WRKC935

Have to ask. Is the water company in question a private business or a government agency? Private businesses can basically do as they please. Including allowing a bunch of hams to takeover their antenna tower. A government agency doesn't have that ability and can be brought to task over it. If they are showing preferential treatment to the hams, which it seems would be the case, then I would with documentation (certified letter) to both the government entity and the ham group managing access for the necessary request forms to gain access. Ten days later, I would send a second certified letter to BOTH entities, making a SECOND request if they haven't provided you with the correct documentation. After an additional ten days, I would write another certified letter to BOTH about the cost of tower rental in the current market being up to 20 dollars PER foot of height, which IS a factual statement, and that as a governmental entity showing preference to ANY group and not the community as a whole is illegal (search your local laws and provide reference to the code stating this). Now THAT will NOT get you on the tower. But it will get the hams a FAT bill or told to get their gear off the tower. If neither happens, the next move is to get an attorney to write a letter to both informing them of legal action if you are not allowed to at least fill out a request for access. The water company has NO IDEA the hams are doing this. Requiring a ham license and membership to their ham club to access the tower that may well be taxpayer owned. That is where the problem starts. If the same water company had a backhoe and you ask to borrow it, let alone free use, they would laugh and tell you no and explain that it's NOT possible due to the regulations pertaining to publicly owned equipment. A tower owned by a government entity is no different than a backhoe, automobile, building or structure, or any other tangible asset. You can no more personally use any of those other things for your own private enjoyment than they can. And if they argue that the hams are allowed access for ARES (emergency communications) then you can simply indicate that the repeater you would be installing is ALSO for EMCOMM on a different radio service and should fall under that same agreement. To tell the truth, some hams really irritate me with their 'we're important cuz we can communicate" crap. And as an extension to that feel that they are entitled to free crap, tower access and anything else they desire based on ARES and EMCOMM. Of course, as mentioned, if it's a PRIVATE water company and has no connection to a local government entity, then you are basically out of luck. You could write a letter to them requesting access directly and try to bypass the ham group, but I don't know how that would go.

So I may have missed it, but are the old Nextel phones OOB direct connect and the DTR radios compatible and able to talk to each other? Running around in public with a 'working' NEXTEL phone would be interesting as that system has been gone for years now. Beyond that, if compatibility exists, it provides a source of radios that work with the DTR stuff that are cheap and available.

Ahhh, no. I am all for people that know what they are doing putting up good equipment after they have PROPERLY identified an open repeater pair in their area that will not interfere with the operations of others. I am willing to assist folks that want to do it right, work with other repeater / system owners to minimize interference and create additional coverage in area's that are lacking any current coverage. But I don't really think it's a good idea for EVERYONE to put up a repeater. First problem is the definition of a repeater. And depending on who you talk to that ranges from a quality 100% duty cycle commercial repeater and duplexer on an antenna of reasonable height to two mobiles or even handhelds taped together with an vehicle antenna on a wall mount screwed to the peak of a roof on a one story garage. And what that sort of this does is screw with a big repeater because the person that was told they needed to put up a repeater did so without even bothering to check the frequency first to see if there was another one that covered their area. You need to monitor a frequency for a MONTH before thinking you can use it. You need to setup a PC with a VOX audio recorder like ScannerRecorder that will record any traffic on that repeater output. And you need to do this with an antenna that's outside and up at least 30 feet. If you can't do that, IMO, you don't need to even consider putting up a repeater. We are limited to 8 repeater pairs for all of GMRS, everywhere. And repeater owners need to cooperate with each other to manage this resource. Failure to do so will just create problems.

I too think that we have little chance of getting the FCC to grant digital modulation schemes to GMRS. The one possibility where it COULD happen is if the FCC decides to make GMRS 12.5 Khz channel widths mandatory on all GMRS frequencies. From my experience with this in the commercial realm, we will sell a 25 to 50% decrease in coverage area for a given repeater. At that point the MAY allow DMR as an equivalency to the 12.5Khz analog move, but even then I don't hold out a lot of hope. I think it's gonna depend on if we continue to see the level of growth in license holders or not. And it may not happen until the first go around of renewals in 10 years. GMRS is currently growing in leaps and bounds. But we saw that in the 90's with ham radio as well and now most ham repeaters are quiet. Will we see that with GMRS as well, who knows. I would like to say no. But I would be lying if I said I see it hanging on with this growth rate for that length of time.

