JeepCrawler98

And I see that as being completely reasonable.  And I honestly expect it to happen here at some point with the mygmrs.com network, and in truth it seems that it already has to a degree.
Now my understanding is that mygmrs.com is repeaters only.  And possibly a leaning to high profile repeaters being strongly preferred.  And I would hope that there is some level of over site that keeps three guys on the same cul te sac from all putting up linked repeaters. 
Allowing every swinging dick in the sound of your voice to connect whatever to the system ruins the system.  Simplex nodes, and I believe they had allowed not only Zello but soft phone connections to the system and that REALLY turns into a mess.  I know that there are a couple groups that put Zello on their wide area networks as a tool for repeater owners to use on an as needed basis.  But those should never be for everyone to abandon their radio and just use Zello.  I also believe they were allowing digital ham radio 'hot spots' on the network which again has little to no coverage footprint outside someones house. 
He was doing all that by himself.  Which is a huge undertaking.  And obviously was overwhelming for him as time went on.  Someone also mentioned it was pretty thankless, and yes, I tend to agree that you don't get much outside help with this sort of stuff.  But if it's broke, everyone is quick to bitch about their FREE access to the service isn't working and they what it fixed immediately. 
 
Couple things I think we need for this system.  Of course this is strictly my opinion but I am gonna throw it out there.
First is documents on how to add a blacklist to a node.  Now that everything is immediately available for download and getting a node number is simple as clicking a link, I think we are going to need that ability as the system grows.  Knowing that the underlying system is All Star Link, there should be a document somewhere explaining how to do it but I haven't looked.  People should have the ability to block other nodes from connecting to them if they desire to do so.  It does exist right now, but there isn't specific instructions for that available. 
Guess, that was only one thing.... I guess the other would be adopt a fixed set of rules on what can be connected.  I don't know that there is documentation saying high profile repeaters only.  I don't know that there is a requirement that you can't link to a system that already has coverage in your area. I do know that one puts people into a spin, and rightly so.  There is ZERO sense in having coverage overlap of any great degree on the same system.  It's going to exist to some degree, but we shouldn't have the SAD HAM attitude of I want my call sign on a repeater too, and I want it linked to the same system that's 2 miles down the road simply because I can do it.  Right now, there isn't anything in writing to indicate that.  But I believe there needs to be.
 
 

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.

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.

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.

It's in your profile settings; from the "mygmrs.com" site hit edit profile, there's a toggle switch labeled "repeater access requests." turn it off (grey, to the left) and hit save profile.

OK three things:
1) "Ham" is not an acronym (unlike GMRS), so it's ham, not HAM.  ?
2) Part 95 is a set of FCC *rules*, not laws.  There is a difference.
3) Your statement about repeaters is incorrect.  Why would 95.1751 spell out an exception for when a repeater didn't have to identify, if *no* repeater needs to identify?
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/section-95.1751
But that's OK, because I can use my new favorite saying.  "There's what the FCC rules say, then there's what people THINK the FCC rules say, and finally there's what people think the FCC rules SHOULD say."  ?

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’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.

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).

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

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).

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).

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.

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.

Just an update that Premium Members can now export a CSV file compatible with CHIRP from the myGMRS Reports page:  https://mygmrs.com/reports
Note that there was a bug in CHIRP that prevented cross-tone DCS codes from importing properly, but this has been fixed with today's latest update of CHIRP-next.
 

 

As some of you may know, we have been trying to get myGMRS integrated into CHIRP, a popular open-source radio programming software created by Dan Smith, for several years now. I finally heard back from Dan in December and shared our API (Application Programming Interface) resources to him and test credentials for the website.
Given that this was a new feature and a big convenience to users, we wanted to offer it as a perk to Premium Members of the website who support our efforts to be the go-to GMRS community. Dan expressed concerns about having any paid services such as RadioReference.com in his application, because developers would be unable to test unless they had a membership at the website. We agreed to table the discussion until we had a solution for developers to test the myGMRS integration, and he implemented the new feature into CHIRP-next, the next generation of the CHIRP application. Dan released a version of CHIRP-next on December 24th with myGMRS integrated into it.
Yesterday, I sent Dan an email letting him know what changes to expect to the API once I require accounts to have a Premium Membership to download repeaters through CHIRP, so he had time to make the required changes to show the appropriate error message rather than a cryptic "Got error code 403 from server" message.
Long story short and omitting the gory details, Dan decided it was best to completely remove the myGMRS integration that he had finally added, rather than work with us on how to reach an amicable agreement that makes everyone happy. We offered several solutions to provide developers with Premium Membership so they could test the feature, eliminating the concern from Dan. We are surprised by this but respect his wishes, even though it hurts the GMRS community which utilizes his product for GMRS and/or Amateur Radio.
Understandably, I know many people will wonder why this wasn't just a free feature and that be the end of it. However, myGMRS is a small business and it needs to be profitable to survive. myGMRS is a one-person operation (not withstanding all the amazing members who contribute the repeater listings and forum posts) and it takes considerable resources to just to keep the lights on with there being so many users. Since the founding of RepeaterFinder, LLC, the corporate entity behind myGMRS, I have not taken a salary.
We intentionally minimize the number of advertisements we show because we hate ads too, but they alone don't cover the cost of running the website for nearly 50,000 users. Very few members have been kind enough to support us by subscribing to a Premium membership, so we're always looking for new perks to add for Premium Members to draw more people to sign up. To those who do support us, I sincerely thank you!
If you'd like to utilize the myGMRS lookup feature and are a Premium Member, you can download the last working version of CHIRP-next from 01/09/2023 here:
https://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_next/next-20230109/
If you receive "Got error code 403 from server" when trying to authenticate to myGMRS, it means you do not have an active subscription and you can subscribe by going here:  https://mygmrs.com/profile/subscriptions
 
You can see the commit notes from Dan regarding the removal here:
https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/repository/github/revisions/12301814e238458766f1f7bf06476b39a4e3ab93
 
Here's the original ticket tracking the feature request:
https://chirp.danplanet.com/issues/9169
 
Thank you for understanding!

List it now; I list repeaters months before they even go online just so there's a chance for someone to let me know if I'm sitting it on an occupied frequency.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only gotcha there would be the interference clause:
DMR, NXDN, P25 also aren't authorized emission types, which we already knew, but it also mentions continuous carriers?:
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.