WRKC935

Kinda laid that out that a growing number was that way. You are a retired PE. So gonna guess you have a pretty good education. And never bothered with the Gorden West books when you got your ham license.

One of the other things that I haven't seen discussed here is the fact that government entities typically have a number of licensed LMR frequencies already that could be used. Part of those being Public Safety frequencies that they would have somewhat exclusive use of in their jurisdiction. So the jurisdiction would need to own and maintain a cache of radios for this purpose or require registered volunteers to acquire radios for the frequency band in use and get an MOU from the jurisdiction indicating they had permission to have that channel or channels programmed in their radios. And this can be anything from VHF or UHF single repeaters to trunked system radios. I personally have programmed system radios for a city we do work for that issue radios to established neighborhood watch groups. Point is, I am really not sure WHY a government entity would NEED a GMRS license as they have other resources available that are exclusive use.

Because many years ago, when technology wasn't what it is now, Amateur radio was a vital part of communications when things went south. Having an Amateur Radio license indicated that you had worked hard and studied electronic theory, laws and regulations and were somewhat proficient in communicating with Morse Code. The real question is why are they STILL a thing. Because having a Ham license now means you bought a book with all the answers to the questions, read it for 3 hours and took a test so you could get on the air with your 30 dollar radio that makes all sorts of beeps and crap and irritate the guys that did it right back in the day. Just sayin.

Yes, there are EXISTING licenses that are grandfathered, and can't be modified that we share the channels with. But he's asking about what I assume would be a new license, which I don't believe the FCC would grant. Now that's only based on the regulations as I personally understand them. But I am far from an attorney, or FCC licensing agent that would be making that final decision. It wouldn't hurt to have the entity contact the local FCC field office and ask if they wanted to get a license for community communications and EMCOMM use. They may well grant it. But they may not. The one difference in part 90 licenses and part 95 licenses is that a part 90 license holder DOES have some level of level of responsibility to the content transmitted on their licensed frequency. Not sure if that would carry over to a government entity having a GMRS repeater license or not. But if it did, that would certainly be a deal breaker for them if they were smart. We have little control over what others say on our repeaters. We can shut them off if there is an ongoing issue. But we aren't required to be mindful of anything said unless WE are the ones saying it.

I don't know that a government entity could even get a GMRS license under the standing rules pertaining to the service. Now that doesn't stop them from 'hosting' a GMRS repeater up to and including purchasing of the equipment and the installation work and having a GMRS license holder as trustee of the repeater. This happens from time to time with various EMA's that again, cant get a ham license but can provide everything to facilitate a repeater installation and having the local ARES group / ham club put their call sign on it with an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) that the equipment can or can't be used for general ham operations until a time where the EMA activates the ARES group and at that point the repeater will be used for emergency communications. There is no reason that the same thing couldn't be done with GMRS, the only difference being there are no 'club calls' for GMRS and a specific individual would need to act as primary trustee of the repeater regarding the call sign on it.

OK, things to know about tones. They are REVERSE of what you might think. The INPUT tone of a repeater is the OUTPUT tone of the subscriber radio. Meaning your mobile, portable or anything other than the repeater. So the OUTPUT TONE of the repeater will be programmed as the INPUT TONE of the portable or mobile. When guys split the tones like this, it becomes a bit of a pain to figure out which is which.

I disagree with the title of the thread. Are there better options than the CCR's (Cheap Chinese Radio's)??? DUH... But they WILL get you on the air and talking to make the decision if you like this hobby / radio service before you dump wad's o cash in some Motorola big dollar radio that you make not get your money back out of later. The cheap stuff has it's uses. And if you feel like the a better radio would give you better performance, then you're right. But at least it's something. And I say this sitting on a cache of UHF radios that would just make you MAD at me. I have a BUNCH of radios, mostly Motorola CDM, XPR, XTS, XTL stuff. I think out of the over 50 radios, I have a few Hytera (CCR) and one CP200. out of 30 handhelds. And that number may be low. But those are distribution radios for a handout cache. Not my primary ones. I don't climb the tower with my XTS radio's either because as good as they are, they will not survive a 200 foot fall. But the XPR 6550's are just fine for that. My point is that cheapies are still good for something. If nothing else handing to your kid when you go camping so that if it takes a bath in some river, you are not out much. Do that to an XTS portable and that's 300 bucks in the drink.

