WRKC935

Don't worry about it. But you really should do a search on a topic or question before making a post. People do come up with new questions every day. But, there are also some things that have indeed been beat to death.

You can do a not for profit and not be a registered 50x. The 'trick' is that anything you take in you keep record of. You put those funds in a specific account that's only for repeater maintenance and you don't pull / spend that money for anything outside of that. If you do that, and it gets questioned. You have records of the incoming and outgoing money and it's a mute point. If you are just dropping the money in your personal account or similar and spending money out of that account then you REALLY need to be careful about tracking what's coming in and what's going out. And if you aren't doing any of that, then if it's looked at, they will consider it for profit. But the first thing that would have to happen is someone get mad and file a complaint on you / the repeater owner. Now this does happen when someone gets told to get off a private / pay to play repeater. The user gets his feelings hurt and calls the FCC to inform on the repeater owner. Now, is that gonna bring the FCC to their door. Who knows. At this point, the FCC has said that they will ONLY respond to INTERFERENCE related complaints. Of course, this ain't that. So again, who knows. But is it legal to 'charge' for access to a repeater? And the answer is, it depends on what you are charging for. IF it's 'CLUB DUES' then yes 100%. If it's actual access and there is no club, then all the stuff above applies, records and such. And to have a 50x you about need a club or organization to have that tax status. Personally I just don't bother with fee's or due's because it's a pain in the ass. Trying to NOT piss off people while running a wide area coverage repeater is not worth my time. If someone hands me some money to support the repeater, I put it towards the electric bill, or tools, or other stuff for the repeater. And honestly, I have has the repeater on since 2021 or so, and the grant total of donated money has been 90 bucks. So again, not worth the hassle.

Wow, we doing THIS AGAIN?!?!?!! Fixed stations are communicating with other fixed stations. Linking aside. If you have a repeater at a remote location, and a base station at your house, when you are talking on the REPEATER, that's fixed station operation. If you go to a simplex channel and talk to a mobile or portable radio, then you are operating fixed BASE. So ONE radio can operate in BOTH manners depending on how you are communicating. The other situation is simplex between two base stations. Both are 'fixed' or not mobile / portable. Reason for this is to NOT create unneeded interference on the frequency by operating at a power level above the minimum required to maintain reliable communications. Repeaters and other base stations have added range due to their elevated antenna systems over a mobile or portable and of course have antenna's with more gain as well. This isn't anything new... commercial has had this same regulation for years. The difference is in part 90 commercial they refer to the radio as a CONTROL STATION. It's still a 'base radio'. This is also how you get the maximum antenna height regulations for fixed base operations.

Yes, PLEASE USE ITm, as often as you like. If you hear me in there, say hello. All are welcome to the machine. If you can get into the Columbus 575, again, use that one too. We want people to use these repeaters. And don't forget about the Morrow 550, it's open as well. I have put a good bit of time and effort into getting the repeater on the air, and really do what others to use it. That's why it got built. The comment about the folks that build 'big repeaters' wasn't a knock. I am one of those guys. The 675 talks from as far Northwest as Mechanicsburg, West to London, South to Lancaster and East to Zanesville. It's got a big footprint. Yeah, I have a couple radios at the house if the wife wants to get in contact, but she just always calls my phone. So please, feel free. And anyone else reading this in the Central Ohio area, get in there. You ARE certainly welcome. I got spooled up because we have people that want to do nothing but complain. And it drives off new guys, or makes them question if they should be using other peoples equipment. And the truth is that's why it's there to begin with. If I just wanted to chat with my wife, I have several other methods to do that with. First is the obvious cell phone. Everyone's got one of those. Then there is the IP phone system at the house that I have a softphone application on my phone for. Runs across an encrypted data link from my cell phone via a VPN tunnel to the house and then allows her to call me at my 'extension' number like calling another phone on a business phone system. Then there's email and text, and voice message texts, and CB radio and the list goes on. Now in truth. Having a repeater that has that sort of coverage, and not leaving it fully open to all licensed users, to me, that's BS. Make no mistake, it talks a long way, and it would be very difficult for someone else to use that pair. So if I built that out, and then denyed anyone else the ability to use that repeater, that would make me an A-hole in my eyes. That's the one thing about the garage repeaters, you can have one or two in every town, on the same pair, and they don't interfere with each other since the coverage is small. Mine ain't that at all.

