JeepCrawler98
-
Posts
187 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
5
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Classifieds
Posts posted by JeepCrawler98
-
-
Yup
-
6 hours ago, axorlov said:
I do not have personal experience with TK-890H, just note that it's 100W radio, while max power allowed on GMRS is 50W. Be a good neighbor. Software seems to be available around, KPG-44D.
I have personal experience with another radio currently selling on this site, TK-880H. That one is very straight forward to program, and also has Part 95 certification (judging by the published split, it must be "-1", which has Part 95), if it is important to you. Software is KPG-49D, front panel is not remotable.
All what was said about passwords and such applies.
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.
-
On 1/29/2023 at 3:07 PM, MichaelLAX said:
It takes you to:
[link deleted by poster]
which is a music video of Rick Ashley singing Never Gonna Give You Up
And then it sucks up available RAM!
So, yes: AVOID!
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
- WRWB424 and MichaelLAX
-
1
-
1
-
6 hours ago, taco6513 said:
I have been thinking about this for some time now. The ham radio club has an antenna on a 500ft tower. Nice coverage from this location.
The antenna is a DB420 (460-470Mhz) model. They have been using this for some years with no issues. I have been told this is possible.
I have reached out to several places with no answer or just no response.
Ham repeater is 444.250 and the GMRS would be 462.?. This is a 18Mhz spread.
Both repeaters to use there currently tuned duplexers. Combine them with another duplexer that simply blocks the other transmitter.
Is this proper thinking? Just need to protect from transmitter power from each other. I have a DB4076 that I could use for the combiner
duplexer.
Thank you for your time.
WRCW870
KI5GXD
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!
- rdunajewski and wayoverthere
-
1
-
1
-
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).
- SteveC7010, Borage257 and Sab02r
-
3
-
3 hours ago, Sshannon said:
I never thought about using Fixed Stations to connect two different Repeaters. If that's correct (I don't recall anything in the regulations that prohibits it) then you might as well use full duplex. Fixed Stations may transmit on both 462 MHz main channels and 467 MHz main channels, thus they could communicate in full-duplex. They are limited to lower power, but that helps with the technical challenges anyway, as you pointed out. The technical challenges you mention are the biggest challenges.
[Repeater] <--- wired connection ---> [Fixed Station] ((((((RF)))))) [Fixed Station] <--- wired connection ---> [Repeater]
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.
-
21 hours ago, WRUV810 said:
Hello everyone. Been a Ham General for a while, getting started in GMRS. I have my own transceivers that fulfill my radio dork wants and needs, but I’ve been looking at grabbing a Retevis RT29 for the kids to use with me.
Does anyone have any experience with these or perhaps could send me in a better direction? I’m looking for:
-No front screen/display or buttons
-Channel knob
-Rugged build
-IP67 Rating
-I don’t want any fancy features, mostly rugged. Camping, kayaking, usage on an open (no cab) tractor, etc…
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.
-
2 hours ago, Lscott said:
I tried looking that up to see if there is any definitive definition by the FCC. Nothing immediately popped up that wasn't confusing. I guess that's why we have lawyers and courts to argue the issue. Maybe some court will reach an opinion, then later elsewhere another court will reach a different opinion. Oh well, use your own best judgement.
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:
Quote95.303 - Remote Control: Operation of a Personal Radio Services station from a location that is not in the immediate vicinity of the transmitter. Operation of a Personal Radio Services station from any location on the premises, vehicle or craft where the transmitter is located is not considered to be remote control.
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.
-
On 9/8/2022 at 6:15 AM, Lscott said:
I'm not so sure of the reception ability of the D878UV design. I had my first generation D878 sitting on a desk next to my Kenwood TK-D340U.
https://comms.kenwood.com/common/pdf/download/DMR_TK-D240V_D340U_K_letter_1124.pdf
Both were monitoring the output of a local DMR repeater. On multiple occasions the Kenwood would decode audio while the D878 just light up the green RX LED and nothing was decoded. I'm doubting the ability of the D878 to reliability decode DMR traffic now.