Yeah, lots of discussion trying to sort this out. FCC requires each station to ID. A repeater is a station, if the owner / license holder and those directly authorized by that specific license (family members) are the only ones using the repeater, then no ID is required. If another license holder uses that station, then the station (repeater), owned by another license holder, is activated the station (repeater) must ID with the owners call sign. I know this is one of those topics that gets beaten around on here every so often. And maybe it's in the manner that you want to interpret the FCC regulations. Honestly, it's just easier to have the dumb thing ID and error on the side of caution. Using HT's with an amplifier as a repeater. There 's a TON of wrong there. But part of this is learning. And folks that do this will learn why it's a bad idea. So I ain't gonna go there.

First WHY would you NOT use both slots of DMR if you had that option. Stay with analog and be done with it. P25 and NXDN should be pushed aside because neither make a real contribution to the basic operation of the service and provide a second talk path to a single repeater pair. As I said before, I would PREFER P25 as it at least would increase range somewhat, and the audio is better in my opinion than DMR. But yes, I run it on HAM and am fine with that. Why should a repeater owner that has had a repeater on the air for twenty years...... simple. When the FCC removed the direct assignment of repeater pairs from an individuals license and allowed ANYONE with a license to use any pair they desired, they created the initial problem. And we DO, as mentioned, face that issue currently. It's nothing new. Being reasonable and showing good faith, the new repeater owner should choose an different pair than the guy down the street with the analog repeater. Pure and simple. We self regulate, and as such actually need to do just that. I didn't say that linking should be part of any standard, but if we as the license holders are going to petition for a change, that is something that needs changed. It needs to be either ZERO linking or linking. No more of this stuff of it saying don't' link with the PSTN specifically, which we are or are not depending on what day it is and who's defining PSTN. Not trying to turn GMRS into ham radio. Trying to put forward some path forward to newer technology within the service to make it better. If you look at the definition of GMRS, then you know we aren't technically within that definition to begin with. Some of us ARE using it as hobby radio. And operate within the confines of the regulations other than that. Right now we are experiencing a boom in licenses and activity. We make it better and there will be more interest. I have said this to ham operators with big heads to bring them down a notch or two, but it's still the truth. Ham radio is now defined by people that studied for 3 hours to take a test they had all the answers to the questions from a book written by Gorden West. I will add this to that statement. We didn't even need to take the test to get our license. Of course we SHARE our bandwidth with another unlicensed service that the hams don't have to contend with. And don't forget, this is ALL a discussion of peoples OPINION. Not a discussion board for creating a petition to the FCC for a change. I forgot that EVERYTHING is now political and NO ONE can have a differing OPINION than the ones held by a select few who want to MANDATE their opinion is the only one that matters. AKA, discuss NOTHING, fall into line and do NOT ever have a differing view. Sorry for the mix up.

Honestly I think the reasonable move is take some number of the repeater pairs but not all at this time and allow them to be DMR. Because you're right, the FCC can certainly make a mess of things. DMR is going to increase the 'available' channels due to the TDMA portion of it. This CAN'T be applied to the FRS portion because no radios that are DMR can legally be FRS due to power and antenna restrictions. It would need to be a repeater only sort of thing. Now is that every other repeater pair, the lower or upper half, or what,,, I have no idea. I think every other pair starting with 550 and going up, but that's just my opinion. And no specific requirement to switch should exist. If an area or group of users has an analog repeater in place and don't see a need to change, then they shouldn't. But they would need to understand that someone else CAN bring up a digital repeater on their frequency and they would have no grounds to complain about the interference from that repeater. What I don't see is any significant benefit for applying digital to simplex channels. This should be a repeater only effort, and done in a way to minimize the number of people that are going to be negatively effected. I will also say that if this happens, the regulations for NOT linking need to go completely away. There is a sot of gray area that we operate in right now as the regulation specifically states that the switched telephone network can't be used for linking. We operate the links based on the fact they are IP and not switched telephone circuits. But much of the telephone system is now IP based and NOT the old two technology that existed when the regulation was written. One of the other things with DMR is the ease of standardization of the subscriber configuration. Meaning that we as repeater owners can mandate that if a user is going to operate on our repeater, they will use specific settings in their radios for microphone gain and such. This is something the Ham's never really enforced and the reason one guy will boom in and you can barely hear the next guy. No standardization. And controlling access to 'private' repeaters is simpler with DMR as well. Motorola, after suing Hytera started pushing RAC (repeater access control) very hard. Where before you needed to turn in on in a new repeater, now you have the turn it off. But this lends it self to controlling access in a repeater system as only folks with permission and the code can access the repeater. The only negative to that is the users will need to have a Motorola radio to access the Motorola repeater if RAC is enabled. But for private groups, that is a small price to pay and second gen (XRP4500 and 6000 series ) radios are getting less expensive on the used market.