Ahhh, he just don't like me much. So he gets in his digs anywhere he can. I pretty much ignore his shenanigans at this point, as they really don't effect me and if it gives him pleasure to badger me, at least he's not doing it to someone else that might take it to heart. A lot of it was changes in the routing of grounding. They added / changed the routing of grounding to the floor in new builds from it going up. The other thing that was added was site safety and air born concerns with working in a tower site, mostly bird dropping concerns. They went woke and renamed the Master Ground bar to some other WOKE thing that doesn't include the name MASTER. Not that the subordinate bars were called SLAVE but whatever. I actually commented in training that the next change would be the removal of male and female designations for RF connectors. And that we would quite possibly all be switching to the HP hermaphrodite connectors for all cabling and connections. Yes, that's really a thing, at about 200 bucks a piece. I believe they were the APC-7 connector. But they were truly sexless and would attach to each other without a male and female specific connector. Turned out the trainer was on the R-56 steering committee and wasn't real impressed with my comments about it being the R-56 WOKE revision. I believe he was somehow offended, and made comment about folks and their right to identify any way they want to. I replied by agreeing 100% and informed him that I identify as an offensive asshole, so I was 100% covered if he was offended. Which is my normal reply to all discussions of that topic. Outside the WOKE additions and changes in definitions, there were some additional situations with grounding antenna's on building roofs that were covered. And the other thing I remember was cable management with CAT-5/6 cabling now that Gigabit Ethernet was a thing. The old standard was written prior to much of that. I believe they added the bonding for armored Ethernet and Fiber cables as well. Again stuff we didn't have when the last standard was created. But I will say the bonding and grounding section is worth reading. And will at least sort of hold your interest. As far as the rest of it, if you are having issues getting to sleep the standards for the height of lighting above the cable tray, and the height above the racks for cable tray. The requirements for fire suppression equipment and it's locations and other really boring stuff, reading that will put you right to sleep. Conducting an audit of a site at this point is very difficult. You almost need to make a detailed video of all aspects of the site and then review it with the standard open and compare what you are seeing wit what the standard says. There is A LOT to know and you can easily miss things with only one pass through a site. Like any other code, the purpose of it is personal safety first and foremost. Followed by the reliability of the equipment in the site and the system as a whole. And while some of it applies to the average guy's install in his basement, a BUNCH of it either doesn't apply, or would be too costly to the average radio operator to implement. But, here's the thing with this standard. And why it's important. In a dispatch site with a co-located RF site, meaning a site with dispatchers and a tower. There is an electrical path that exists from the top of the tower to the dispatchers headset if they are using a wired headset and at minimum the path exists to the computers and radios in the room where the dispatchers are. They can't STOP doing their job when a lightning storm rolls past. So their protection is of the utmost importance. And when a government entity want's to save on the grounding and bonding work needed for a site like this, making that statement typically shuts the discussion of cutting corners down about the labor and material cost for it.

2017 manual. That's the current standard and the one I just certified on last year. Scanning it??? It's 736 pages.... NO I ain't gonna scan it. 68P81089E50-C_Standards_and_Guidelines_for_Communication_Sites_R56.pdf

Dude, it really depends on your situation and install. Everyone is gonna tell you a 408 or a 420, and those are damn fine antenna's in certain situations, but NOT in others. So I am gonna ask a couple questions before I answer. First is what height is it gonna be mounted at? Second is what sort of tower is it gonna be mounted on? Third is what coverage footprint are you looking at/ And finally what repeater and duplexer are you gonna be running? Look forward to your answers and helping you out more.

Anything over 1/4 wave in length will reflect RF. Doesn't need to be anything real substantial. Because of what's required, the issues begin to manifest in the higher frequency spectrum, because more things are at least that size. While an apartment in Manhattan would certainly have this issue, it does show up in area's that are NOT nearly as congested as that. Road signs, other vehicles, metal poles, all are over 6 inches and therefore can create multipath. And the other part of it is the timing and wavelength for how out of phase a signal has to be. For AM radio, very low frequency, if this was even a thing the dead spots would be hundreds of feet in diameter, buy would require numerous HUGE objects to create the problem. When wavelength is much shorter, then the area's of phase attenuation due to multipath are much smaller, again typically within one wavelength of the signal you are receiving. Been through A LOT of this with simulcast radio systems where multiple transmitters were on the same frequency and their reference oscillators were referenced to GPS. Audio launch and PL launch times are also down to the millisecond to keep things working. With the systems I work on I am actually able to adjust the overlap area's of issue and put them in fields and other non-occupied locations and away from places that police and fire personal would need to use radios.

