wayoverthere

I was hoping late night would make it a little easier to get through (and there seemed to be some gaps to get into), but I think I just piled too many compromises together to be very effective. On the upside, running between midnight and 2am PDT meant lower temps...it was more like high 70's instead of the 107/108 highs we saw Saturday and Sunday...when I went to pick up food Sunday afternoon, the display in the truck read 135F.

In terms of after-action, i'll say there's room for improvement. wasn't going for points, so i was doing some hunt and pounce between 20m and 40m, around 0700-0900 UTC. For some reason I decided to play on high difficulty, and on top of the compromised antenna (end fed wire, sloping from 7ft up to around 20 ft roughly east/west), I was running QRP phone. In retrospect, I should have either taken the effort to set up the interface box and computer for FT8, dragged out the 100 watt radio, or both. I heard club stations as far away as Indiana, Kansas, and Central FL, but nobody could hear me, apparently.

Current plan is operating solo a bit Saturday night to avoid the heat. Recently picked up an Ultimax wire antenna (and the necessary tuner) and looking forward to testing that out. Club wise...I can't find much. One local club is providing support for the Climb to Kaiser race, while the other, I only found references to a field day setup, but nothing public....the closest event listed with ARRL is 2ish hours away

looks like the small signal stalk (as the larger one has a bit more of a "salt shaker" base); just measured mine at 20 3/4" from the base of the plastic to the end of the whip.

IMO, that should be sufficient to test, as that will give you basically the same setup as if it were mounted, minus actually sticking the adhesive. Anecdotally (as it's not the same radio), icom's 2730a actually comes with (or might have been part of an optional mount kit..i forget) magnets that mount to the back of the faceplate to stick it to a metal mounting plate. I even ran that metal mounting plate on top of a magnetic phone holder for awhile, till I got a proper hard mount (panavise). As far as I (and the signal reports) could tell, no ill effects.

I'll go ahead and tag @rdunajewski on this, as he's the one that can take a look at what's up with the listings from FCC making it into the site's database to allow registration. In terms of repeater listings, this site IS one of the best sources, but not the ONLY. While Repeaterbook was mainly focusted on Ham repeaters, there's also a fair number of GMRS repeaters being listed, so you may check there to see if they have any listed in your area till things get sorted on this side.

If it works like my FT4X, one option would be to change the "lock" settings to only disable PTT, so you can still change channes at will. then just unlock when you want to switch to a channel you can transmit on. this is the route i go with the FT4X since i don't have any public safety channels programmed, but dial one up on the VFO occasionally when there might be something going on. alternately, what i did with the baofengs and the LMR stuff is set them for duplex, with the intended listen only (public safety/commercial/etc) frequency as the receive frequency, and either GMRS CH 1 (462.5625) or MURS 1 (i forget the frequency offhand) as the transmit frequency. Neither is strictly kosher, but GMRS1 is often a mess of kerchunks and call button tones from the kids with bubble packs (at least here), and I've never heard a peep on MURS. CHIRP is pretty good about letting you just type in the transmit frequency directly, and calculating the offset, but if you're using Yaesu's you may need to calculate it yourself.

First, I'm not a Mac guy, so I don't have firsthand experience there. However, per others' experiences (and Linux/wine experience with other software), it should get along okay with emulator software (not sure what the Mac equivalent of Wine is). Second, what part of the settings are you having problems with? In the software, I tend to program the basic frequency info (Rx, tx) on the main screen, then hit the carets >> over to the right side of the line to do the rest..ctcss/dcs, channel naming, and scan behavior (and disable tx on monitor only stuff). I'll.try to get on the other computer I used for programming later this evening for some screenshots if someone doesn't beat me to it. I honestly havent tried much manual programming, it seems less difficult to just use the software,though I do have a dedicated Windows laptop for radio work ($150 refurbished Dell from woot.com).

Gotcha. Settings are a definite possibility, but any chance of swapping mics with another working unit to test and rule out a fault there? That was what clued me in on the broken wire in mine...swapping between one working and one not, and which part (cord vs mic) the problem followed.

Not sure what Kenwood would call the feature (others more familiar with kenwood likely will), but some/many LMR radios have a feature that may be referred to as "on hook scanning". I ran into this with my vertex stuff, and the fix was to ground the mic holder button to the radio. I also had one mic where the ground wire to the button was broken, but a quick solder and it was back to normal.

I don't see any reason, with the right hardware, that a dual pl setup couldnt be implemented similar to what CARLA has on the ham side. One pl, your audio goes to the whole system, while another pl repeats on that machine only. If you key up the local pl, linked audio is muted until a set period after local activity ends, and the link resumes. http://carlaradio.net/thesystem/pl_ct.php

It's in the product description (first paragraph) for the UV980P now, though I don't remember seeing that part in the past. https://www.buytwowayradios.com/wouxun-kg-uv980p.html Yeah, it's been a couple of few months since I looked, the 1.25m version was listed last time, but I put off grabbing one...not there when I checked today.

