gortex2

Booked all our trips for next year. 5 Jamborrees as well as monthly trianing for the wife. Looking forward to next year. Also decided drag racing wasn't going well so traded the Drag Pak for a 25 Willys JLU. Plan to take that to CA for that Jamboree as well as our family trip. Piling parts up next too it. Pick up my new 4 post lift next Friday.

Sounds like my trips. Drove from Elgin IL to SW VA yesterday. 15 hours. couple multicar pileups on 65 in Indy area. CB was pretty chatty. Heard one repeater with a WX announcement but that was about the only traffic I heard on GMRS. Was the same for my trip north 2 weeks ago.

They make 2 BT speaker mics now (well technically 3 SVX). The new BT speaker mic for the Next is even better than the old unit. The new one I like the pairing is done once and never touch it where as the WM SM you had to touch blue dots every time you turn the radio on. The new SVX (w/built in body cam) also pairs once and done. As said I can get 100 yards on mine. I have been in a house and still connected to my vehicle in a driveway.

Pretty much any waterway is acceptable for marine use. Many lakes have local CG Auxilaries on the lake to monitor CH16 as well as assist USCG with incidents.

I guess I meant for any type of monitoring as an emergency channel. When .675 was a suito emergency channel our REACT team monitored it 24/7 365 from multiple locations. Now its hard to monitor between hunters, kids, grocery stores, ham light guys and every other gagle of FRS/GMRS user. No emergency center is going to monitor this stuff. And lastly the FRS GMRS merger did kill the way GMRS was used in the past as a family service. Alot more users are on GMRS/FRS than 10 years ago and while thats a good thing I also see it bad as in at some point it will be no different than CB (pretty much is in many areas) with people just doing what they want on it. When it was a service with limited channels, limited equipment it wasn't as "easy" for folks to use it and made it a cleaner band. Change is what we have on all fronts. In the end thats why I dont see any standard getting setup as its already too much of a mess.

If its a portable unit that will be in different locations then its not worth listing. I ran one in our motorhome for years and never ran into another user on the channel If this was going to be setup in your garage and never leave there you could list it. For me noneof my repeaters are listed.

Those were the good days of GMRS as it wa pretty private of a system for family comms. Rarely did anyone ever end up on your channel. My father would run the PL monitor sysitch on all the time and we never heard boo on his frequency. In those days we had a base at home and it ran 24/7 with speakers in multiple rooms. Miss those days.

I hear this alot but on the east coast ch 4 is what many of the clubs use. As we have said in the past there is no real designators for anything. For years our REACT team monitored the 462.675/141.3 but when SAR took over the channel they changed the PL mostly due to equipment issues on the old MICOR repeater and when SAR replaced it with a MITREK based repeater the only PL reads we had for the base was 131.8. Its still on the air but doens't get used nearly enough. I am a strong supporter of use what you want. When the FCC merged the FRS/GMRS stuff it became a non useable band in my eyes so any "emergency" channel or such went out the window. But thats just my opinion.

The site shows restocking fees. Unless it is defective they are not going to wave charges. Being your not happy doesn't mean the product is defective. Not defending them but its in black and white on the site. Normally you can work with companies but I'm not sure these places are easy.

I do like how these do have FRS built in. None of the other POC radiso on the market have that. There have been a few companies that marketed hey we can do this but never really took off. I'd be curious to see how long these are around due to that fact.

I use midland in all my vehicles. My parents run a MXT115 as well on a Laird FG4603 (LMR400) and have no issues. The advantage of the 115 for them is the Power Supply is small and the radio is fairly small and out of the way for them. They pretty much sit on one channel but if they need to change channels they have the ability. I actually am waiting for xmas sales to grab another for them for the shed.

Some of this just goes to same old same old and folks are cheap. Hams especially dont like change. If the radio doens't have a PL259 its junk, same with antenna and everything in between. I remember hams coming into our shop back in the day becasue they bought motorola gear that came with a Mini UHF and instead of cutting the antenna cable off and crimping a Mini U on they wanted adapters. Then 2 months later they are back with broken adapters or issues. Motorola used Minu UHF on all bands from Lowband 33.00mhz all the way up to the 900 Mhz XTL. Even APX had the Mini UHF. Now with the multiband APX they are migrating to the QMA. So while I agree N is btter alot of gear still uses the "uhf"" style connectors. I run N on everything after the radio just because (polyphaser, RF lines, antenna's) but now the industry is moving from DIN to 4.3-10 connectors to help with PIM. This is fnny as the 4.3-10 is very similar to a N but can handle PIM better as well as power. But as other said in the end the SO239 is cheap so you will see it forever.