Ahh, go read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_fading Explains a LOT of what you are experiencing.

Yes, the applications are LIMITED for enhancing coverage through down tilt antenna's or fill antenna's for specific area's. It's mostly used in mountainous regions that have towers with a TON of HAAT (height above average terrain). If your repeater happens to be on a mountain top and it's the tallest around, and PART of teh area of interest is in the valley below then this type of stuff comes into play. But if you are JUST trying to serve the town at the bottom of the valley, then you put the antenna in the bottom of the valley somewhere on a tall structure and be done with it. I have heard of guys sticking MOSTLY ham antenna's way the hell up in the air on a tall tower on a tall mountain and can't understand why the coverage sucks. And what's funnier about that is the area that actually gets the best coverage is without any residents. It's forest, or wheat fields but NO PEOPLE. There was a time that even the commercial radio guys put the biggest antenna on the tallest tower if you want it to talk. And that is rarely the best option anywhere. 300 feet is about the max if you are in a flat area. And hilly terrain, you really need multiple sites with multiple repeaters to cover that topography. Nothing else really works. You either end up covering the hill tops, or you have a small footprint of coverage.

Here's the video. THis was posted on Facebook in the group. So some explanation. Think of an antenna's radiation pattern as a donut looking at it from the side. It looks a lot like to circles in side by side with the antenna in the middle between the two circles. This is the pattern of a UNITY (0 dB) gain antenna. Something known as an isotropic radiator. When you look at antenna gain numbers they will typically be listed in dBi. The i in there refers to this type of antenna. But the important thing here is the antenna radiates power in ALL directions almost equally with a null directly above and below it. So then we start talking about antenna GAIN. Gain manifests in a manner similar to crushing the donut equal distances from the bottom and the top. With the pattern being pushed out to the horizon at the cost of radiation both above and below the plain that the antenna is on. If you take this to extreme you CAN in some situations create a null at ground level under the antenna and out some distance from the tower. BUT you need enough height to make this happen. I actually know of a repeater that has this issue that is currently on the air at a local TV station. The repeater and antenna are located at 750 feet above the ground and the antenna is a DB-420 high gain UHF antenna. This repeater will talk to Indiana just fine, but you can't talk to it unless you are a minimum of 5 miles from it from the ground. The helicopter that it was setup to communicate with had no issues because it flew in the pattern of the antenna. So how does this effect your GMRS repeater and it's coverage??? It DON'T. Not unless you happen to have a VERY high gain antenna that is on a very tall tower or happen to be near the top of a high hill above a valley that is 700 foot down and inhabited with people you want to talk to. THEN and ONLY THEN does this come into play. I have a DB-420 antenna mounted at 180 feet up at the tallest point in the county. I have no issues with using it to communicate with locally and even from the tower lot. It works fine. Another thing you need to consider if you are looking at down tilt of an antenna. That being the UP tilt of the opposite side of the antenna. If you were to tilt your antenna DOWN to talk into a town or someplace below your antenna, then you tilt the other side of the pattern UP into space killing the ability to communicate in that direction at all. And frankly there are better ways of dealing with an antenna system that has this issue with local coverage. You add a second antenna and a power divider lower on the tower and if needed a yagi or corner reflector antenna to cover the area you need covered and only having a SMALL effect on the overall coverage footprint form the main antenna.

The biggest issue with what you are asking is finding an amplifier that will take the little bit of power that repeater puts out and amplifying it to 50 watts. One of the issues you will run into is the amp will need to be type accepted for GMRS and I don't believe there are any that are. Second issue is amp's typically don't have a 10dB gain number. Meaning 5 in for 50 out. it's less than that. Most of what I have seen in the commercial world was 6 dB of gain. which would be 5 in and 20 out. BUT 20 isn't bad with a good antenna, feedline and height of the mount for the antenna. Unless you are having specific coverage issues where the repeater can hear users that can't hear the repeater, the increase of output power does nothing except stroke your ego that you have 50 watts instead of 5 watts. And if the receiver in that repeater is not up to the task of hearing as far as 50 watts will transmit, then you end up with an alligator that's all mouth and no ears. Which leads to interfering with other repeater owners or prospective owners that can't use that pair because of interference.