Lscott and gortex2 are both correct. But there is a bit of explanation that needs to be done to have a better understanding of it. First is receiver technology. Back in the day, and in the present, a standard analog FM receiver has a number of stages that the RF goes through as its stripped of it's intelligence (the voice communication) and presented to the user via the speaker. First is an RF stage, this is connected to the antenna and amplifies the signal (and ALL other signals it can hear) to be shipped up the line. These are typically fairly wide band amplifiers that will amplify much more than just the frequency range of the radio. Here's the first part of receiver degradation. That first RF stage has a design gain of X number of dB gain for the stage. So, lets say that's 10dB. If you connect said radio to a signal generator and feed it a signal level of -110dBm the output of that state SHOULD be -100dBm. An increase of the 10dB of the stage. BUT, if you feed that antenna with 2 signals from a generator that are different frequencies and also are -110dBm and look at the output of that stage, the signal level of each frequency will be -105dBm which is half as much as the single signal gain because the state can only generate 10dB of TOTAL gain. We are talking GMRS, so 462Mhz. But that RF stage exhibits gain at 140 Mhz too. To deal with out of band frequencies a GOOD receiver will have a band pass filter that will only let in 460 to 470 blocking the out of band stuff. Cheap receivers don't have expensive filters. And receiver sensitivity is measured with a SINGLE frequency in a controlled environment at the BEST measured level. Meaning they will sweep around and find where the radio performs it's very best and that's the spec. Second is shielding. Keeping the signals that are floating around in the radio out of other circuits in the radio requires shielding and isolation. Go find an old Motorola Spectra and take it apart, look at the designed isolation. Then take a part a kenwood TK860 or other radio from another manufacture of the same era. Spectra's were a BEAST for performance. Other's not so much. But you could buy 4 TK-860's for the cost of ONE Motorola Spectra. So stage two is the IF stage, a second signal is created in the radio and mixed with the RF. This mixing creates two frequencies. The sum of the two frequencies and the difference between the two frequencies, which is the one that's important here. Of course, what ever else has leaked through beyond the primary frequency of concern (what the radios actually tuned to) is also present and ends up converted as well. This is where the 10.7 IF frequency is created and passed to the IF amplifier. Stuff is cleaner now and more filtering happens. Then it's stripped of the intelligence from the IF and sent to the amplifier for presentation by the speaker. Digital processed radios. These are analog radios that operate in the digital realm. An SDR receiver if you want to think of it that way. Some of these directly take the RF into the digital processing chip and some operate at the IF frequency mentioned before. Because the RF is directly converted to a data stream it's now easily processed and can be filtered much better than even the best designed analog receiver could hope for. If it's not specific to the frequency of concern, it's simply ignored. And 'amplification' is as simple as changing the bit stream. All amplifiers can mix frequencies. so RF. IF whatever, mixing can occur. If there isn't any amplifier in the sense of a stage with an analog transistor that exhibits gain in the stage, then no mixing happens. Remember that the RF is now a digital stream of date, even in an analog radio. The SDR chip take the RF in and outputs the intelligence directly to the audio amplifier. All the A to D and D to A (analog to digital and digital to analog) happens in that chip along with all other signal processing. This allows for greater First RF stage gain, better filtering and error correction (something that CAN"T happen in an analog receiver at all) and a whole host of filtering that's done in the digital domain. And that's how we are seeing a huge increase in receiver sensitivity in these newer radios that are Digital and analog like the XPR Motorola offerings. They are barely analog at all. Doing all RF and IF processing in the digital domain while being 'analog' radios.

