beerftw

With uhf which gmrs uses, output watts mean little except for pushing through weaker signals and pushing past obstacles, and uhf is fairly limited in it's ability to push through obstacles. With clear line of sight in a good position 5 watts will get just as much range as a 25 watt, if you were in a heavily wooded area 25 might get more range but would still not be that major an advantage except to push through local obstacles. This is simply why anyone who plays with gmrs says height is might, power is good but only in certain situations. Learn the best spots to put a repeater, and ensure line of sight. To determine power output you need to determine what if any obstacles would be present and whether or not extra power would help.

Actually the refund or should I say replacement was done by a service rep, because the automated process told me to stop and call when I clicked defective battery. I really think they do not want the risk of a defective battery causing a fire because usually they want me to ship back the old stuff. I turned it off and it would not turn back on and had a full charge when shut off, it would power up if usb was plugged in but would do the rapid red/green light flash indicating battery failed. My guess would be the battery had an internal short and had short protection that cut off the battery altogether to prevent overheating and explosion.

10m has upper and lower sideband and fm and am, but you would be right with usb being where it is at due to the fact every current license level can use it which means more users. The ham guys I talked to who said they used 10m fm said they did so because it was shorter range coms and most often because outside usb on 10m it was empty ie they were just using channels no one else was using at the time. I have the retevis ailunce hs4 I believe it is, which is a anytone 5555 clone, which is very similar to a radioddity qt60, the little brother to the qt80. I have thought about buying a qrp labs qmx+ that does 160m through 6m with digital and other support for around 200 bucks, but it comes as 5w only and is less icom level ready to go and most experimental level of quality.

Retevis a3 already died, it worked great while it did work, I think the battery shorted on it. Either way amazon said free replacement as soon as I mentioned shorted battery, not sure how often they get ht issues with batteries but how quick they jumped to that makes me wonder if they are scared of them batteries catching fire if they have any defects and want them no where near their warehouses. This has me worried in the future if it is a common issue or not with battery failure, as no one but retevis on their website sells batteries that I have found for the a3, it seems fairly proprietary to what model it is and or what it was a rebrand of.

Already planning to practice for general, most hams that use their radio for anything but emergency backup usually settle atleast on general as that gives the vast majority of bandwidth available for use.

For a 10 meter portable rig you need to figure either good 12 volt battery or a portable power supply like a jackery or similar plus a 12 volt styepdown if the power supply does not have sufficient 12v amp output. You will need a 10m rig, to be portable many of the chinese made ones that do ssb are fairly compact and will easily fit in a backpack, plus they are cheap enough no crying when they get damaged. You will also need an antenna, I have the jpc-12 because packed up with 50 foot of coax in the bag the bag is not much bigger than a half sized tackle box, it extends to 13 foot tall and is stabbed in the ground and run your radials, it can also be adapted to a tripod. Radioddity makes a similar antenna that is cheaper that is also just as portable.

For atleast a year but it does not transmit am or ssb just fm. The quad band part is it can transmit in 10m 6m 2m and 70cm, all fm only, so 10m on the ht is outside my license since techs can only use ssb for phone on 10m not fm, and 6m on fm is useful if there are 6m repeaters in the area, which 6m repeaters are scarce. It can recieve am but not transmit it same with ssb, few ht's can do ssb and most that did ceased production and the few that still can are icom levels of cost.

So this morning I finally recieved my callsign, and my retevis a3 showed up a day early. So I decided to play around on the local repeater, sounding like a retard as I do not have my callsign memorized, and am still fumbling around the controls of a new ht, but on a 2m repeater I waited until after the net had concluded to run an equipment test. I got a xxxxxx out of waco I can hear you so you are getting through to someone, mind you waco is a 45 minute drive from where I live. I doubt the ht simply transmitted that far so I likely set something up right for repeater use considering how stupid it is to program a repeater through an ht keypad. Either way up until about 8pm the repeater is fairly alive, judging by the bedtime calls I am betting most of the users are very up there in age. It is exciting though finally after all that studying got to contact someone, and after the radio confusion with the ht is gone it should be easy as I have heard no sad hams on there yet. saturday I will set up my 10 meter rig and my jpc-12 mobile antenna and see how 10m usb is. Though with active repeaters a simple ht seems to easily be able to reach out of state, some of the contacts are a 3-4 hour drive from me and this kind of range I could not ever see with gmrs or uhf short of tropospheric ducting.

I solder massive wire at work, my soldering iron does not work either for big copper. My simple fix is a small butane torch and precision heat control, if you already know how to draw solder to the heat you can make it work. Of course most of my soldering is ground and power cables for car batteries, and I solder them because most aftermarket crimp connectors are terrible and sometimes cars come in configurations where no pre made option works.

frn is still part of it, I was referring to the green light red light and wait part.

For anyone else seeing this, the application get's processed, either green light or red light. Red light does not mean denied but a discrepency or something in your background they need to double check or need confirmation on. If you get a green light usually they send an email wanting payment, you go to fcc cores website and pay the fee. From there they process on weekdays, not weekends or holidays, and a call sign can be the next business day or in the next few business days depending on backlog, usually sent by email but sometimes callsign emails get lost in the matrix, so you can check daily with the fcc sight as well. Enjoy how uncle sam works, he works at light speed when you owe money, but works at a snail pace when he owes you something.

Most decent antennas if tuned right will get you much better range and reception. One thing to keep in mind though, a tuned proper gmrs antenna will work better for gmrs, but if you use your ht for noaa, noaa channels will likely come in weaker, as will other channels outside the tuned range if you are listening in on them. You can never have an all around perfect antenna, but a simple answer is to simply keep the shorty antenna around, it get's noaa reception often better, and sometimes the bigger whip antennas do get in your way and sometimes being out of the way is better than more range. I will not lie though, if I am in the open I love me some 48 inch folding whip antennas, just not practical in every situation.

I may have to look into one of those

I ordered a retevis a3 for a handheld, it does 6m fm only, and like most things ssb on 6m is a rarity it products yet the most desired function of 6m. I did not buy the a3 for 6m or 10 meter fm function, I bought it because it is fairly rounded on functions and can recieve most bands but is limited to fm transmit. Either way I am still waiting on my callsign from the fcc and my uv5r today picked up crystal clear ragchewing on 2m. I thought it was the repeater down the street from where I work but when I looked it up it was the repeater 2 towns or close to 20 miles away, coming in crystal clear on a super cheap uv5r with a whip antenna folded, and I thought might as well get a more functional ht if the cheapest of the cheap is impressing me. Either way it can only do fm 6m and fm 10m, it is supposed to show up on thursday, and the majority of even base stations ignore am and ssb for 6m. It just is more economical to retune the same mass produced fm tuners to 6m than to build a proper rig, just like many hf rigs are simply retuned cb rigs to cut costs, many actually just foreign cb rigs that could already use hf with the cb portion just blocked out.

For 6m and even 1.25 it seems I will have to be patient, the shack in a boxes like the icom models tend to work great but I can not afford that much since I am also rebuilding the engine on one of my motorcycles and that is eating part of my funds. I will likely wait until I find a good deal since those bands are less frequently used.