Yeah, wall thickness is more about structural integrity than RF emission. If you look up 'skin effect' you will find that UHF rides right on the face of an antenna, not through the whole element. And the depth it rides in is far smaller than anything you are gonna find to make an antenna out of so I wouldn't be concerned with that. Now it was mentioned about the diameter of the antenna elements and how bigger diameters have a wider bandwidth. This IS important and can throw off the design a bit. So be aware of that.

Yeah, I like the idea of the linked repeaters. I seen it a bit differently in that if you put up a Linked repeater and there are no other repeaters in that coverage area, you should put up a stand alone repeater as well. I put up two stand alone repeaters first. Those being the 725 that was the first repeater on the tower. That one is under the call sign of the tower owner and he uses it to communicate with his family and some other folks and we use it for tower work. Then came the 675 repeater. I got licensed and had another repeater so I fired it up and put it on the air. Then I found this place, and the Midwest GMRS group and facebook page. And that looked REALLY appealing to me so up went repeater number 3, on the same tower and no same antenna system. My bigger concern is they will limit height on repeaters and I will need to drop my transmit antenna down 130 feet to 50 feet or something horrible like that. I really don't want to see linking go away, but if it does, I will just unlink the controller and and pull the Ethernet connection off it. It would suck doing it, but it wouldn't destroy me. I may decide to switch one of the repeaters to ham but outside that, it's not gonna be as big of a deal to me as it would be to others.

I don't disagree that things that are blatantly against the rules should NOT be encouraged. Equipment modifications are a no brainer for crap you don't do. And yes, the linking seems murky, but the linking seems to get people on the air. Which gets people to buy radios, get licenses and renew licenses. An issue the ham community is fighting with above 50Mhz currently and one they seem to be loosing. This leaves people that wanted to TALK on the radio (what a concept) bored and lacking enjoyment of the ham radio hobby. I realize that talking on the radio is PART of the ham radio hobby, but it's the most important part. Because at the end of the day when you have built some cool new antenna, or radio accessory, or even possibly a radio you want to test it and show off your accomplishment. And if there is no one to talk to about it, whats the point. Part of feeling accomplishment is recognition. Again, take that away and for many there is no longer a point. And while I agree with the statement that lack of enforcement is not a license to forget the rules and turn things into a free for all. I would NEVER encourage someone to do stuff like operate DMR or P25 on GMRS. But I sure would like to do it myself,,,, legally. Which of course isn't possible at this time.

Oh, I can't agree more. If you are looking for a relative measurement the cheap meters are great. And if they are 10% or even 20% accuracy, they are enough to tell you that you are squirting RF out of the radio and the SWR is close or way off. And I have some of that stuff too. I run an Anritsu 412LMR Master and a 50dB Connecticut Microwave 100Mhz to 1Ghz directional coupler for doing high power readings. And I am expected by both my employer and my main client to check the loss of the cables I am using and do my power calculations with those loss numbers in mind. In fact the client saw me doing it and when they ask what I was doing and I explained it, they required everyone else in the state to do the same thing. So my coupler is 50dB down from the actual signal level. So a 100 watt signal (50dBm) would register at 0dBm without that cable loss but at 800 Mhz that cable has 2.7dB of loss so it's significant, and will through the readings WAY off if not accounted for. Of course it all got questioned until I connected the 3 thousand dollar Roade and Swartz watt meter up in line as was within 1.5 watts of what I had on the paper for my reading. At that point they were all happy and rewrote the procedure for doing RF power readings at an RF site. Now I don't break all that out to check the SWR on a mobile antenna for a vehicle install. I use one of my Bird meters for that. And it's MORE than accurate enough to do that work. And maybe I was a bit harsh on my reply, but I thought my head was gonna explode when I read that. Not your answer to it, but that it's a topic even being discussed. But I get a LOT of that. I had one today, guy was wanting to know why his vehicle repeater was not working when he was driving down the street. I wanted to tell him because whoever installed it actually did it right. They are connected to the park neutral switch so they specifically DON'T work when you are in motion. That's what the mobile radio in the vehicle is for..... the one connected to the VRS (vehicle repeater system) that you talk through when you are on a fire ground and OUT of the vehicle. I honestly told my boss what was up and to explain that the system is designed that way to keep from causing interference while responding and driving past another working incident where they were also using a VRS to extend their coverage.

