gortex2

Sadly many repeaters talk out better than talk in. With a portable you may be able to hear but will not be able to talk. Its normal. 

Proposal [1] is a good request. The others don't personally interest me. Radio has been so strangled by HAM restrictions that it maybe too late to fix it. Hence the desire to turn GMRS into what people want, which is a way to send off grid messages to family and friends who are not radio freaks.
That has always been the problem with HAM, it is a club of people who like to talk about radios but don't actually use them. The people who actually use radio for important things are GMRS users or Public safety, etc.
But as more HAMS use GMRS, naturally, they make it about saying your callsign 10 times a minute, talking about radios, yadda yadda.
 
 
 

Ham operators have from 420MHz to 450MHz to experiment and do what they want with it (with some exceptions due to shared agreements and line A and C restrictions) and now they want to take over something else? On top of this, let me make clear, that in many parts of the country, Hams not only do not use the 70cm band as it is, they flat out refuse to use it and will actually verbally spit on it. In many areas of the country, Hams barely use anything above 2 meters (144-148MHz) because they claim "it doesn't get out far therefore you cannot do anything with it". Hams do not need anymore frequencies. 420-450 is in the same band that behaves the same way as 462 and 467MHz. There is absolutely no difference between the two except for the numeric frequencies. If Hams want more to experiment with, go petition to allow more capability within their own 70cm band. Stop trying to ruin other services. 

DO NOT BE FOOLED! Ham Radio operators are not lacking in bandwidth to experiment and talk on surrounding the GMRS band. Something many people, Hams included, do not realize is that Ham Radio operators have the following bands outside of the contesting bands to fully operate in, experiment in and do what they want in with, in most places, a 1500 watt power limit -

50-54MHz (little activity except for band openings once or twice a year)
144-148MHz (Utilized the most for short range communications across the country)
220-225MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned in many parts of the country)
420-450MHz (small amounts of activity depending on the part of the country) The same band that GMRS (462 and 467 MHZ) sits in.
902-928MHz (little to no activity)
1240-1300MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
2300-2310MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
2390-2450MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
3400-3450MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
5650-5925MHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
10-10.5GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
24-24.25GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
47-47.2GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
76-81GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
122.25-123GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
134-141GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
241-250GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)
and all above 275GHz (little to no activity if not totally dead and abandoned)

I have personally heard Hams come out on the air and identify 50-54, 144-148, and 420-450 as being the only bands Hams have to operate on above 10 meters and how Hams dont have any room to play. GMRS operators have 8 repeater pairs and 14 simplex channels to use. Not chunks of bandwidth like Hams, only channels! So, no, Hams do not need "...allowing Ham Radio users more flexibility when operating on GMRS Channels." You want more flexibility, go back down on your own 70cm band and start utilizing it!!! GMRS is for people who need a means of communication and dont want to be hassled with becoming a licensed radio hobbyist. I personally hope the FCC laughs at this and throws it out. Hams do not use the bands they currently have and it is the reason the FCC is taking portions of their bands away. If Hams would get off of the HF bands and stop doing contesting and start utilizing the bands above 50MHz, they wouldn't have a reason to steal from GMRS, but that will never happen. 

I agree with this however many manufacturers have sone this in the past and are doing some again. Motorola for instance is doing APX and XPR free. The problem is folks complain about the cost of the radio. Cost of a radio can be argued to death but engineering costs and many other process's dictate price. Way more than we need to discuss here. But its also a supply demand situation. IF folks aren't buying new radios it doesn't bring funds into a manufacturer. In the end if you want a quality radio you research as you said and find out if you are capable and comfortable with the purchase you intend to do. Purpose built equipment, ham, gmrs, lmr is jsut that. The CCR world has caused most of the issues with all those services. Good or bad can be argued but the mentality of cheap stuff is much larger than 10 or 20 years ago. I go back to my first HT, HTX202 that I put on layaway at Radio Shack and paid $325.00 for and had no software or any of the stuff anything new has to offer. Our first GMRS mobile was a Uniden Xstal Radio with 2 channels. It had a button with RPT and TA. It was close to $500 which was about what Dad paid for the AMC Hornet that it was installed in ! 
 

