wayoverthere

To be specific, it's the p25 stuff, both UHF and vhf. They seem to come and go reasonably regularly, and they're apparently still approved for firefighters' use.

I would say the fact that there's enough market to support aftermarket programming software is pretty telling in itself (RT Systems), though that does have a few quirks in it's interface as well.

Glad to see a little confirmation to what I strongly suspected (and have alluded to a bit lately)...between the current state of things, and info I've run across on both both wouxun and retevis regarding quantity buying, I've had a hunch it was really the distributors more to thank than just the manufacturer. I know BTWR also has a strong presence on Reddit gathering feedback, I'm fairly sure bettersaferradio does also. That combined with another distributors experiences theyve been quite public about. While I do have a little issue with some of BSR's marketing (all the "SHTF!" and similar buzzwords), I can't fault their or BTWR's efforts at getting better products to the market. It's kind of cool seeing the market finally get a little focus on better products, and i do think there's room to get above the bare minimum and keep an easy to use radio for the basic simplex crowd while including enough features for the somewhat more advanced user (and spreading the cost across both)...the current growth of options would seem to support that.

I remember reading something to the effect of the "Pofung" name came out of a their version of a trademark dispute between two companies using "Baofeng" and making similar products...so one switched to "Pofung" during the dispute to differentiate, and chose that because the pronunciation was close to the proper pronunciation of "baofeng"

Their website is kind of unhelpful. I've been eyeing some of their LMR gear, and in digging there's a lot of their LMR stuff that exists in their website still, with little to no leads as to whether it's current product or not. They do still appear to have some LMR product on the market, at least.

I think that sums up the markets they're mostly aiming for...."if you need more, oh well" Which...agrees with the above....they have markets they're aiming for, and make a product good enough for those markets, and that's it. On split tones, I've run across a couple out here that used it as a control for whether the repeater would link or be in standalone mode (more common on the ham side), and spotted a a few in the database. I've also run across comments of repeater owners that did it with the specific intent of excluding Midland users from their system (this may go back to the lack of licensE issue too, general inexperience, or both).

Interesting to note what it's drawing on the 120v side of things. Also slightly curious why receiving draw would be different depending on transmit levels. I was curious what my mxt115 draws, and since my alinco psu has power poles on the front along with a digital display, I put an adapter together and plugged it in, got 1.4A on low power and 3.5A on high, iirc, both at 13.8v.

It was one (or more) of the newer overseas entries coming with preprogramming issues. Midland is pushing hard (from a sponsorship standpoint) on the overland/off-road community, especially in the move from cb to gmrs; can't argue with this as a smart business tactic. Also can't argue with Midland being very good at things being off the shelf ready. The weakness until the recent updates has been their missing tones and lack of ability for split tones (minus compute programming the mxt400), though this is less of an issue with simplex use. The whole tone to code conversion you have to do to change tones isn't exactly intuitive either. Maybe repeater usage is more of an afterthought, and their main focus is simplex users. The other manufacturers just don't have the presence here that Midland does to get behind the marketing, I think. Wouxun is definitely making some big progress in terms of product with others not all that far behind, but how much of that is wouxun, and how much is it more them custom programming something for a given vendor, with the vendor being the one taking the big risk to put something better on the market?

Looks like the same radio sold as the tyt th-uv88 as well, just locked down for gmrs (like so many others) That aside, DPL is another name for DCS, where PL is equivalent to CTCSS.

Trying not to, though someone turned up a pile of punch cards at work not too long ago. I hear we actually still have things running on COBOL, not that they let me near much of anything...I've ticked off too many of the helpdesk techs over the years.

I wouldn't doubt it. Waiting for that last programmer familiar with COBOL to be available, perhaps? ?

Yes, give it a day or two. There are sometimes delays in FCC getting the data out, and there's been an ongoing issue with a bad character in the data file that FCC puts out causing issues with loading the into the site's database, but it's usually sorted in a day or two.

The overlap between simplex and repeater could be a good thing if you're using a "highway channel" for max range, as anyone tuning in for this will hear both the repeaters and the simplex calls. Another plus of .675 is higher power vs 5 watts on the 462 interstitials.

The list of p25 repeaters within 100 miles of me is...pretty long. NXDN on the other hand, 1 with 100 miles, and it takes opening up the search to 200 to find a second. So yeah, NXDN is somewhat exclusive in the middle of CA. (According to repeater book, anyway)

yeah, the update @AdmiralCochrane posted on the last page indicates they're holding off dropping the fee for GMRS until they can redo ALL the fees at once, GMRS, amateur, etc. (sometime next year).... Making sure they don't drop this side to $35 till they can get their $35 apiece in on the ham side, i guess. (I took advantage and did a vanity request for the ham side while it's still free)

