AdmiralCochrane

A good J pole should have about 3db gain. There are variations with a little more gain, but I am not fully versed in them. I have successfully made and used 3 J-poles and am currently using one on my 1.25m Alinco. My nanonva and wattmeter both say the SWR is in the 1.1:1 range, where my Comet triband antenna is about 1.5:1 on 1.25m

Well covered for commercial passenger flights. There are private pilots that are hams and use their HT's while in flight. Height is might, line of sight, baby!

I have no trouble using Chirp on Macs. You do have to tell the Mac that you do want to run the program you found on the internet.

And the only one remotely near northern VA is the Alexandria repeater already mentioned. The others are much too far away to consider.

There is another GMRS repeater coming to PG County in the next few months. If you can hit the Baltimore 675, also try the Towson 600 machine.

If you set up a broadcast station, you deserve to be df'ed and mugged. Any real plan that went as far as considering encryption, should also include coordination of limited time on air, multiple frequency and/or band usage, mobile or at least movable transmitting to avoid df attempts. I've been following some threads on other forums on the same lines of thought and learned a little about fast acting single point df equipment. To say its expensive and exotic is understatement.

Pretty install. SWR meter is OK, but the nanonva is the real tuning tool these days The anylizer will let you tune to whatever center frequency you think is best and estimate the fall off both ways from your center tuning point. Not saying the SWR meter has no use, it gives different info, so in some particular troubleshooting cases its better. A real gadget guy will have both.

Some CB'er drove by my house today yelling "Audio! Audio! Audio!" Came in clear on my stereo speakers

The same reflection and/or refraction occur with a repeater in Maryland working into/out of Washington D.C. Colocated on the same tower and linked, the repeater owner has both VHF and UHF repeaters. One would expect the VHF repeater to work better into the heart of the city, but in fact, the UHF repeater has better penetration and users transmitting to the repeaters are heard better on the UHF repeater.

I mentioned lightning damage to my HF radio on FB and magically 2 replacement boards appeard on eBay within 48 hours

I'd move the bracket to the peak of the roof and mount a good antenna as high as possible, its almost impossible to "power thru" trees

I run my coax to my triband antenna exactly as DowneastNC suggests. My UHF element is resonant enough to give OK SWR on GMRS. I think it was actually 1.11:1 on 440 and 2.10 on GMRS. I recently upgraded the coax to LMR600, but I should actually bump it up another 5 ft; right now its about 40 ft up.

The Surecoms seem to be popular, but I am put off by their cheesy appearance.

I laugh at the 5% off offers, they are a joke

Very good explanation. When our local elmer gives a Tech class one of the last day hands on class demonstrations is each student actually using HT's brought in by other club members under their direct supervision. This is done in the parking lot right under the repeater. Probably half of the HT's are CCR's but I have never noticed a desensing problem during the class demonstration. I guess we have been lucky with the hardware volunteered.

Boxcar put the correct qualifier on it. It varies by location. IN MY AREA there are probably 60 repeaters, 4 or 5 don't use tones, the other 50+ do.

I get as much good radio tech info here as I do on several ham sites. A great group of knowledgable and friendly folks

If you are holding your breath for the $35 GMRS fee, you better have big lungs, it will happen at the same time ham fees are implemented and not before.

"Proper stuff" - are you implying homemade is improper? Certainly seems to be the text you posted, though you may not have meant so.

I think its more of a cost savings by having ITT or whoever does the programming do it all at once. Some of this legacy crap is still runnning on mainframes

People without licenses are still allowed to listen. Pretty much impossible to stop unlicensed from transmitting regardless of what information they possess or not.

Welcome Stone. You are using GMRS exactly as it was intended.

I have so much success with the 18 ft of coax (probably best grade of RG-58) that came on my Browning 320 on 70cm that I have doubts that switching to LMR 240 or 400 would make any difference. Here's why: #1 its a Browning 320, its very well matched with moderate gain, #2 I have it mounted very high on a tall van, #3 I couldn't mount it directly to the roof or the van's ladder rack, so I built a flat bracket attached to the ladder rack to mount the antenna on that probably works as a ground plane, #4 I connected that bracket with 2 pieces of #8 wire to different parts of the body of the van to be sure I had a ground plane in addition to the mounting plate. You can have all the power in the world delivered to the antenna, but if you can't effectively radiate it where it will work, the power is wasted. Correct me on my math, but 20% power output difference is less than 2db if I recall. Edited to add antenna gain, which Lscott points out is relevant.

I have a laptop I bought for work stuff that there is no mac/apple version. I run the windows only radio software on it for the very same reason.

Same here, ham first then GMRS. Luckily have found a repeater that can be reached from my house, my daughter's house and my brother's house even though each is tens of miles from the other and the repeater. As always with UHF, height is might. The repeater is high up on a tower, high on a hill.