And we are back to the "Guys that build BIG repeaters" want people to use them. I have banned exactly ONE person from my repeater. I did that because he got mad at ME for not banning someone else from my repeater. So since he didn't want to hear the guy on my repeater, I banned him. In this day and age, don't think your leaching off an open repeater owner. If he wanted money, or assistance with labor or anything like that, he would ask. Or he would close the repeater and start charging fee's for access. As a repeater owner, I can tell you this is true. We haven't invested the time and money into building out this stuff for it to sit dormant. If you have repeaters in your area that are OPEN, with posted PL/DPL codes, and they state they are open access repeaters. USE THEM. That is what they are there for. The owners WANT people to use them or they wouldn't be listed as open. Don't expect them to invite you yo them. Listing them as open and posting the codes or having the codes announced over the air in some cases, is all the invitation you are gonna get. But don't think you are leaching. You don't build a repeater system out that covers multiple counties for your own private use. It's done because they want to support the GMRS radio community. Because, not every GMRS user has the access to a tower or the ability to build out a big repeater. Those of us that do, to this to support others.

I don't know how it got to this. I will tell you how it will end though. There seems to be an almost 'ham club' mentality about having a repeater. Long ago, someone told me if you found a town with 2 hams in it, there would be a minimum of 3 ham clubs. Because each one want's to have his own thing, and then the third club they are both members of. GMRS repeater ownership (and I use to see this a LOT in ham too) somehow is some status symbol, or just 'part of having the license'. People will stand up a medium to poor coverage repeater hanging an antenna at 20 feet in the air just so they can hear their call sign in CW on the air. Not that they know CW or know it's correct, but it's THEIR repeater. Never mind there is a monster coverage repeater or two in the area that everyone has access to, they need to do their own thing for whatever reason they have. SO here's the outcome. Guys that build monster coverage GMRS repeaters do it for others to enjoy and operate on. There is no other reason to build a repeater like that. It's far easier and cheaper to just build one with the antenna on the end of your garage and be done with it. This happens at a cost in time, money and labor. You don't park antenna's multiple hundreds of feet in the air using LMR400 or RG8. Antenna's that will put up with the wind at 200 feet do NOT come from Ed Fong, Retivis, or Comet. And they certainly aren't cheap. When the little play time repeaters start pulling the users away from the big repeaters, and it's not the asset that it was, or the owner doesn't see it that way, they will QUICKLY decide that it's not worth the effort to keep theirs on the air and the big repeaters will go away. You will go from being able to talk across an entire county on one repeater to hopscotching across a city from repeater to repeater trying to carry on a conversation that would have been no problem on the big repeater. And you can sit here and pontificate all you want about that not being the roll of GMRS. NO ONE care's. Figure it out. That's what it's being used for regardless of what you say, the regulations indicate, or the FCC has conveyed. It's a social gathering medium. Pure and simple. So while it may be meant for that use. It's what it's being used for. I just personally experienced a setback with a project at my site. We crested $400 A MONTH for the electric bill. I was looking to run an inverter to power part of the gear that will not power off DC any reasonable way. But converting 48 volts to 120 volts and the feeding servers don't make them draw less, the draw went up significantly. Which lead me to look at what I am sitting on. I have a bunch of good 75 and 105 Ah AGM batteries that would sell easily for 50 bucks a pop. Just the 48 volt plant batteries are worth a grand. Then there are another 12 divided between the 12 and 24 volt plants. So another thousand plus dollars. IN BATTERIES, sitting there so that others can use the repeaters I host for NO cost to them. SO yes, when it seems that Elvis as left the building and the repeaters aren't getting used, they will be shut off, sold off and I will NOT care in the slightest. I can't wrap my mind around why we are getting on here and COMPLAINING about the actions of others. Are these other repeaters interfering with YOUR repeater? Are you unable to put up you own 20 foot antenna for your own repeater that will equally not serve anyone, and have less coverage than two walkies on simplex? I fail to understand the issue here. Do you have thousands of dollars in equipment that the user base is slowly dwindling away because they put up their own repeaters and they choose to go hang out on them and talk to no one because no one is in the coverage footprint besides them?