So, up front, I'll say that the "stated intent" of GMRS is more of a "FRS-plus"...so a lot of users tend to stick to their group, run tones to filter out those outside their group, and generally not answer an outsider. This does vary from area to area, sometimes quite significantly, but the reality is many areas don't have the hobbyist presence that we see on the site (not all areas have a ham-lite mentality). Definitely not trying to be harsh, but it's important to go into it with reasonable expectations...I was a little disappointed when I started, to be honest. That aside..let's talk technical limitations. You likely won't have dealt with tones on CB. There's two types, and they go by a few different names...PL and DPL (Private Line/Digital Private Line), Quiet/Dequiet, or just CTCSS/DCS (Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System/Digitally Coded Squelch). In simple terms, these act as a filter on what you hear; if a signal has the same tone the filter is listening for, you hear it. If not, it doesn't get through. The same is in play for most repeaters; you need the right tone to get past the filter to be heard. Many family (or other closed) groups will use tones so they only hear each other. After the technical blocks, there's the mere range. The more serious repeaters often run much higher gain antennas than any of us run on our cars, or most are likely to have at home. One thing you can try is picking a repeater and driving closer to where it's expected to be; you can sometimes be a little more precise if you can find info on a repeater from a club or association site. If the repeater is hearing you, many times you'll hear a blip of static or a tone after you unkey...if you hear that, you know you've at least opened the repeater, and if it works at that point, you know it's a range issue. Finally, there are some inactive listings in the database. Unfortunately, there is some level of dependence on the repeater owners to keep their listings up to date, and there isn't currently a system to 'vote' when the last confirmed usage occurred. This shouldn't be an issue if you can hear people using the repeater, though. Hope this gives you some things you can check off, and at least narrow down if it's a signal issue, an access tone issue, or people simply not answering. p.s. One final thought for the Btech, which is another roadblock I tripped over. The preprogrammed channels are all you get for transmit channels; you CAN program more receive channels past the base 30, but they'll only ever be receive channels, even if they're in-bounds for GMRS. I found this one the hard way, as i have two in my area on .575 that use different input tones.

Very nice ? my 824 was similar...saw a deal and jumped on it. 2 of the 3 EVXs were a good deal, buy kind of an ordeal with the seller (ongoing contact about thinking they'd shipped 4 instead of 2, and leaving info off the address), but they came packing larger capacity motorola batteries and included a speaker mic for $60 apiece. The third was from a different seller, a little steeper price but better fit what I wanted, and was easy as pie.

I guess we'll see on the stability. I feel like the groups that go to the effort of linking are likely to be mlthe more stable, less likely to jump to the next cool thing, but who knows. I've been keeping an eye for some p25 mobiles; most of what i see is Motorola, but a lot of that is 700/800...I've seen a couple "p25 capable" icom, but looked like actually getting the capability would run in the $600's. Interestingly, there's more p25 repeaters in my area than D-star and Fusion combined. Haven't actually looked into DMR, though I probably should, as I think the EVXs I have are capable. For back to back testing, I have jumped back and forth between the p25 and the analong on the same channel, and it was minor but detectable better on p25.

It really depends on the repeaters, to be honest. It looks like a number of the p25 machines on my area are linked, either smaller local stuff (n6lye), down state (KERN), or to the coast (w6dxw, which has some both here and on the coast). Maybe linked is just a bigger thing in CA with the fires and quakes. I won't say there's nothing with talkgroups yet, but I haven't gotten that far into it to say one way or the other. Will have to see what I can find online.

Good point(s). I'm just still a little boggled why they felt the need to throw that limitation of no combining anything with murs.

Interesting that they'll allow dual certification with gmrs, and other services requiring certification, but murs specifically disallows certification for any of the other part 95 services. Otherwise, gmrs/Murs in one radio would be a no brainer. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/95.2761

Thoughts... On #1 and 2, it'd likely be trivial at this point to filter repeater status (open, etc). Should they be marked "open" if they're react/club only, or not open to public usage? #3, the repeater listings are available without logging in, so the basic functionality shown presents no more issue than the site already does. I'd agree not to include input tones unless it can be integrated on the site to require logging in to view the tones. I will also mention that the current version of Repeaterbook's Android app does include a filter for gmrs repeaters (along with the other Band filters) though their database is lacking for actual listings...gmrs being a semi recent addition there. Edit: new post while I was typing addresses most of this...the links are a great way to address the access control issue.

I've had good luck with bluemax49ers on ebay, both for cables and a source for software for my vertex gear; the antenna farm also has some listings, and used their cable with one as well. Most of the bluemax stuff I have was in the $25-$30 range, software included.

Agreed. I think it's a couple vendors that are working with wouxun and going the extra mile to get user feedback and get that incorporated into updated/future products. I know I see buytwowayradios active in r/gmrs, and fairly sure I've seen someone associated with bettersaferradio active as well.

I would guess it boils down to being easy to do with existing hardware and be first to that market, rather than developing something from scratch. Repurposing existing hardware with firmware tweaks seems to be wouxun's thing, really, and they seem reasonably willing to modify an existing product to a vendor's specs, probably with a minimum order quantity. It seems like buytwowayradios and bettersaferradio both have pretty much one-off wouxun products, no? No disagreement that making it small would make sense, though the remote head capability the 980/1000 chassis brings is something rarely found in the smaller radios, and may make the actual size of the unit less of an issue since you can stash most of it in the trunk or under a seat.