I may have missed something, but I thought the version of the uv920p with 2m/1.25m was full power for both, but I can't seem to find anything solid now, and the 1.25m versions is no longer listed when I look today. I know a lot of the other tribands are low on 1.25, which was what had me eyeing the wouxun. I don't remember seeing the 10w on 6/10m wording in the listing for the uv980p though, so entirely possible I missed it previously too.

To be fair, there were legislative reasons the fee for ham licenses stayed zero as long as it did, along with some administrative hoops to get their <stuff> together to justify the fees and get the payment processes in place. It'd probably get more traction to argue the cost of administering gmrs licensing should be adjusted to reflect actual costs than trying to get a structure where the license costs nothing.

Well put, and putting it nicely. It sounds like making more of a mess to me, and there's definitely an overtone of "hams are superior" in that document While I wouldn't mind seeing digital voice come to gmrs, it'd probably be best relegated to a new channel or two (maybe require narrowband there), and for simplicity go with one set standard...there's already a good variety of radios out there with DMR, from cheap to LMR. Along that line, how about explicitly making part 90 gear a-ok too? The one thing I wouldn't mind seeing that's definitely a concession to hams (and I'm not seeing any corresponding downside to gmrs, but let me know if I'm missing something) would be a pass on the 95e certification requirement IF the user holds both a gmrs license and a ham license, i.e. the ability to also use your ham gear for gmrs, subject to the usual power, mode and bandwidth requirements for gmrs. Hey, a guy can dream.

I've said the same in the past as well...not to discourage, but to moderate expectations. Some areas are a lot more social, especially where there are linked systems. Mine is a bit lower activity, a little repeater chatter but other than the machine run by the ham club, not much "outside the group" traffic.

For the main page, either the "Repeaters" or the "Map" links (near the top of the page on desktop, or under the right sidebar, accessed by the 3 lines in the top right, on mobile) lead back to the main site. On that repeater icon, is there one specific you can point to that shows it?

Yes, some companies make antennas that don't require a ground plane; i'm partial to Laird. The main thing is that it covers the 462-467 range with sufficient bandwidth (the one linked covers 450-470mhz) https://theantennafarm.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=3236

It's the OP, Kdcstks. May have been typing in the wrong field when posting the question

This. I'll note that somewhere around the time of the original post (I forget if it was before or after) the logins between the two parts of the site were unified. One may still need to login to the main page again, as it doesn't carry between the two (afaik), but the login should be the same for main site or forum.

First, I've had nothing good experiences with The Antenna Farm as well, and hope to see them get back on track in the new year. Second, most of the mag mounts I've used have been the mxta12's, and they've worked well for me, both on that 32" 2x5/8 wave Browning, and the 36" long comet 2x4sr. They've hung on fine on the roof of my little truck even close to 90mph, along with dragging a signal stalk across all the ceiling beams in the 7' clearance parking structure at work (5 or 6 floors worth, depending where I found a spot). The only time it actually came off in the year I had it up was once, with a direct hit on the comet on a solid (2"+ diameter) tree branch

The one antenna I've found that actually did well on both was a Browning (br1713bs, 2x5/8 wave), rated for 410-490mhz, iirc. When testing, both on 70cm and gmrs, I never saw higher than 1.2:1. I never tested it without SOME ground plane, but to be fair, my little truck isn't a ton of space either (center roof, single cab compact truck). Unfortunately, some poking around looks like it may be limited availability or discontinued. Tram does also have a 1/4 wave they rate for a similar frequency range, though I haven't used it, so I don't know the model number offhand.

So...I haven't worked with the newer mxt115, but i don't believe they're computer programmable, at least at the consumer level. The key points with the older 115 I had were enabling the repeater channels via the menu, tuning to the right "XXRP" channel for the frequency desired (which is programmed with the offset needed for repeater use) and then setting the code that corresponds to the tone needed for that repeater. I understand the new 115's have TX and rx tones separate now, and TX tone is what you need for the repeater...Rx is optional. https://cdn.accentuate.io/81031332017/1623709961570/MXT115-Owners-Manual-11-16-2020.pdf Page 23 has the instructions to enable repeater channels, 18 and 19 have the past about setting tones, and 27 has the table of what code corresponds to what tone.

Yeah, I have a little stubby flexible rubber comet antenna and a signal stick for mine too. The comet is great for around the house (or vehicle) hotspot use.

To add to this...in a very general sense, it can be easier to make a good performing superhet than SOC, and there's some cheap bad SOC radios out there. There's also some really awesome (and priced accordingly) SOC radios, and some meh superhet ones. That aside, I have the little brother to the ft65 (the ft4x), and it's been solid, and is the one I grab most often for handheld use. Holds a charge well, little to no drain when off, and decent filtering. Even took it up on the hill by the repeater and commercial fm sites, and was listening to myself and the convo on the repeater there, while talking into another repeater across the valley on the mobile. Meanwhile, the baofeng uv5r I also had along was stone deaf, acting like there were no signals present