Im not sure why so many folks go to repeater book to look for repeaters. That site was primarily used for amateur radio. For some stupid reason the decided to list GMRS most likely casue some ham cried about it but its not near accruate. I would focus on mygmrs for gmrs stuff and repeaterbook for ham stuff. Just in the 2M and 440 arena Repeater Book lists 3 repeaters near me. None of them are on the air and have not been in years but folks wont release the channels.

This website lists 129 of them on the repeater page.

I use standard commerical LMR multi band antennas with no issues. Motorola all band, Larsen and PCTEL all offer wideband all band antennas;. MY work truck has 4 of th MSI all band and I use ham/gmrs/lmr in all my radios. On my personal vehicles I run the Larsen mutiband. Motorola AN000131A02 Larsen NMO150/450/758 Laird All Band

The reason we use it in SAR is coverage. Portables cannot reach every repeater site. A mobile can reach the majority of the sites but 90% of our members rely on portables. With the same TX from the 4 repeatersi n the county there is a good chance they can hear the repeater but not talk back. Thats the reason its the same TX/RX with different input PL. The second reason is we are above line A and it takes forever to get a channel approved from the FCC. Our last frequency pair took almost 2 years to get a license. The state Forest Ranger uses a similar system to ours. They have 1 TX pair for the entire state and have 2-3 RX frequencies they use for each repeater site. For us in SAR we only need to monitor the FR Repeater output as we can hear the channel all over the state regardless of repeater site they are on. In the end even if you need to pick up the phone and call back to dispatch you still most likely heard them. The county to the north of us now has a true voted system. We have 3 simulcast transmitters (All TX same time via GPS) and 9 Receive sites. This of course is all conencted via microwave. Voter takes the best audible signal form a portable and retransmits it on the TX. All TX and all rx sites use same PL/CTCSS tone there. There are many ways to setup a repeater system. And the basic ideas from 40 years ago still works when needed. And at least in our area repeaters can't hear portables from 100 miles away like Im told about other areas of the country. In public safety its about reliabilty and not max performance. Yes I may be able to hit xyz repeater on a clear sunny day with no leaves on the tree but in reality the missing hunter is our in the winter in a blizzard at night.

Poor man voting. We do this in SAR. All our repeaters transmit and receive on same frequency pair with different PL tones across the network on the inbound. Basically allowsa unit to hear all the outputs without changing channels. If we say Unit xxx on the air on XYZ Mountain and I'm on ABC mountain I still hear them and know to talk to them I need to change to that repeater input. My GMRS sites are similar. For those with a base or scanner its only one channel to monitor.

Thats becasue no one reads the rules.... https://forums.mygmrs.com/guidelines/

My APX radios have 3000 channel capacity....Both mobile and portable. Alot of commercial radios have plenty of channels. With that said very few need 100's of channels. Being I can change PL/DPL on the fly I really see no need for dedicating 100+ channels for GMRS, and I travel accross 4-5 states weekly. 99% of the people using GMRs barely change the channel.

Justt another homemade antenna. I still prefer commercial antenna's.

So looking over the site it appears PL259 on both ends of the cable so SO239 on repeater and antenna. But as said looks like RG213 and according to the specs shows 50'. Rg213 is about 5db loss per 100, so in this case 2.5db of loss. Thats not nuts but definatley better cable would help. Midland ships a LMR400/RG8ish cable.

So i would start with a watt meter to verify your antenna is actually working.

Looked over list last night and have 4 on our list so far for 2026 - Tennesse Mountians, Big Bear Lake CA, Uhwarrie, Cumberlands. Most likely do a 5th but looking to fit it in between SFWDA events and other JJUSA training events my wife will be at.

At least he shed the Pink Hat this year !

SFWDA will have Trail Fest (April 17-19) at Leatherwood (https://leatherwoodoffroad.com/) in the spring and Dixie Run (Sept 18-20) in the Fall will be back at Golden Mountain (https://goldenmountainparkevents.com/) It will be the 40th anniversay of the Dixie Run and I believe it was started at Golden originally.