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gortex2

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Posts posted by gortex2

  1. It was alwasy common to test in the middle when we used CB and think GMRS would be the same. With that said repeaters are 467.xxx and simplex is 462. If you use simplex 99% of the time I'd test on a middle 462.xxx channel. For instance a 1/4 wave should work fine across the board. It realyl depends on useage. For my SAR stuff we always use the National SAR channel for tunign as thats the most important channel we use. Other channels are repeaters and a portable works fine so worring about a great single from the mobile is less concerning. Granted we are all in the VHF side and most folks run a quarter wave to eliminate then eed to tune to a certain frequency. 

  2. You should also look at some radio propagation programs. I live in rural area. I have a DB408 on my house 40' in the air which is on a hill. 14 miles away I cannot talk to the repeater with a mobile at all. I loose the house about 6-8 miles away. My area isn't perfectly flat its rolling hills. My APRS barely makes it 14 miles on VHF with a gain antenna to a mobile 5/8 wave antenna. Yes some guys talk about 50-100 miles on a repeater but most are in a high location with nothing in between you and the repeater (LOS). If you can stand on your house and see the other house you will be good but I think 20 miles is stretching's it on GMRS for simplex operations.  YMMV.

  3. Normally in multiple repeaters you use a combiner on TX and a multicoupler on RX. The issue is the GMRS repeaters are pretty close and it takes a good combiner to make it work right. I have our SAR repeater (453.xxx) and a GMRS repeater in my combiner with 3 repeaters using a receive multicoupler. The 3rd SAR repeater uses its own TX antenna. 

  4. Maybe. My repeaters are closed. I originally did it to try to eliminate those users as most are using a CCR. While some may still key it normally doesn't open my base and doesn't bother me as much as hearing the hang with no traffic. 

  5. I have my hang time set to 0 on all my repeaters except 1. The 1 repeater is set for 2 seconds hang time but no PL on the tail. Hopefully this year I can swap that repeater out also so none of them have any hang time. No need for it. In the old days with tubes you wanted the repeater to stay on the air in between transmissions. No need for it any longer. For SAR all my repeaters have 2 second hang time but no PL also. 

     

  6. I laugh at all the complaints on here about loosing linking. If that's the only reason you use GMRS you need another hobby. As has been said many times over and over GMRS was never intended to be a social gathering place. It was meant for local communications for families and friends. All linking has done is ruin this in many areas. Use GMRS for what it was intended and its fine. I operate 6+ repeaters. I've never needed nor wanted any linking. Each one is for a purpose. If I need to chat with someone 100 miles away I pick up the cell phone. Personally I hope this is the start by the FCC to do something. Maybe they will, maybe they wont. But if those that are linking decide they dont want to deal with it and dropped there links its up to them as the owners of the equipment. To many folks get on hear and complain about the way a repeater works, covers or operates. There is also the expectation that repeaters are up for you and your family. If you didn't purchase it, install and maintain it then you need to rethink. 

  7. Make sure the jacket can handle being in water. Unless you use steel threaded conduit and seal connections you will most likely get water in it. We use Rigid at tower sites to eliminate this and still can get some water in it. I have helped a few SAR users with small control stations where we actually used PEX pipe in a short distance and worked well. 

  8. I run all 6 of my repeaters in narrow band. As said a true built out repeater will not work better or worse than a wideband. I'm sure someone will jump on and give us data to prove different but thousands of systems are narrowband and work just fine. All our SAR stuff went from wideband to narrow and did not loose coverage that was noticable to the end user. Anyway yes most GMRS is wideband but there are narrowband repeates out there. 

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