JeepCrawler98

The current bit of legislation that’s causing a stir in the amateur and GMRS communities is the following: http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-to-oppose-forest-service-administrative-fees-for-amateur-facilities its my understanding that the $1400 is applied to lease holders (site owners) and not the individual equipment owners; although the leaseholders may pass that cost onto us. Let’s just say that if the USFS starts charging $1400 per sublease for every repeater we run on their public land, we’d be taking almost all the repeaters on the SWCRS down; we just couldn’t afford to run that at the price we charge (nothing). Aside from that, they’re proposing to flat rate all sites which is somewhat blunt since some site users are more intensive than others. It’s like the building department charging the same cost for a building permit for a house vs. a shopping mall…. Theres a number of good repeaters around the four corners, including Durango under the San Juan Connection; I used the ones in Durango, Purgatory, and Silverton this past summer, worked fine, can’t confirm it’s current status though: http://www.sjcham.com/gmrs.html

There’s a link in the listing to sign up with the SWCRS; once someone in the admin team reviews your application you’re sent a link with a password that will give you the info to all machines on the network, including the Lemmon 650. We centrally manage access to all machines as opposed to on a per repeater basis, otherwise we’re constantly inundated with requests for each one considering there’s a good number of them we look after.

A fixed station is one that’s not broken; I usually work on breaking my fixed station

300ah full time battery operations for the home shack, servers, and repeaters; batteries are topped off by commercial power but will run off solar to keep them topped off. An LVD prevents the batteries from getting nuked in case they're drawn to empty.

You flipped the switch! Looks good Rich; I particularly appreciate the ability to pull reports and dark mode so I don't have to wear my sunglasses at night...

@Jwalter66 Munds Park and Glendale would be well in coverage of the Towers 575 repeater; look it up on the map - it’s on Towers mountain near Crown King. It’s a very active repeater in the area.

The notches on even high end BpBr duplexers are actually wide enough for GMRS that you have some channel flexibility, let alone the Fumei/Jesai notch only duplexers that come with the RT97; GMRS is only 175Khz wide (195khz if you account for signal bandwidth) for the whole slice of spectrum. While you'll have best performance on one channel, it should be wide enough to allow you to move around without a massive impact. What you're describing does sound like desense - either that duplexer was not tuned right, or it's not providing enough isolation; you really want 80dB or more - I've typically seen about 50-60 dB isolation on the Jesai/Fumei duplexer units with 4-5db insertion loss; both hurt your receive performance. Also on repeaters; feedline and antenna can make a tremendous impact - cheap feedline or antenns can generate wideband noise when transmitting. On a normal base station, that's not really a problem, on a repeater where you're trying to listen while transmitting at the same time, that can be an issue. Think of it as you setting up a microphone to hear a pin drop from across the house while your neighbor is testing out a trunk full of subwoofers. LMR400 can be noisy over time, although freshly installed tends to be ok.

Raspberry pi’s are like milk to me

The out of stock on the linking bundle is likely due to the global shortage of Raspberry Pi's - most places are out of stock on those for months. I normally keep a stack of them at home for linking projects on the southwest network, but I've had no luck getting them either short of buying the overpriced canakit starter kits. If you have one laying around and get the USB interface direct; as wayoverthere mentioned, you can grab the myGMRS SD card preconfigured and ready to go from the store. Of course you can spin it up on other hardware too - but that requires you're well versed in the workings of Asterisk and app_rpt. Switching AllStar or HamVoIP over to use myGMRS registration server and node list isn't terribly difficult but does need you to know what you're doing.

This will be a premium feature on the new beta site that Rich is working on; it's in the works but not here yet.

Commercial radios can frequently do this - I have this set up to page my family in case they want to keep the radio muted from the every day chatter on the repeater, or I need to alert them when they're away from the radio. Take a look at 2-tone paging; it's robust and plays nicely with weaker signal strengths which is why it's popular with the various public safety agencies still on analog (it's the two long beeps you hear before the buzzer goes off at the fire station). Other options that can do this include DTMF and AFSK (MDC/FleetSync) signalling. edit: see http://genave.com/two-tone-paging/

Most commercial radios have pinouts for COT and/or COR (valid tone & carrier received) - you could wire these up through a transistor or relay to turn on a light of any size when the radio receives a signal with either a correct CTCSS/DPL tone or any carrier for that matter.