This is a great question. A little background: I worked at Motorola for over 30 years and asked this very question to some of the RF guys there. The resounding answer is to "go high baby". Well, in a case like yours where your high-gain and low height option is not really very high, then yes some extra maybe 10-20ft with a somewhat lower gain will be better. Now if you were already at 100ft with high gain and could go up another 20ft with low gain, this could be a different story. That would depend on the surrounding terrain. But in short "go high baby". 
As evidence of how this works, I too ran a repeater during the above mentioned time period, that being a 450MHz ham band repeater at my house. I lived on a small hill in the Chicago suburbs, maybe a 40ft above average terrain. Sounds like not much, but in the Chicago suburbs that's all you get for a hill   I chose to go high baby, and put a 6dBi gain antenna as high as I could get away with, about 60ft above the hill. I was afraid to put a larger higher gain antenna at that height due to tower strength limitations. And wow, did it have great coverage for being just a home brew repeater. In the direction where the land sloped down slightly it easily had a 40 mile mobile coverage and I had people 80 miles away using it from simple base stations. Now granted this was one high performance repeater: 25 watts TX (yea, not huge I know) but the receiver was souped up by me, being an RF receiver guy, it had less than 2dB noise figure counting the duplexer loss (for those who don't get noise figure, 2dB in that case is outstanding). 
Hope this helps.
 

Probably better to send Rich a message and ask him....

Probably better to send Rich a message and ask him....

Offroad and family. The intended use. 

What's wrong with leaving FRS/GMRS as is? "Listening to the people" implies that there is a majority of the hundreds of thousands of FRS/GMRS folks out there who have come to the conclusion that FRS/GMRS is flawed because it doesn't include the scenarios you put forth. Does that majority exist?

If I am going to waste my very valuable time dreaming and fantasizing, I prefer to do it over something that matters..  Like Taylor Swift washing my dishes while wearing a Minnie-Mouse costume.

So first of all the CCR world is the issue at hand. Long before Baojuk and others the ONLY radio you could get on GMRS was a LMR radio with Part 95 certifications. My father bought many for our local radio shops. Hell back in the day it was a crystal so no adding 50 channels. We had RPT and TA to use thats it on our Unidens
Anyway I have software for the M1225 Ive had for decades and was purchased when we bought a radio back in the day. As other said the software is pretty easy to find. Folks seem worried about finding software yet have no quams at using a HAM radio on GMRs with a mod. 

I agree with this however many manufacturers have sone this in the past and are doing some again. Motorola for instance is doing APX and XPR free. The problem is folks complain about the cost of the radio. Cost of a radio can be argued to death but engineering costs and many other process's dictate price. Way more than we need to discuss here. But its also a supply demand situation. IF folks aren't buying new radios it doesn't bring funds into a manufacturer. In the end if you want a quality radio you research as you said and find out if you are capable and comfortable with the purchase you intend to do. Purpose built equipment, ham, gmrs, lmr is jsut that. The CCR world has caused most of the issues with all those services. Good or bad can be argued but the mentality of cheap stuff is much larger than 10 or 20 years ago. I go back to my first HT, HTX202 that I put on layaway at Radio Shack and paid $325.00 for and had no software or any of the stuff anything new has to offer. Our first GMRS mobile was a Uniden Xstal Radio with 2 channels. It had a button with RPT and TA. It was close to $500 which was about what Dad paid for the AMC Hornet that it was installed in ! 
 

So first of all the CCR world is the issue at hand. Long before Baojuk and others the ONLY radio you could get on GMRS was a LMR radio with Part 95 certifications. My father bought many for our local radio shops. Hell back in the day it was a crystal so no adding 50 channels. We had RPT and TA to use thats it on our Unidens
Anyway I have software for the M1225 Ive had for decades and was purchased when we bought a radio back in the day. As other said the software is pretty easy to find. Folks seem worried about finding software yet have no quams at using a HAM radio on GMRs with a mod. 