Well, I am in process of replacing 600 and some foot of 7/8 line on a tower with this exact problem. It IS water ingress. The only fix is full replacement of the feed line. Water gets in two ways. First is a break in the jacket, if the jacket fails the water runs down the cable and in the crack. Second is a break in the antenna radome (fiberglass outer housing). Water runs in, through the connector and into the cable. Either way, it's in the cable. But once it's in the cable, it's in the cable. If you want to try to take the cable down and put it in a dehydrator and get the moisture out, OK. But while you have the cable down, just go ahead and replace it anyway because that's the only option that will work. And while you are replacing the cable, replace the antenna. Then worry about water proofing the connections once everything bad has been replaced. Not sure why I got back on here just to post this. But I really have no intention after reading much of the stuff on here of making it a habit.

Well, you win, keep using this site to post links to your videos and make money off doing that. They don't seem to care that you are cashing in, so why should I give a damn. You decided to bring MY DISABLED SON into this discussion which just shows what type of person you are. How DARE YOU. So sit there on your throne and do your thing. I have better things to occupy my time with. Go feel bad about that. EDITED For language. I was obviously mad for obvious reasons. Still done. Just not going to leave this post the way it was.

Need to know how to fully delete my account? All content, my repeaters, the whole thing?

WTF??? My sons confined to a wheelchair... you asshole, what kind of bullshit is that? You implying something here? Keep running your mouth about my kid. I knew you were a jackass, but now your bringing my son into this. Who the hell do you think you are?

OK, so yet another video about nothing,,, getting posted on here to get clicks and get you paid. Of course, content of the video. Especially one that is controversial, gets you more clicks and therefore more paid. Never mind that the regulations specify you can't use the channels. Rules are for bootlickers right? Nevermind that your efforts and video's were quite possibly a part of what got the FCC to do an about face on linking and shut all that down. So the rules only apply when they make YOU money. Maybe someone at the FCC needs to look into how you are cashing in on spreading misinformation. Maybe they will come down on you like they did the guy from Info Wars. Hard to tell. How's that AI chat bot working out for you?

(c) 467 MHz main channels. Only mobile, hand-held portable, control and fixed stations may transmit on these 8 channels. Mobile, hand-held portable and control stations may transmit on these channels only when communicating through a repeater station or making brief test transmissions in accordance with § 95.319(c). The channel center frequencies are: 467.5500, 467.5750, 467.6000, 467.6250, 467.6500, 467.6750, 467.7000, and 467.7250 MHz. Meaning they are there, as part of the frequency allocation, but are NOT to be used for general simplex communications without communicating through a repeater. So they are extra channels how? Regulations say they can't be used for simplex operation, so they really aren't for general use.