Hard to tell for sure, but it sounds promising - have you let Rich know what repeater 20201 corresponds to? Once that's in place you can see your connection on the map: https://mygmrs.network/map When striking the connection, if it says 'Node XYZ connected to Node ABC" then you're good, if it says "connection failed" it obviously that's no good, and if it just beeps but doesn't say anything that means the registration data wasn't pulled in yet onto your node so it doesn't know what the node number means. So, if it says it connected as you mentioned, you're probably fine - it wont announce "Transceive," "Monitor," or "Repeat Only" unless you do a status check which is a different command. Based on the nodelist: https://mygmrs.network/nodes 20201 shows up so it's maintaining registration with the myGMRS network, so that's good too.

In general it's good to plan on UHF being line of sight for reliability purposes. With that said, VHF and UHF can go beyond what you can see pretty readily. It's not going to bounce off the atmosphere (short of rare atmospheric conditions), but you do have refraction and reflection within the environment. If you're standing on a perfect marble - yup it's going to go into space like you mention. Same for the most part with rolling hills or paths over sustained topography; it's what you can see for the most part. Down in my neck of the woods (Tucson), there's a lot of isolated mountain ranges. If you're on the other side of a mountain and the topography is such that the top of the mountain forms a somewhat clean 'knife edge' between you and another station roughly perpendicular to your path; the signal can actually bend over the top pretty easily and you can get a pretty appreciable signal even thought here's a huge mass of rock in your way. Likewise, UHF can also reflect on large planar-ish surfaces such as rock faces. I have a few repeaters I can hit/hear from Phoenix at my house decently (over in the northern end of Tucson) even though I have a small mountain range in the way. When I point the yagi at Pusch ridge (a large rock face/cliff formation about 15 miles from my location), they actually come in with a solid signal, if I try and point it at the direct path to the repeater, it's nothing but noise. Plotting the path on Google Earth actually revealed that this rock face is at almost a perfect angle to act as a reflector in this direction where both my station and the repeater have line of sight to it, but not between my station and the repeater directly. This has actually proven to be a reliable tool for me for hitting those machines - works every time.

It's a bit more convoluted than that: https://scotthelme.co.uk/lets-encrypt-old-root-expiration/

Stick with they PolyPhaser, there's a reason they're the industry standard. Check out the IS-50NX-C2; however there's other configurations available as well.

See: I interpret "it retransmits only communications from GMRS stations operating under authority of the individual licensed under which it operates" as individuals authorized to use the repeater owner's license only (ie. authorized family members). Then for bullet number two, you can't guarantee that everyone using your repeater will identify properly especially if you turn it open to the licensed public, so it's best practice to have the machine ID on that merit alone. The only time you're in the clear if the repeater doesn't identify is if it's a private, family-use-only repeater and everyone ID's. Sauce: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95#95.1751 There was a comment a ways up about intentionally not having repeaters ID to keep them unknown - while I understand the sentiment, it's a bad idea in the sense that GMRS doesn't have a frequency coordination body. Since we're all supposed to play nice and not cause interference, self-coordination becomes more difficult if your machine is undetectable; I can't avoid a repeater if I have no way of knowing it's there. List it on myGMRS and have it beacon if you want to discourage other users from parking others on the same frequency, then use split tones or other mechanisms to lock it down to your use only, otherwise don't be surprised if someone shows up with their own repeater on the same frequency one day. The beacon can be less frequent than the 'active traffic' identifying requirement; even if you do it on the hour or every few hours it's enough to be noticed by someone monitoring for a free frequency pair.

Just a heads up, and this should only affect older or nodes running self configured software (such as Debian 9, or modified HamVoIP or ASL builds). It appears the issuing authority for the myGMRS TLS certificates (LetsEncrypt) is no longer playing nicely with certain older systems, so certain nodes are no longer pulling in the node list or posting statistics to the mygmrs network map. If your node is no longer showing up on the mygmrs.network map or able to connect to other nodes otherwise on the network; the easiest workaround I know of is to not have it check for certificates, by modifying as follows: rpt.conf: your statpost_program should be as follows: statpost_program=/usr/bin/wget,-q,--timeout=5,--tries=1,--no-check-certificate,--output-document=/dev/null If you do not have this string, add it - the main change is the addition of --no-check-certificate, the other stuff is to keep you from spamming the mygmrs server in case there's network issues. Node list: depending on your mechanisms for pulling in the nodes list (https://mygmrs.network/nodes) If you're using usr/local/bin/rc.updatenodelist - you'll need to add "--no-check-certificate" to the calls to wget in that file. I don't use this mechanism, so if someone wants to take a stab at modifying that one and posting it here I'm sure it'd be appreciated. If you're using wget in a cron job - add "--no-check-certificate" to the line you have for that

I guess that depends on what 935 was initially alluding to, but I'll leave that to you two to figure out.