First thing that will be considered is the level of interference with legacy equipment. Since we are limited on bandwidth, FHSS is gonna be a no go. The popping it will cause in the analog receive of the legacy stuff and the fact it will effect ALL the channels not just the selected channel I just don't see it happening. The next logical thought IMO is DMR, using TDMA of a 25KC or 12.5 KC channel. Implementation would be simple enough in the channels could be designated with an A and B. Meaning CH 19 in digital would be 19A and 19B to split the two time slots per channel. The branded name for DMR of course is MOTOTRBO in Motorola speak, but there are a large number of manufactures that make DMR radios. This would basically DOUBLE the number of channels that could be accessed from a radio in the same allocated bandwidth for GMRS. But so would going to 12.5KC channel spacing. Mind you the range would suffer greatly with going narrowband, but the interstitial channels between the repeater allocations could then become full repeater channels if the FCC was so inclined to make that change. The other thing that's possible since we DON"T have the non-proprietary technology requirement in GMRS that the hams have, we COULD petition for some level of Tier2 DMR functionality like trunking for area's that have significant GMRS use. That would share 4 talk paths on 2 repeaters with a huge amount of possible group call designations (talkgroups). But planning and cooperation from ALL users of the system and the system owner would be key to getting that to actually work. But some level of a 'CLUB' membership with or without dues would almost be mandatory as the configuration of the subscriber radios and ID assignment for the individual radios would need to be controlled or it would simply be chaos. Tier 2 DMR allows for proprietary trunking methods like Capacity Plus from Motorola that will ONLY work from a Motorola radio. P25, which I would actually prefer, does NOTHING for increasing bandwidth allocation, unless you went to a Phase 2 APCO25 standard. But the requirements for that are radios that are thousands of dollars and back end equipment that would be in the tens of thousands. So that is a pipe dream. And linking P25 is FAR more complicated than linking analog or DMR. DMR linking is simple, other than every device on the linked system needs a specifically assigned ID. Call routing mandates this. But outside of that, a Motorola repeater that is DMR has an Ethernet jack in the back. You configure the repeater a certain way, and connect it to the Internet. There has to be a C-Bridge somewhere as there is a hard limit of 15 repeaters that can be linked together with out the C-Bridge, but outside that, you can route talk groups with the bridge to limit the number of active repeaters by the talk group being used. Meaning a TG (talkgroup) could exist for each state, region, or a nation wide group simply by routing the TG to the repeaters in the footprint of the TG designated area. Any of this would of course interfere with legacy analog equipment and communications in analog. There would almost certainly need to be some level of restriction of what repeater pairs could be used and how far they would need to be placed apart from current analog repeaters to minimize interference. DMR talks further, which increases the possibility of analog interference. And while I am all for it, and the conversion for ME is as simple as going to the tower and reprogramming my repeater (running an MTR3000 on the 462.675 machine) if you look at the coverage footprint of 675 on the map, running an analog repeater in that footprint would be near impossible as my transmitted output would tear the analog receive up for those operators.