Be aware that the 'coverage map' on the mygmrs.com web site is NOT a generated heat map like the one displayed above. It's a simple circle around the TX site that gives an average expected coverage based on path loss across flat ground. Meaning, if you look at the map for Johnstown675 on here, it ain't right, or even close, depending on the direction you are from the repeater. The map of my repeater (WRKC935 / Johnstown675) shows coverage in Pataskala, Newark, downtown Columbus, and several other area's that I have no coverage in. Those coverage holes are caused by the topography of the area. Case in point is the Granville ridge. I have good coverage on 161 / St Rt16 going east right up to the point you cross where Granville is and St Rt 16 comes in from Pataskala. After that the coverage stops for a time and then picks back up closer to Newark and continues out to St Rd 146 and further. Same thing happens going West, Works great until Little Turtle exit off 161. Then falls off getting on the 270 outer belt. But if you continue west on 161 it's good most of the way to St Rt 23 (High Street) in Worthington. Then it falls off until you get west of Columbus and then picks up until you are out to St Rt56 on I-70. I have talked from the Honda plant Northwest of Marysville, From Mechanicsburg, and from London (42 / I-70 ) from a portable. So my point is that you should NOT have an expectation that all area's in the green circle are going to work based on the mygmrs.com maps. And you are further limited due to using a handheld radio. The power is lower and the antenna's do not have the gain that a mobile or a base station would have. I say all this based on the programming that you have in your radio you posted the codeplug of. If you have the Pataskala repeater programmed, I know that machine has limited coverage in that area due to antenna height. If you are in the Pataskala area, and are having coverage issues getting into the Johnstown repeater, that's why you are having issues. I can't talk to it from Pataskala with a 50 watt mobile. The coverage just isn't there.

First thing is NOT giving them what they want, which is to be recognized and acknowledged for what they are doing. If at all possible, when the show up and there is a conversation going on, continue the conversation without commenting on the problem. Keep right on talking. If one of you gets covered up by the guy, DO NOT directly say that. Claim it's noise, or something else. If possible have a conversation going on a different channel so that it seems transparent. But DON'T say anything that gives them recognition. That is what they want. If you clear the frequency, again the person 'wins' by default. Don't let that happen. If needs be, get several other people into the conversation. Get a conference call going on telephones so everyone knows whats being said. And just keep talking like the person isn't even there. This will frustrate them the most. If they aren't having any effect, they will go find someone else to screw with. Make sure when they get on initially, ask them to REPEAT their call sign. Act like it's just another conversation. Act like they are having sign issues if you do this. Tell them they aren't making the repeater very well and advise them to try again when they get closer. Mention that they might want a better antenna. This is regardless of how good their signal is. Full quieting or not. THey are weak and barely making the repeater. But address them the same as you would anyone else that had a poor signal and them tell them to give you a call once they get closer. Throw your call and wait. That typically will confuse them and again cause them to be frustrated. I can't explain the mentality of folks that do this. And I use to do it all the time to certain individuals on CB because they had it coming. But to take time out of your day to just be an asshole. I don't follow that thought process, and I even identify as an offensive asshole, so I speak from some level of experience here. But DON'T give them ANY level of satisfaction if you can help it. If you aren't showing any level of frustration with them, they will be more frustrated than you are. They are looking for a captive audience. Don't be one.

While I disagree with it needing to be done by 'someone with proper knowledge and equipment' the nano VNA is fine for a NOTCH duplexer, in my opinion, that's the opinion of a guy that's been donig this for 15 years professionally and over 20 years in general. The little flatpack notch setups aren't going to be tight enough that if they are only close they will not be close enough. And there are tests that can be done to ensure they are at least that close. I have tuned them with nothing more than a radio, attenuator, RF signal meter and a bit of know how. And when I put them on a regular VNA they were dead on. Biggest concern is does the VNA output the frequency it says on the display. Easy test is put a frequency in it that you have a receiver for and verify it can be heard in the receiver. If you can hear it as a carrier, then it's on frequency enough to tune a flatpack. If you decide to take it on yourself, you need to know a few things. First is the open port on the fatpack needs to be connected to a dummy load. If it's not terminated, ti's not going to tune up right. Second is how you actually move the notch. Guys without any experience will just start cranking on whatever cavity they feel the need to and NOT move a little at a time. Once you move one cavity off far enough the notch in that cavity will disappear. Once that happens, it's a PITA to figure out. So make your changes up or down about a half turn at a time and do ALL three cavities with each step move. You will want to set your VNA with a wide frequency range to start. Once you are close, then you drop the bandwidth down to 1 Mhz and finally 500Khz to walk it in all the way. Remember that you are notching the TX out of the high side (receive side) and the RX out of the low side (transmit side). They should be marked high and low. So follow that and you will be fine. DO NOT however attempt to tune one the way I talked about before with just using a radio, attenuator and RF meter. I have tuned hurdreds of duplexers, built up combiner networks from parts, learned all the math and crap that goes with doing that. It's not stuff for a beginner to attempt.