Running a GMRS station (a repeater is considered a station) with the intent of selling subscriber access for-profit isn't legal per 97.1705: Charging for using the repeater itself isn't against the rules, but costs collected should only go towards running, purchasing, and maintaining the equipment; it can't be padding someone's pocketbook. source: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E/section-95.1705

RG8x is better than RG58 but is still terrible for UHF - spring for the LMR400; it'll give you a noticeable boost in performance. It's worth the cost: https://abrind.com/product-category/abr400-solid-ultraflex-assemblies/ I can't comment first hand on the antenna; but the Browing BR-6353 works well at GMRS for what it is, it's only slightly more than the TWAYRADIO brand: https://www.theantennafarm.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3580&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkbuKBhDRARIsAALysV7PYMkBxYiCxyoQ5dSVENW9I2CnZc0eMgrFmNlvt_oP7ufbQQW9qdYaAiPhEALw_wcB. It's fully welded and pre-tuned, it's surprisingly tough for how cheap it is. I recommend getting away from Amazon when shopping for radio stuff. Bonus points for the type N connectors too - while PL259's are also called "UHF" connectors it's because when they were designed UHF was anything above 30mhz; Type N is mechanically a better and lower loss connector, and are better for weatherproofing too. edit: Back on the coax; you're putting up a 7.1dBi yagi antenna, with 50' RG-8x you will lose 4.246db of that gain for a net system gain of 2.9db. In contrast; with the LMR400 - you're 'only losing' 1.371dB for a net system gain of 5.7dB For the hell of it - using RG-58 results in a net system gain of 0.2dB; it'd almost completely negate the benefit of your antenna to an isotropic radiator (which is below the performance of a basic dipole as it is already). For reference; a basic dipole 'unity gain' antenna is 2.15dBi (aka 0.0dBd) see: https://www.qsl.net/co8tw/Coax_Calculator.htm

What's this? Anyways - we had a repeater start hearing itself (Pecos 550) after we adjusted a few other things including shooting microwave internet over to the site to get rid of a link radio that had started acting up with the 4 hours of burn time we get almost daily now. It's been unlinked until we fix it - it's not a ping pong between different repeaters or a link radio/repeater, but an antenna noise issues with lack of adequate isolation on the filters after an antenna change. There's a return trip involved with that one unfortunately; nothing we can fix remotely.

If you have a spare PC you can use Zello in gateway mode and have it handle COR/PTT signalling via the com port - this is cheaper than the Solidtronic approach but arguably also a bulkier piece of equipment: https://support.zello.com/hc/en-us/articles/230749207-Enabling-radio-gateway-mode-in-Zello-for-Windows-free-app You just need to add some +5V pull up resistors to the com port signaling and it'll work just fine. You might want to get a hold of Cory or Buddy with the Midwest GMRS group - I know they're using the SolidTronic for their Zello gateway.

So for reference; I just got done tuning up our portable repeater's duplexer for a campout next week with the local GMRS crew - this is a Celwave 633-6A-2N mobile duplexer, measurement device is an Anritsu MT8212B. This is measured through a couple extra fittings that are part of the normal install; so this adds a few tenths of a dB for insertion loss. For 462.700 Mhz (TX side) - insertion loss is -1.52dB, with a high notch (nothing RX) at -81.72dB For 467.700 Mhz (RX side) - insertion loss is -1.25dB, with a low notch (notching TX) at -87.97dB Below are comparative measurements I took a while ago of a similar Celwave unit (left) vs. the chinesium Jesai/Fumei unit (right); you can see the difference - the cheap stuff is unfortunately garbage at the 5mhz split:

@WRNA236 - yup here it is: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-126A1.pdf At first glance Pages 12 and 23 or of interest; with the limits imposed by the table on Page 23 you're probably okay but it's not a blanket exemption to automatically put everyone in the clear unfortunately (except for handhelds). Awkward.