The best feature of the D878 however is the digital monitor mode. You have no idea what slot, color code, talk group and user ID is being used, well the digital monitor mode shows it all. Unfortunately the higher end commercial DMR radios can't do it.
I have a MARS/CAP modded TK-D74A. The radio is a beast. It's the fastest scanning radio I have, something like over 20 plus channels per second. I've only used mine maybe a few times. Other than the D578 it's the only other radio I have than can run digital voice on the 1.25 meter band. With the prices these are selling for used it's like own a brick of gold. One odd thing is nobody in North American sold a soft case for it. I even contacted the US based Kenwood tech support and they confirmed it. Nobody could explain why. I had to order one from a Ham radio dealer in the UK and shipped it by airmail here.
This was my experience with the Anytone D578 mobile rig too; I got it because it seemed well regarded, triple band, DMR with all the bells and whistles. Everyone raves about them.
Using it on analog repeaters revealed some pretty obvious selectivity/rejection problems that the Kenwood TK790/890 setup I had in the truck did not have at all; you could hear it cut in and out with pulsing of SCADA systems on the way in to work (which are fairly low power), next to public safety vehicles, really anywhere there was any sort of remotely non-weak signal present. Packed it up and sold it it within a week and concluded I'm not a fan of the Anytones. I suspect folks like them because de-sense is not as obvious in DMR mode, but RF is RF, and you're still dependent on a receiver doing its job even if you're not directly listening to a discriminator.
Switched back to the TK790/TK890 setup, and will be adding XPR4550 to the truck for DMR and calling it good. It seems a good swiss-army knife is expensive to come by at a resonable price.
-
1 hour ago, Lscott said:
The FCC rules allows all matter of stuff that's prohibited on GMRS. I don't doubt that some areas may see little use, but that doesn't alter what is authorized.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-J/section-95.2731
What is notable is I don't see any limitation on the duration of those permitted uses. That would imply they can be used at high duty cycles.
The only gotcha there would be the interference clause:
Quote§ 95.2725 MURS interference. MURS station operators must take reasonable precautions to avoid causing harmful interference. This includes monitoring the transmitting frequency for communications in progress before transmitting, and other measures as may be necessary to minimize the potential for causing interference.
DMR, NXDN, P25 also aren't authorized emission types, which we already knew, but it also mentions continuous carriers?:
Quote§ 95.2771 MURS emission types.
A MURS transmitter must transmit only emission types A1D, A2B, A2D, A3E, F2B, F1D, F2D, F3E, and G3E. Emission types A3E, F3E and G3E may include selective calling or tone-operated squelch tones to establish or continue voice communications. MURS transmitters are prohibited from transmitting in the continuous carrier mode.
Can you get away with it? Probably, after all it's "just" MURS, as was already mentioned it's already a catch-all for all sorts of interference causing applications.
-
1 hour ago, JAF27 said:
I’m not against DMR use for repeaters - it’s a great resource and works tremendously well!
My issue is handling the limited bandwidth of GMRS for both analog and DMR users. HAM has so much space that analog and DMR repeaters can coexist peacefully. However, GMRS only has a few repeater channels, and for analog users, DMR would likely flood their repeaters with the annoying sound of that buzzing!
I have had numerous illegal DMR users transmit on the output channel of my repeater. Even squelching them out with PL tones doesn’t work, and the interference is incredibly frustrating.
This. GMRS is an analog service, with all legal hardware on the band putting out 12.5khz or 25khz FM modulation (technically SSB and AM would be allowed too, but nobody makes this). The problem with DMR is that it's disruptive to these kinds of radios - traditional analog PL's will often leak DMR through as they're triggered by the signal, and currently most DMR's radio transmit inhibit functions are set to listen to the presence of other digital signals only, in short even with the equivalent "BCL" enabled they'd walk all over analog traffic. DMR users have no way of knowing what non-DMR signals exist on frequency (not saying it's impossible to implement, it just doesn't exist).
