tweiss3

Not when the radios themselves are 20+ years old, and were first programmed with a true serial port. I can't remember if the TK-880 needed booted up in a programming mode or not. I guess check the manual to see? That may only be for firmware updates though.

You won't find them new anymore. TK-3140 was a great Kenwood that has Part 95 certification. They used to be $70-110 used, I still have a handful of them, used the KNB-55 battery, which is also used on the NX-3000 radios. These guys check the radios out before selling them, for $150 its fits your budget https://used-radios.com/kenwood-tk-3140-uhf-450-490mhz-250-ch-4w-portable-radio/?srsltid=AfmBOor3hXfzNg6frpl6zsTfAzixQGKZJjih1N4fJGGRJn8_YKKdad4w

This all depends on what and how tall you plan on using the antenna. Simple is a 1/4 or 1/2 wave whip with a ground plane kit, can be broken down quickly, and have the least problem with wind. A fiberglass antenna could be used as well, anything 4' or less would be ideal for packing and hanging on a telescoping mast. @marcspaz has a portable go kit with guy wires, he's posted it here a few times. It's a bit of work to balance portable and effective.

Have you tried running KPG as an administrator? I've also had issues at times that a reboot of the system was required to clear all com ports of previous use.

open device manager, see what port the cable is. I can't remember if KPG-49 limited which com port you can use, you may have to reassign the cable to a port 1 thru 4. You also have to set the com port in the software.

I use N1MM to log anything I log, then I don't have to deal with frequency or mode at all, only call sign.

I did a handful of contests when I started out. One was field day when COVID was still a think and everyone worked from home. Beyond the difficulty of figuring out how to get the radio and logging computer on a generator to work 1E, and the 1 RTTY contest I did, contesting in general has lost my interest. I barely get a chance to jump on HF, and usually when I do it's FT8/4 so I don't have to talk to someone.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it practical? No. It could be achieved if you have enough tower height and plenty of filtering. You would have 2 "repeaters" at each location, 1 would be the repeater, the other would be a "fixed station" and have to follow those rules. The fixed station would be a duplex RF link between the two repeater sites, but you would need to use directional antennas and significant physical vertical separation from the repeater antenna and the link antenna. Likely you would have to run the link and repeater as far apart in frequency as possible, repeater on 15 and link on 22 or the other way around. Can it be made to work? Probably. Will it be expensive? Yep. Will it be worth it? Not for the average person.

Install it in a permanent manor such as a center console or hard mount under the dash. Don't leave HT's visible. That's the best you can do. In my wife's car, everything is mounted in an overhead shelf, can't see any of it from outside, but you do notice the antennas. When parked for a week somewhere I pull the antennas and put NMO caps on so it's not a target.

This is probable for many of the ham or single band antennas, but some of the magic in the "all-band" HT antennas doesn't appear to be improved by a tiger tail. Though, to be honest, the radio bodies are significantly larger and involve much more metal than say a FT3DR or Woxun GMRS radio.

On another note, I recently bought a Motorola HT-1250 for 6 meter use, and I needed to replace the antenna. The replacement came with instructions, and there were 2 different cut lines, 1 for with a RSM attached and 1 without. It was about 0.75"-0.5" different across the band. For those wondering, this is a helical antenna designed to cover 30MHz to 50MHz with a bandwidth of maybe 2MHz when cut.

At UHF, there isn't much discernable improvement, the radio body is more than enough counterpoise to the antenna. Now, when you get to low band VHF (50MHz) a tigertail counterpoise has the potential to provide significant improvement to compromised antenna systems.

It requires Professional CPS version R06.12.05_AA, which is the last version that permits wideband usage. It will work on Windows 10 64bit, but will not even install on Windows 11. Cables can be bought from a multitude of places, Bluemax49er hasn't let me down yet.

The Cadillac of quick meters is RigExperts. I have the Stick XPro, but the Stick Pro and Stick 500 also cover UHF. I chose the XPro because it does 1.2GHz. https://rigexpert.com/products/antenna-analyzers/ If you want to spend a ton of money on a professionals series, FieldFox is kind of one of the standard pieces of equipment for RF Technicians. If you want significantly cheaper, a NanoVNA will do the job, but it can be rather annoying to calibrate and use every time.

He's not, he is a dealer trying to peddle Hytera radios and repeaters.