Honestly, if you need the actual FCC regulation on the matter, then look it up on the FCC web site. If you are smart enough to get logged into this web site, you are smart enough to look it up. The regulation is pretty cut and dried, 50 watts out of the radio transmitter, amplifier or whatever the source is. That's the on paper FCC rule. Reality. If you are running a hybrid combiner network feeding three repeaters into one antenna, your losses in that combiner network will exceed 6dB. So if you are running 100 watts into the combiner, you are STILL only getting 25 watts out to the antenna feed line and then you have the loss of that line to contend with as well. My system is putting 18 to 20 watts out of the building. Feed line is 300 feet, and .817dB per 100 feet. So that's .817 X 3 or 2.451dB. Plus the .5dB loss per connector on the cable, the .5dB loss for the surge suppressor... Am I gonna tell you that I am pushing past the 50 watt maximum at the station, of course not. My station is completely legal. But lets have a different discussion. Lets talk about 12dB sinad, capture and minimum signal required to hold open squelch. The average MTR2000 will open squelch with a PL at about -120.5 to -122dBm. And requires about -118to -119.5dBm for a 12 dB sinad. That's a signal change of a very scratchy signal to a fully copyable signal with background static. For a full quieting signal you need to increase your input signal from -120 to about -105dBm. So about 15dB of increase. So what is that in terms of watts? specifically the power change. If you are running a 10 watt radio, and you are generating a signal level of -120 at the repeater input, to make that signal -105 would mean you increased your signal to 80 watts to achieve that -105dBm signal level. SO, does a 50 watt radio make a big difference over a 10 watt radio? It does, but not as much as you think. With my silly little 18 watts I talk 37 miles in some directions. Because antenna HEIGHT and gain is FAR more important than what your watt meter says your power out is.

While i don't mind net's for 'technical' and discussions that are SPECIFICALLY GMRS related, the ham add on's frankly make me turn it off QUICK. I fired up the radio a few weeks ago and heard a net starting. The minute they ask for 'emergency or priority traffic" on a linked system that NOT for emergency communications, I pushed the power button. I hear that on the local ham repeater every week. It's not a traffic net, it's NOT ARES (ham EMCOMM) and I honestly don't what to hear it. My PERSONAL thoughts are that if you want to use GMRS for SAR / EMCOMM/ whatever for YOUR group, then put up a repeater for YOUR GROUP and do whatever you want. But then again, WHY would anyone with emergency traffic of ANY kind wait for a net to start to pass that traffic or request assistance. So I am stuck on a mountain side, flat tire, broke down. Should I wait until the net starts to ask someone to make a telephone call to send me some assistance. If that's the case, I probably need to pack more crap because if it's Monday and the net is on Sunday night I am gonna be here for a week waiting on the net to start right???? Of course at that point I will have been eaten by a bear. These are MY PERSONAL opinions on the matter, you are free to agree or disagree. But I will not be joining ANY net on GMRS that starts off like a hammie ARES net.

Curious about the etiquette of linking a repeater to the different nodes across the US. I am going to be traveling to Fla at the end of the week and would like to have the ability to link back to my local repeater while I am down there. Of course I am in Ohio so it would be temp links while traveling, but is there issue with linking my repeater into 174 while I am down that way? Obviously I would need permission from teh local machine owners to access their repeaters, but is it an issue to link my repeater to 174 since it's connecting the stats I will be in for that period of time.

Well, geeze, if it's not a hobby, then there wouldn't be guys putting thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars into building sites and systems. And I certainly would not have put up 3 repeaters on the same site if they were ONLY for my personal communication. Of course, is my hobby building sites, or radio in general... I honestly can't answer that. I enjoy the site building more than the talking.

They would start hearing frequencies other than the one it was tuned to. Would get intermod, hear paging transmitters (High power but not overly close) And at times loose the ability to hear a transmitter on the tuned frequency. We figured this was due to the first RF stage being swamped with RF due to a total lack of filtering. Now scanners will do the very same thing, at least the inexpensive ones because they are designed to hear everything everywhere.

If you are wanting to have two or more radios on a single antenna you are out of luck..... you need two antenna's one for transmit and one fore receive... If you are willing to run 2 antenna's you can run a control station combiner that allows you to run as many radios as it has ports. 4 is usually the minimum but 8 is more common and they can be expanded to 32 ports which is the largest I have seen. With tow antenna's. Now the pricing isn't for the faint of heart, typically about a grand per port on the smaller ones and can get down to 500 per port on the larger units. Plus of course the two antenna's required. Signal loss though these is pretty high as well. Looking at 6 dB both directions. SO a 50 watt radio will have 12.5 watts out, but it's typical to turn the radios down to 20 watts so you are looking at 5 watts out. Incoming signal is also 6dB down so you need to be fairly close to the repeaters you are talking to.