National, the check in for National was handled by the regionals) - so it was a fairly efficient process to run through in the end. We just ran out of manpower to run the National net, especially with the main local groups growing like crazy and requiring more and more attention, and while it played a decent role in drumming up interest in the various GMRS repeater networks (especially when linking was the shiny new thing on GMRS) it kind of just lost its value and steam after a while.

Yup

I have 8 of the TK790/890 radios in dual band configuration - I buy them up even when I have no need for them because I like them that much. And while they’re my absolute favorite tank of a machine of the vintage, I wouldn’t recommend them for a first time commercial radio. programming them is easy enough, however in terms of packaging they are meant to be heavily integrated public safety installs so there can be a lot of non-standard parts, wiring, and hardware involved to actually get one online. other than that they’re great though; the receivers on them are amazing and they’re near impossible to kill. the 880 is a great little rig, the 8180 is fantastic too if you want something newer.

It’s 60 fps of Rick Astley in all his full 4K UHD remastered glory; sounds like you may need to download more RAM if you ask me: https://downloadmoreram.com

It can absolutely work - it's a poor man's way of combining transmitters, but you will need isolators (that you should have anyways) on both transmitters (to prevent spurs) and adequate frequency separation (70cm and GMRS is more than fine) to notch the other transmitters out. Seen it, done it, and would do it again in the right circumstances. Basically you have two complete, normal, and perfectly conventional BpBr filtered repeater setups, one on 70cm, one on GMRS, you can then use a flatpack (notch/reject-only) as a splitter to notch the GMRS transmit out of the 70cm pass on the flatpack, and vice versa for the GMRS side (Notch out 70cm transmit). You will have extra loss from the flat pack (about a dB, if not less since the separation is large), but it's not massive. Feedline becomes even more important as you now have twice the power making noise on the coax, I'm assuming a 500 ft run has heliax already. Also keep in mind your reject duplexer will need to be rated for the sum of transmitter power. There will also be receiver losses, but the band pass filtering on the BpBr duplexers should be minimizing that to be almost negligable. Nothing complicated about it, just an extra bit of math and an extra component to tune.

Oh man! I'm going to start having to go through my bucket-o-HTs!

I usually do a single wrap of electrical tape over the exposed threads to keep them clean, wrap the whole thing in linerless splicing tape (3M 130), then wrap that with electrical tape (3M Super 33). I'll wrap from bottom to top in exterior connections - same way you'd shingle a roof, for the same reasons. Have never had an issue with it - Type N connectors are better than PL259 not just for loss, but they're technically weatherproof as well (although I wouldn't trust them by themselves).

You could; there's just a few extra considerations when going that route - You will (presumably) have higher transmit power on the repeater output site that will make the RX side in the 462 band more difficult to manage This could let FRS users make their way onto the repeater Your system will potentially have presence on 3 of the 462 main channels.

What you're looking to do is called linking - there's several ways to pull this off, the more modern being VoIP linking. You can't just flip one repeater over and put them together and expect to hear anything other than just a giant feedback loop. If you're not wanting to use IP hardware to link repeaters together, you can use a simplex link radio between them - GMRS allows this in the 467 main channels (this would be considered fixed-to-fixed station), and while it can be done effectively, it's not without it's challenges since your link radio is transmitting fairly close to your repeater's receiving frequency when there's traffic. It requires very sharp filtering, careful antenna selection so that the link radio is in the repeater's "null", excellent repeater hardware with a very selective receiver, and lots of vertical separation between your repeater antenna and link antenna. You'd also want to reduce power on your link radio as much as possible (a couple watts), use a directional antenna to recover the reduced power on both ends of the system, and you'd also want to plan your spectrum use so that they're on opposite ends (eg. your repeater listens on 467.550 and the link radio transmits on 467.725 to the other repeater, which could be on 467.550 if there's minimal overlap, but most likely 467.575). All three frequencies need to be clear and not in a position to interfere with other GMRS repeater stations (this is a non-start if you live in an urban area) This is not exactly a newcomer type setup, but it can work well. Again, this is if you do not want to use an IP or other telephonic type setup (T1) - which you should seriously consider doing, it's much easier to just use the internet, and if you don't want to use the internet, private IP gear using ubiquity or mikrotik is really not very difficult to set up (but does require line of sight between sites) I'm also assuming you'd want to follow the rules and not use MURS for linking, which would be the easiest approach but has ethical decisions to be made.

I have a set; they work well for the price range and the UHF version does have an FCC ID with Part 95 approval for GMRS somehow. Their selectivity is bad but it’s not really a problem if you’re not near strong RF sources; sensitivity in a clean environment is good - about .17uV for 20dB quieting on the bench (probably due to a lack of front end filtering). The audio on them is clear and quite loud. They’ve held up well to drops, including in the pool. The feature set on them is very basic, but they do what they’re told - very easy to use, and plenty rugged for most; they feel very solid, on par with most commercial grade radios. Overall I like them for what they are but I still stick to the commercial gear for performance reasons. I had originally gotten these for family use as well in the woods, but the XYL and kids thought they were too big and heavy, and wound up going with a set of Kenwood TK3140’s - personally I don’t mind a full body radio, but these weren’t for me to use. The battery life on them is amazing, almost 7 days at 24hrs/day standby and casual transmit use.

Your node is not registering with the registration server; otherwise it'd be showing up here: https://mygmrs.network/nodes Without that; nothing will connect. myGMRS is currently showing all our nodes as rejected in terms of registration, alluding to a registration server problem on the myGMRS side, thus the node list is stale. I've pinged Rich on this issue. edit: it's been fixed; try it again in a few minutes.

Agreed, and this also what I ran into years ago when trying to figure out what the heck this limitation meant, ultimately I took the "if it's not illegal it's legal" school of thought. The point of the wire-line definition exercise is just to allude that it's an inconclusive argument at best - you can't exactly cite the rules verbatim but then use anecdotal definitions where the rule is not clear. Lots of folks consider wire-line as just remote control over a dedicated twisted pair (such as dispatch consoles), some consider it phone, some consider it everything that comes out of a cable, the FCC has a wireline bureau which explicitly is for communications that are non-wireless, and then there's the whole debate on how this ties in if you use private non-IX reliant IP networking (such as p2p microwave. which is wireless), but there is no clear definition of the term that I could find within the scope of part 90/95. The rabbit hole deepens when you consider you can't carry messages over wire-line, but then you are allowed to to use PSTN and "other networks" for remote control under 95.1749, when the definition of remote control is explicitly just remotely using the station not within physical proximity to the transmitter, and makes no limitation to not include audio, nor does it imply it's only keying/unkeying/disabling control as yet some other folks will say: It again just comes back to not using the service to make phone calls to a phone number, which is where this debate always ends up.

Define wireline using the CFR Title 47 definitions please. Same for where the rules state it must be a short range service.