Depends on the radio model and manufacture.
For example the new KENWOOD radio series, NX-1000's, NX-3000's and NX-5000's they now require you to purchase a license key. The software communicates over the internet to valid the install before working. The keys are $100+ each and you can only have ONE install version of the software active at a time. If you have the software on more than one PC you have to deactivate the license on the one PC and activate the license on the one you want to use. Of course you can spend a wad of money buying more license keys. I have two desktop computers at work, one at home and a laptop. Buying a license key for each or trying to juggle the key between the various computers just isn't worth the hassle and cost.
So far I've only found a cracked version of the software for the NX-1000 series that has bypassed the license key check. That's why I'm an owner of several NX-1300DUK5 FM/DMR radios now, one I purchased new from a dealer. I've also purchased the DMR encryption license for each radio, which gets permanently written to it. If it wasn't for the cracked version of the software I NEVER would have purchased them. I would like to own one of the NX-3000's or better yet an NX-5000, but I can't justify the cost of the software license key to program one radio that i might use a few times.
IMHO if Kenwood is that worried about the software just roll the cost of the programming software into the cost structure of the radio and just give the programming software away.  That's what they do for their amateur gear. The radio programming software is free.
If I spot a radio that looks interesting I'll check for documentation for it on line. But most important I'll look for the programming software. If I can't get it I just forget about the the radio I was looking at. Just about all commercial radios are just paper weights without the programming software.

Software is free and easily found on the net. Version 4.0 runs fine on a WinXP  computer. Cables are cheap; serial is more reliable if the pc has a serial port. 

You can see that in the antenna specifications referred to as  "Down Tilt" angle. The purpose is to direct a bit more power closer in to the base area of the antenna. Otherwise the signal strength can be a bit poor close in but much better once you get some distance out from the repeater site.
Both of the antennas in the attached datasheets have no down tilt. However look at the beam width specification. The higher gain antenna has a VERY narrow one, 14 degrees, compared to the lower gain one at 27 degrees. Something to consider before buying. 
DB408-B Product specifications.pdf DB404-B Product Specifications.pdf

I use mine for off-roading.. any time I want to "make contacts" and find anonymous men to talk with, I use the Grindr app.

The 97S model has an extra port which can be used for an external mike or an IDer. But I absolutely agree about just mounting it to the top of the mast with a short piece of good cable.

Oh, I don't disagree.  And even with ham, you can have a private repeater. I don't have issue with private repeaters at all.  I have issue with a-holes getting on their private repeater and getting animated (cussing and such) when someone happens to get on said repeater without permission.   If the owner gets on and explains that it's a private repeater, and he uses it for whatever, or it's a club / group machine for his buddies and him or whatever, I take no issue with that sort of thing. 
When the guy keys up and acts like a jerk, starts cussing and gets red about it, then yeah, he gets the treatment. 
 But,  when you are putting up a repeater, and find this sort of thing you tell the polite owner that you are putting up or have put up a repeater on another pair and direct the folks that accidentally get on his private repeater to just switch over to your repeater because it's open and tell him it's open to him too if he wants to. 

Howdo you use the RT97 for a base radio ? Mine only had a power plug on one side and antenna jack on other side. No mic/speaker. Maybe the new ones do. As for cable I'd just go with LMR400 with the closest leantgh you need. Remember the RT97 is only 4-5 watts at the antenna connector. The more loss you can eliminate the better. I'd focus on a way to mount it near the top of the mast with a 3' jumper to the antenna. 

If your goal is a base and base only alot of commercial LMR radios are much better suited for that and can be had for less than the ones discussed here. My parents have a M1225 I paid $75 for on ebay. It sits on 1 channel and scans a second repeater. Simple.

For a DB404 you can buy it right here on the site. I've scored some decent ones on ebay, but you need to be looking at the stuff. Talley and Tessco are my go to for DB420 and other antenna's but your going to pay a good price there. 
 
https://shop.mygmrs.com/collections/antennas
 
https://www.talleycom.com/
https://www.tessco.com/

I have an amateur general license and GMRS license. If I want to use digital modes I get on one of my amateur radios. I like the simplicity of GMRS and do not want to see it change.

I would start with a DB404, unless you plan to move the antenna to a tower in the future. A 420 is a large antenna and heavy. Your not putting that on a piece of conduit. You need a decent mast/pipe if you want it to stay in the air. 

Yup hams trying to inter-fear in yet another service. My hopes are the FCC laughs at this one.