So are they using an MDC control list, or a RAC (repeater access code) to open the repeater? Moto did support those on some of their repeaters. I am not so much interested in locking people out of my repeater at present, but If I could figure out an MDC switch that would turn on such a filter switching the repeater to 'private use' when needed that might be something.

No idea, But figuring that you are reading the labels of the crap you have in your medicine cabinet for daily consumption, you would be far better equip and experienced to answer those questions. But from Googling the names of the medications, and the fact you brought them up. Well it does explain a few things. Guess you subscribe to a statement a friend once made to me. Better living tomorrow through the pharmacological discoveries of today. So just remember to stay on your meds and we will all be just fine.

Hit a repeater at 25 miles with .1 watt? Yeah, it's not hard. Several ways to do it. First is vertical height, if you get the radio in the air far enough it's not hard. Aircraft will do it in any situation. Beyond that, two tall hills over a valley would work as well. Issue is to have unobstructed line of site. Second is antenna gain. Lots of it. Toss up a 12 foot dish that you can pull close to 30dB of forward gain. Same way I do it with 23dBm (200 milliwatts) for 23 miles at 4.9Ghz. Of course path loss at 4.9 is WAY higher at that distance than 460 Mhz. At 460 the path loss is 117dB. At 4.9Ghz it's 137dB. SO 20 dB more. You have to remember that a repeater, or at least one with reasonable coverage is going to have vertical height already. Repeaters with antenna's at 50 or 100 feet don't talk 25 miles period. The curvature of the earth makes the line of site horizon 14 miles for a 100 foot high antenna. Beyond that you need to increase height to maintain LOS.

Count for what?

Set your Repeater tuning steps to 25 as well.

GRID DOWN!!!!!! GRID DOWN!!!!!

How about I prove you RIGHT. The FCC has clearly said several places in CFR 47 that you can NOT operate a radio on multiple services. So no radio an legally operate on GMRS and HAM, MURS and HAM, GMRS and MURS or part 90 and any other service. So yeah, they don't exist. BUT, both MURS and GMRS are cut out of the part 90 frequency allocation. So an antenna like this can and does exist for dual band commercial radios like those offered by Motorola, Harris and Kenwood. But, and I have said this here before, those manufactures spend a good deal of money designing their radios and accessories, including the antenna's to have the greatest performance possible. Taking the factory antenna off a 10 thousand dollar radio, and replacing it with one of these may or may NOT give you a performance increase.

No, and there is a reason for that. The GMRS service is not meant to be used for that type of business communications. If you are a 501c then you are a business. A non-profit, but a business anyway. And while it gets used all the time, FRS is the same way. Not for business use. It's right there in the name FAMILY radio service. Not crane operator plumber electrician and church radio service. No one seems to pay attention to that, they just go buy some WalMart radios and use it for whatever they want. I would venture to say that there are more illegal FRS radio operations out there than guys with CB amps, even in the hey day of CB. MURS is what was created for business use with a cheap license. Of course, no one bothers with that either. But those radios cost more so they just keep buying FRS radios and using them. If you are a business, you need a business radio license and the proper equipment for that license. Not trying to misuse another radio service that is clearly NOT for non-family businesses. IF you were all family, and have a business, then it's legal, as long as only family members are on the radio. Outside of that, you need a part 90 license and part 90 radios.