Using DMR on the interstitial channels might be a workable solution, maybe even at full power, as they're 12.5khz wide and would fit reasonably well between the main GMRS channels when considering true signal bandwith, but asking it to co-exist with analog repeater systems on the same channels is trouble.
That's not to say that DMR is not more spectrum efficient, you have half the band width, and twice the time slots (which can also allow for single frequency full duplex repeaters), so it could effectively handle 4 times the traffic as a whole had it been what GMRS was based on, but that's not the case currently. The other stumbling block would be programming - lots of folks have trouble with understanding repeater PL's, let alone talk groups, time slots, DMR id's, color codes, transmit inhibits, roaming settings, and what not - this would need to be made more intuitive to users first, perhaps even standardized by industry, as getting it wrong can seriously mess up the usability of a repeater.
- JAF27 and DeoVindice
-
2
-
4 hours ago, WQZF786 said:
But it's NOT Frs they get on GMRS Channels and it's not a business
Is this accurate when considering the latest rules? The only non FRS shared channels on GMRS are the repeater inputs (467.550, 467.575 ... 467.725)
See https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95#95.563
-
11 hours ago, marcspaz said:
I have a portable 50w repeater system that runs on 14vdc. I use 2 antennas and 2 masts because they are easier and cheaper to transport than a $1,500 duplexer the size of a cooler. I can endorse that as a method, no problem. It's not ideal for a permanent station, but it 100% works.
That said, 20 feet is not far enough apart. Even with as little as 5 watts, I get desensing unless the antennas are at least 150 feet apart. You may not realize the receive is being desensed until you turn the transmitter off. When I run the full 50 watts, not only are they 150 feet apart, but I put the transmit antenna at a lower elevation than the base of the receive antenna, to help reduce the desensing even more.
Hmmm I wonder if I should try stacking so the two verticals so they are in the nulls of each other. I might test that.
Man... I know RG142 has a high frequency rating, but I would never use it for GMRS or lower portions of UHF. Real-world, my RG142 had more than 8.5dB of line loss for 100 feet, compared to 4.1dB with RG8x and 3.4 with LMR400. Have you done any metered loss testing?
This page has some useful charts when going the physical separation route: http://www.repeater-builder.com/antenna/separation.html
A good duplexer should give you more than 80dB of isolation (100dB+ if you get a really good one and take forever to tune it).
-
3 hours ago, WRQE813 said:
Yeah, I've seen the various FCC letters / emails from 2017. But when I look at the current FCC site and the current FCC rules I'm unable to find anything supporting / allowing the linking / networking of repeaters...what I do find is quite the opposite.
So, obviously, making telephone calls via repeater is not allowed. But as the rules are currently written, the only thing that is allowed to be done via network is remote control. I've looked through the entire Part 95, did keyword searches for network, link, repeater, interconnect just to see if I missed anything. So...what am I missing? At the moment, the statement on the FCC website and the FCC Part 95 rules appear to be in harmony, unless there is something in the rules I'm missing.
This argument has already been had ad nauseum, and I'm surprised nobody has brought up §95.333 nor §95.1733(8) yet in this thread. As others have stated it's all in how you read the rules; the two schools that perpetuate this argument are "if it doesn't say it's illegal, is it legal" vs "it's only legal if it explicitly says it is legal," the latter of which would require a rule for every possible circumstance in the service. And that's of course addressing IP based linking, which in-band RF linking within GMRS is fairly easy to accomplish too (but would add further congestion)
If the FCC were to pass a rule that states "GMRS operators shall not beat live horses," would we still permit ourselves to beat this dead one?
-
4 hours ago, WRQE813 said:
I'm quite new to all of this, and just trying to learn & understand. It's this statement on the FCC website that has me questioning "linking" for anything other than remote control of the repeater...
