gortex2

You cannot use digital on GMRS. Analog only per the rules. There are alot of good repeaters out there. The GR1225 while a decent unit will burn up if you run it on high power. No there isn't support but for a $500 unit and a little online you can be on the air pretty quick. With that said also know your environment and what you expect from the repeater. If your installing this at home in a town and not on a mountain you may not get what you want. The midland repeater package is a good unit for a home repeater as long as you can get the antenna up in the air. If all you have is portables its ideal. Vertex, Motorola, Bridgecom, Uniden, Daniels, Maxon, ICOM all make good repeaters. Antenna system is where a repeater shines.

Whats you application ? That normally drives power. Many think power is king but its really what antenna you have.

Bronco is like a jeep. Fiberglass roof so not many options for mounting. The antenna from RRR is very similar to the Laird B4502NS. They are supposed to be wideband but I found tuning them with a VNA can help a bit. In the end I'd probably swap the UHF out to a Laird B4505CNS which is a 5/8 wave antenna. However with that said I run a 1/4 wave UHF in a similar location on my jeep and can get over a couple miles in the mountains but not in the valley. UHF is line of site. All I car about 90% of the time is the jeep in front of me or behind me so its not a huge deal. When I use my repeaters I can hit them with a handheld so dont need a great setup to use mobile. Kudos on a good radio setup in the bronco.

I assume he means https://broadnetgmrs.net/ which appears offline at this point. Google shows posts last week so maybe a domain issue (forgot to pay bill) or something else.

^^^^^ Is 100% accurate. It baffles my mind when folks say they need a 50 watt repeater and all they have are 4 wat handhelds. We used to deal with this in the LMR world all the time. Balance of a system is not only good practice but can help reuse frequencies also. We had multiple factories in one city all using the same frequency. All of them were far enough apart the 5 watt TX repeaters did not interfere with the other sites. Our C-C SAR repeater on UHF is set for 10 watts at our antenna on TX. We only have UHF portables and no mobiles. Rarely does one who can talk to the site not hear the site. Even my testing with a mobile was great. When you can see the antenna from miles away no need to have a ton of power. In the GMRS world with limited repeater frequencies this is something all should remember.

GMRS is normally a bring your friends along service. If your here to find friends you may be disappointed. Yes there are some areas that are ham like but alot of areas gmrs is radio to radio or user groups that really wont answer another user....

You need vertical separation for a dual antenna setup. Unless your doing a combiner and receive multi-coupler I don't see the value in the dual antenna setup. A good duplexer will have a small amount of loss and in the end work much better than the dual antenna setup. There is alot more to this discussion than just antenna. The repeater is another big item that needs to be figured out. A repeater made from cheap mobiles will be worse in a dual antenna setup than a purpose built LMR repeater. In the LMR world a lot of sites use dual antenna. My one SAR site uses a receive multi-coupler with a DB408 at 35' up a tower. The TX antenna is thru a TX combiner at 15' off the ground. With the filtering on both TX and RX I see no desense at all on 75 watt Quantars on GMRS and our SAR channels. Another site we have an ICOM FR4000 with a BPR duplexer. Out of the duplexer is a 30 watts into 1/2" LDF 150 up the tower. Again no desense at all and there is multiple LMR repeaters at this site. Both sites have great coverage for the area and both serve specific purposes. If I didn't have other SAR LMR frequencies at the first site we would have a duplexer. Normally the cost of feedline and antenna will be the same cost of the duplexer.

Just drill a hole and drop and NMO mount in it.

Did you add cable to raise your antenna ? If so you have loss there that you did not have before.

I have 6 NMO mounts on the roof of my F150 (crew cab). All are hooked up to APX mobile radios. I see no noticeable issues. Really will depend on power and quality of radio. Cheap radios and high power don't go well together.

It would and is listed in MOL under your account. Users that only had myview access will most likely not see it. Its still in my MOL account under Astro Devices. In myview ASTRO CPS refers to the APX series.

Anyone try one yet ? https://midlandusa.com/products/spk200-amplified-external-speaker Temped to grab on for my JK. A lot of times on the trail the audio gets lost in the environment. I run a standard external speaker (21-406) but it still doesn't always cut it. Just curious.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0531/2856/0817/t/10/assets/GXT1000-Owner-Manual.pdf?v=1621291161 they are in the manual on the website....

I believe if the speaker is hooked to the head and not the deck it will allow individual volume control. Its been some time since I had a 90 series in a vehicle but our ambulances had them and we could control back to no volume while front is talking.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-396533A1.pdf

Are you sure they didn't program a DIR button for Direct. That's how all my mobiles are setup. Worth checking.

Buy an antenna for the service you want. If your using GMRS buying a HAM antenna isn't going to be the best. As said above the TRAM is a good option for cheap antenna. Although for the price f both of these antennas you could have bought the Laird FG4505 and been done at once. Make sure you trim the TRAM per the instructions. Im not convinced the gains they show are remotely accurate but thats another discussion.

Channel 8-14 aren't supposed to be in mobiles so that's most likely why they didn't put them in. The rules state handhelds only. The 221 is a much more solid radio than any of the CCR units. I run them for SAR work and have yet to have one go bad. 128 channels and scan works well.

The midland/RT97 is small enough you could mount to rail.. Midland says weight is something like 5# if i recall. Not bad to have to take down. Power is not what a full blown repeater is but 5 watts in a good antenna up in the air works wonders. Worth looking at.

A RT97/Midland with 3' of LMR and antenna is ideal for what you want to do if you have 110V at the top of the silo.

On my JK I run a 1/4 wave on a fender bracket. On my JT I run a Larsen NMO pepper shaker (Similar to Midland Ghost) on the center of the roll bar under the soft top. It has worked pretty well for my use case. My Kubota SXS is similar and run the antenna on a roll bar mount in the center.

The product ID was on the original CD from ICOM. There are Product ID's on the web if you do some searching. If you ordered the Software from ICOM it would have the ID.

For 90% of my GMRS use I run the Midland 275 in all my Jeeps with a NMO 1/4 wave antenna. They are mostly used on trails with other jeeps and work well. In my work truck I run multiple APX8500's so will use one of them when needed. All are used on my repeaters and work well.

Not without a lot of money on combiners and filtering. It is done in the commercial world but its definitely not cheap. You would be better off adding a second antenna with hardline for the GMRS repeater.

I carry multiple APX radios when I fly and never had an issue. They are normally in my backpack.