Well, the first two apply to GMRS. THe third one is for HF (2 to 30 Mhz) operations and not suitable for GMRS work. So we will start with the 'roll up antenna kit' This is the same design as the Ed Fong, and other similar antenna's. If you search around on Google, looking for 'twinlead J-pole antenna' they will pop up all over the place. There is nothing special about them really. And they are a KIT. Meaning that you get to solder them together. If you are comfortable with that, they are a usable antenna and will work well in the right conditions. THe one from DX Engineering. They tend to never sell junk. If they carry it, it's usable. No idea on actual performance, but certainly better than the stock antenna's that came with your radio if it's a cheap import. If you are running around with a Motorola radio, I don't know what you might gain. Mot puts a lot of effort in to their stuff, and so do the other 'big name' commercial radio companies. And in truth, if there was something better for their radios, they would be selling them too.

OK, been meaning to explain this and this is a good time. The commercial guys here will all tell you there are three tests that we perform when installing a new repeater system out in the field. First test is 12dB sinad with the service monitor connected to the duplexer wit no antenna. Second test is for something called isolation. We drop the input signal down to where the repeater squelches, or stops transmitting and then increase the signal slowly until the receiver just opens back up. What we then look for is the repeater to drop again when the transmitter comes up and then drop back out. If the duplexer isn't tuned correctly, the repeater will 'ping pong' up and down because the TX frequency is getting into the receiver and deafening it to some degree. If it does start to ping pong, we increase the signal level in in TENTH's of a dBm until it stops. At that point, we usually stop the testing, touch up the duplexer tuning and run through all the tests again. The last test is antenna desense. An isolation Tee is connected to the duplexer antenna port and a dummy load is then connected to the output. The tap port has signal injected on it to the point the receiver opens and the signal level is noted. Then the signal is removed, and the dummy load is unhooked and the antenna is connected. The signal is injected again on the tap and increased to the point that the receiver opens again. The difference in the required signal level is the antenna desense for that antenna and repeater system at that site. Now, here's how that applies to what YOU are seeing. With the 12dB Sinad test, you need to understand what that measurement is. That being a ratio of signal to noise in the receiver. Here's a good explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINAD But it's NOT the minimum signal level that the repeater can hear and open up. That is actually the LAST test (antenna desense) where the signal level is just above the noise floor enough for the receiver to recognize it and hear the PL /DPL. On a repeater running CSQ, the level is going to be lower, because it doesn't need to hear the tone above the noise, just the RF. These readings are gonna be 6 to 12 dB different in their levels. And the basis of where I make the statements about needing to be able to increase signal level a BUNCH to get a noisy signal to be full quieting. It's not a watt or two, unless you are only running 1 watt or less to begin with. That's based on using dB and specifically dBm numbers for power output in place of watts. An example is 30dBm is 1 watt, 33 dBm is 2 watts, 36dBm is 4 watts. on the upper end, 50dbm is 100 watts and 53dBm is 200 watts. So when you look at it that way, and start realizing that to go from just opening a repeater receiver at -119dBm to 12 dB SINAD at -110dBm or so, that 9dB signal level change is HUGE in the percentage of power change when you convert it back to watts. And the best part is you can calculate all this if you have the information about the equipment in play. You need the antenna model (so you know the gain) the coax type and length (to calculate the cable loss) the number and type of jumpers (again cable loss) the duplexer model (insertion loss). Then you need YOUR power level in watts (converted to dBm) and your antenna system numbers as well. The last part is the distance between the antenna's to calculate something called PATH LOSS. With all that you can calculate what the actual signal is at the repeater input from your radio transmitter from miles away. And yes, I have tested this and found that it's accurate within a dB or two. The difference is from signals that bounce off other things and arrive out of phase to the antenna and cancel put part of the signal. This is called Rayleigh effect. (Again, go look it up, NOT typing it all out) but that also explains sitting in traffic and the repeater fading out. Moving 2 feet and the repeater signal coming back.