Why do I get the feeling that you are referring to the linking discussion here? And specifically me and something I have said here or elsewhere, it's just that reply just seems strange. Unless you are referring to my comments on another board about amplifiers that have the ability to exceed the power levels set in the US regulations for ham radio. If that is the case, remember, that is there and is about HAM radio, it is NOT here about GMRS radio and the two should be kept separate.

WiFi when you are using your call sign as your SSID and transmitting or exceeding the ERP allowed in part 15. You also have to be using the correct channels. This is a sticking point with MANY hams but the question has been asked directly to the FCC a number of times and they have said it was acceptable to encrypt data links that were ONLY supporting ham radio activities.

Well, I am a BIT higher. antenna height is 550 HAAT and 1560 above mean sea level.

Yeah, I don't expect that we will ever see encryption on GMRS. It's been deemed legal in certain situations on Ham, but the key has to be posted sort of removing the security of operating secure. I don't know that we will see digital modulation in GMRS in the future either. It's getting along fine without it and the number of license holders continues to grow. If enough people were to write letters requesting it be reviewed, it might get looked at but I doubt it's gonna happen. To the comment about linking. The regulation says the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Now that gets defined by the FCC during an enforcement action. Is the Internet (due to VoIP) now considered part of the PSTN? That would be for them to consider, and argue to a judge during legal proceedings. But there first has to be an enforcement effort to even begin to have the discussion. Leading back to the question of when was GMRS looked at for enforcement of any kind. Now the difference between 5 watts and 50 watts is 10dB. One S-unit is 6 dB of change from one level to the next, so it's actually less than 2 S-units. The height restriction. This is similar to the control station height limit spelled out in part 90. That states that a control station antenna, meaning an antenna for a radio that is communicating to a repeater and NOT another station, can be no higher than 20 feet above the highest point of the nearest structure. Now, a base station is defined as any fixed station that is NOT a repeater in part 90. Meaning a base station is setup to communicate SIMPLEX with mobile and portable radios directly without a repeater being involved in the communication. So again, what are they defining as a base station with GMRS, is it ANY fixed station that is not a repeater, or is it only a fixed station that communicates through a repeater? That is another double speak regulation that deserves a layman's explanation of the written regulation. Now here's a thought. I wonder if you could get an FCC attorney to write a layman's explanation of the GMRS regulations so that it was a bit more cut and dried and not so confusing. Lastly, ERP. there's where the rubber hits the road. If you were to stick a GMRS repeater on a tower. Have 10 feet of feed line between the duplexer and the antenna with 40 watt's of output due to losses in the duplexer with a 50 watt radio. Connect that to a DB-420 antenna with 8dBi of gain. Your ERP is 250 watts. Park that 200 feet in the air and you are legal in all aspects and talking for miles. But damn few are gonna do that. Maintenance on the repeater required a tower climb. Rigging and lifting the repeater and duplexer up there is gonna be difficult at best and the tower is gonna need to be sturdy enough to support the weight and wind load of the cabinet that it's in. If you put 300 feet of 7/8 line in there and locate the repeater in the building, you loose 2.4 dB of signal. Dropping you down to 144 watts of ERP. Which sounds like a bunch, but since I have an antenna at 180 feet and am only getting 20 watts out of the duplexer (actually a combiner which has higher loss) and it talks 30 miles, I don't believe it's that big of a deal. Now on some tower this is absolutely possible. But it's a pain to work on the thing. We discussed it and decided against it and have both the room and the tower to be able to do it. And that picture is ONE corner of the top deck taken from the center of the deck. And those posts are 6 feet apart.

God, I just found this by accident, and couldn't agree MORE. I posted earlier today on eHam about this very thing. Ham's seem to WANT to piss off all comers that are new to the hobby to the point they toss their equipment in a closet, and allow their license to expire in ten years, never really getting involved with the hobby because they came across this mentality and figured it wasn't worth the effort to remain in the hobby.

Well golly Gee.... it gets hot here too, and we don't have these issues with flex alerts or any of that stupidity. Can't say we have ever had a MANDATE to conserve energy here. And as far as cancer causing materials. Yep some stuff causes cancer. It's only regulated there, because state governments in other places expect their populace to be smart enough to not get over exposed to them. One one state feels like their residents are too stupid to understand that and create stuff like prop 65 to regulate it. Then again, interacting with some from that state, I can see why they would feel that way about it.