tweiss3

You knew DMR wasn't going to happen. You know better, if you want DMR, the price point on the NX1200/1300 is better than the D75. Looking at my D74 again, the batteries are 1800mAh at the best, 1100 at the worst, which is insane. I have 3800 and 4200 for all my carry radios, so it's not really a surprise when I think about it that the battery life sucks.

If you need to take it with you, SDS series is about the standard as it has GPS options to adjust your lists as you move, plus it handles the simulcast most trunking systems have. If you don't need digital trunking, there are some less expensive unidens that could work. If you are just listening at home, I use an AirspyR2 on a computer with SDR Trunk software.

Those are ConnectPlus. You may have issues removing trunking firmware and going to a standard firmware. I have not personally made that change, so I cannot walk you through it.

I get what you are looking for, but GMRS was intended as a business/personal radio service, and as such, the field programming isn't supposed to be a thing (so the typical blockhead can't change to an unlicensed frequency). Beyond that, with a little bit of planning, it's not hard to program things the way you need, even for a cross country trip. Toss in OST and you shouldn't have an issue using any repeater you have access to.

This is exactly true. Unless your intended recipient is exactly matched to your setup, there is no need to worry over power. In fact, most repeaters are turned down for reliability, so a 100W rated repeater puts out something like 50W after the duplexer, often many are 50W rated repeaters putting out 20W after the duplexer, and have ears way beyond their transmit range. It's one reason I don't fret over having 45W UHF decks vs 50W. Now, in my communication plan, obviously, mobile radios in every car are preferred over HTs, but in that case its to get 3 miles simplex.

Inventory spreadsheet says an embarrassing number, over 50

Marine does have HF, looks like an older version of the current Icom tranceiver: https://www.icomamerica.com/lineup/products/IC-M803/

NX-5K allows you to program a single button to turn on OST (operator selectable tone), then holding that button brings up the OST list, scroll down and that's it. Now, that's not Part95, and it's a $980 option per deck, but many of the commercial manufacturers have it figure out, just not by using bluetooth.

I added a replacement cost column to my spreadsheet, I really don't need my wife to see that column. Oh no, my wife doesn't really care, she knows shipments just show up, but she also hasn't seen the total replacement cost either. I have stuff laying all around my home office/radio room, its to a point it isn't noticed what is new and what is not.

Nope, no help. I figured out how deep I was last week when I spent some time updating my inventory spreadsheet. It's pretty bad.

To be fair, any current commercial radio that you can get wideband on is going to be excellent for GMRS. There are plenty of options that are considered end of life that are great too. Motorola didn't have many, if any commercial radios that did get part 95 certification, but there are a boatload of Kenwood's that did. Depending on what you need (mobile, mobile with remote head/rf deck, HT, etc) will determine what you find. TK8150 is 45w, will do wideband, and remote head is an option, I have 2 of them.

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RJ45 connection to the radio, right? Try a CAT6 network cable and an RJ45 coupler.

You are right. I guess I'm more annoyed that you have to leave the VFO B on the screen, which is pointless. On the FTM400, you can't turn off the B band, but it will do dual receive. Every other HF radio that has dual VFO literally doesn't show the B band unless you are using it for split (817, 450D, 705, 7300).

No problem Marc, It was a good exercise in really understanding the radio. RR has no response to my question. The groups.io didn't have any solution, but suggested I reach out to RT Systems. RT Systems went back and forth with me a few times. It turns out the memory structure was designed to only allow a single offset for 6 meters and a single offset for 10 meters (probably to save memory size). There isn't anything they can change in their program that would allow multiple offsets for 6 meter repeater memories. My solution is to put a TX and RX memory next to each other, and if I need that repeater, just jog back and forth between the memories. Not ideal, but better than messing with VFO or other buttons and hitting the wrong one ruining the memories. I do find it annoying that you can't dual receive on both A and B at the same time.

Mars mod took all of 30 seconds, but did not open the quick split range. Firmware is current Main V01-10, DSP V02-05, LCD V01-01 I also emailed RT Systems to see if they could update the software. This is the only radio I have that doesn't allow typing in the transmit frequency, and I have RT Systems for almost every ham radio I own.

Interesting. Do you see a range wider than 20kHz in the menu? I don't have an opposition to doing the mars mod, though I don't need it for out of band, if it changes the quick offset. What firmware version do you have? I need to check what I have in the radio as well. You are right. I knew that, just didn't type it correctly in my frustration.

Getting back into it, I can't get it to work with quick, not enough range. Quick split is in kHz, I need 240kHz: Even 0.5Mhz isn't going to work, since quicksplit is 20kHz (0.2MHz). Crap. I need to work through putting a memory into VFO, then swapping it to B.

I ran into a crap storm today with the kids (quick onset sickness), so I didn't get to try much. I found the quickshift setting. How to turn it on quickly is what I need to try. I just need a few free hours

I'm not seeing like 7 different shifts. The 705/7300 don't care what the shift is, you program it per memory. I need to probably swap this for my 7300 and actually play around with it on the air to figure out how best to program this.

@marcspaz let me know when you start messing with it again. I did put my question in the groups.io, so maybe I'm overthinking something.

I'm assuming it is a VX-4000 LB(B). I just looked, I only have CE49, and the low band manual doesn't say what the alignment program is other than high should be 70 and low should be 30.

So I need to have 2 memories saved, and push RX to the B band and TX stays on the A band? I vaguely remember something similar on my 817, but it has been a while.

Let me know. RT Systems software greys out transmit frequency and wants you to set via offset direction and frequency, but if you change the offset frequency, it changes all the memories.

Anyone deal with programming memories with an odd split? There is one 6m repeater that is +600kHz, but all the others are +1MHz.