Good catch on this informal and informational page; the phrase "or any other network" showed up in November of last year per archive.org well after other sources in the FCC had stated that it's fine and well after linking had already become prevalent on GMRS based on that correspondence and the implementation of the 2017 rules. This 'minor' addition in my opinion is in conflict with prior correspondence from the FCC before this date, the current CFR (which of course represent the actual rules: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95?toc=1), upon which the GMRS community have already acted (and invested) in good faith.
Perhaps they're looking to discourage it, but in my opinion it still remains legal regardless of whatever the official sentiment may be especially since they already stated its fine in the past and the current rules are consistent with that. Perhaps someone inside the FCC had an "oh wait not like that" moment after evaluating impacts of the 2017 rule change, since GMRS absolutely exploded in popularity during COVID. Still - the rules are the rules and are the only thing that governs the service. The only thing that would concern me on the issue is any future proposed rulemaking changes or amendments (which I believe require a public comment period?)
- kerstuff, wayoverthere and tep182
-
3
-
4 minutes ago, Blaise said:
WHATISGOINGONHEREIDONTUNDERSTAND
WENEEDMOARCAPSCAPTAIN!1
- DeoVindice and gortex2
-
2
-
-
That's a sad post to read; but I also think it's great that they posted the story directly and cleanly for the community to digest; it's disappointing that they weren't able to get the support they needed. Many don't realize the hard work and costs (be it direct or merit based) it takes to put up a good repeater on a good site; it's not just the hardware costs, it's the maintenance of the gear, it's the work to earn your keep there or pay the bill or both, it's the fuel to drive to these places which can be hours away, it all adds up both financially and in terms of time. These machines are ubiquitous, such a tremendous part of people's every day use yet in the background so that it's not realized that someone has to put them up and keep them up, someone has to pay for them in one way or another, someone has the balance their work/family time to look after them, and yet they're often made freely available to the community because it provides a public service for the greater good. They were assessed $125/month to be on a tower covering the bay area and then some; in reality this in itself is an amazing rental rate for a site covering small city let alone the bay area!
Support your local GMRS groups! It's hard, time consuming, and expensive work to provide these machines. If you can't do this financially; help pull some weight in other ways - step up as net control operator, help out newcomers, buy someone a beer, and if for whatever reason you can't do that, at least be courteous and don't complain that you can't receive it S9+60dB on a Boafeng in your mom's reinforced concrete basement 80 miles away.
-
7 hours ago, JohnE said:
It also depends on the duplexer itself. They however have to be tuned to a specific frequency.
a br/br(notch/notch) will be more "forgiving" than a bp/br(pass/notch) and even that varies manufacture to manufacture. most can ~500kC's, the GMRS "band" is only 175kC's
W/that being said a good br/br filter tuned to 462/467. 6375 "should" be able to handle all the GMRS channels w/o any real issues.
This - thanks for shedding light on the "it's only good on one frequency" myth.
Duplexers, filters cans, etc. are all rather 'pointy' devices, however GMRS is narrow enough to where if you shoot for the middle your repeater can be frequency agile so long as you remain within the service. You will have an optimum frequency of course, and if it's a fixed install I'd absolutely tune and optimize it it for that specific frequency, but changing the channel will only cost you a fraction of a dB on most duplexers (both br/br and bp/br).
-
9 hours ago, WRKC935 said:
Up until I did the rack swap at the site I WAS recording everything on two of the three repeaters.
I will be again once I get things completely set back up. Why is it an issue?
Ditto; all our hubs are recorded 24/7 and retained for 90 days, asterisk makes this cake to do - literally one configuration string and a cron job.
I do it primarily for my own entertainment, but also in case there's somebody using it in an emergency and a record of events is needed later on. We're also close to the southern border here so it wouldn't be the first time we've had some 'odd' traffic show up and work its way through the system; that goes straight to BP, and is one of the primary reasons we don't post our tones anymore without a slight sanity check first.
- gortex2, DeoVindice, wayoverthere and 1 other
-
4
The Net
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by JeepCrawler98
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.