WRKC935

I got mine in Dayton as well. Charger, used battery, antenna and the radio for $420. One of the guys with the local group had a couple of them and a couple different mission plans to stick in it. I found the Bluetooth programming function to be great as I don't yet have a programming cable. I also need to track down a KVL adapter as some of my personal radio stuff is encrypted. I did have one issue with dropping a mission plan in it that wasn't right. Radio wouldn't boot correctly. The three finger salute reset the radio and restoration of a known good mission plan got the radio running again. Being a Motorola guy, I was on the hunt for an APX for seemingly no good reason other than the desire to own one. I ended up with a 7000 that was VHF/ UHF-R1. Which is the most desirable option to get for frequency bands. I was never a big supporter of NAS on a carried radio and I have a legit system ID and radio for work (radio service tech) with direct access to a full system key so I can build any codeplug I want for 'scanning' and when ask what I am doing with a system radio I have a reason to have it. I mess with the Harris a bit, but I have found the accessories are stupid expensive. And taking into account I have access to second hand accessories at the office, it's sort of a no brainer to prefer the APX. I have one RSM for the Harris. I have at least a dozen RSM's including the 'commander' type with display and channel knob for the APX. Have the green XE RSM's, have a Pelitor headset and interface for the APX that is noise canceling. The noise canceling feature on the Pelitor is good enough I can have a phone conversation on the Bluetooth model I have connected to my phone from the gun range I am a member of while I am shooting. Of course batteries are not at all an issue as I go through the recycle bin and get out of date batteries. Some that have only been charged a few times and are fine, but out of date. Fire service doen't use out of date batteries. This is due to the safety rating for the batteries while in combustible environments and in fires. My radios are not used in life and death situations on a regular basis, so I am not effected by these things. I will say that the 'mission plan' design with the ability for the radio to have multiple 'code plugs' that are user accessible is a really handy feature for building travel configurations when you are out of area but not needing to have endless radio zones in a codeplug. Sure you can have multiple codeplugs saved in a laptop for the APX and program the radio as needed with them. But being able to store them in the radio, and switch them on the fly is much handier in my opinion. I will also say the programming software is a bit hard to navigate if you are accustom to other programming software. And in truth it's just a pain all around. But once you figure it out, it does it's job. Congrats on getting the radio, welcome to the Harris owners family and if you really like it a lot, there is a mobile version called the XG-100M. Basically the same radio in a mobile configuration with some added features. Might be something to look into.

FAA went nuts on any drone over .55 pounds. So basically anything past the little Walmart drones requires registration. Fines are crazy if you get caught unregistered. I don't know what happened that brought all this about, but they all but killed that hobby, and basically anything related to RC model flying.

And this is the reason the HAM radio repeaters are quiet. GMRS has in a way turned into HAM radio, going beyond what it was intended for. The original intent was for situations that you needed communications, but didn't want to go the full route of a commercial license on Itinerant frequencies or MURS. GMRS is a nationwide license (commercial frequencies outside SOME itinerant licenses are NOT nationwide) you can use with family, and other license holders. We of course have transitioned beyond that to rag chew when it's not being used for the original intent. Repeater linking is a lot of what makes that possible. I have 3 repeaters on the tower. One is the tower owners (725). It is open but all users are requested to use my unlinked repeater (675) for local comms unless the repeater is busy. Then there is the 600 that is linked. It gets a bunch of traffic. Some of it is local traffic for the link but much of it is from other repeaters on the system. The 675 see's maybe 3 hours of use a week and the 725 see's less than that. So area of coverage has a lot to do with how busy a repeater system will be. Stand alone repeaters in medium to low population densities are not going to have much traffic outside the system owners. Large multistate systems that cover multiple high density population centers (Chicago, Indy, Columbus, Milwaukee, and most of the state of Indiana and Illinois) will obviously be busy because there are more people in the coverage area so you have a higher possibility of people being licensed in the coverage area. You mentioned pre-arranged comm's. That's a NET in ham radio. And we do see traffic during nets on ham. But very little normal conversation. And in truth, everyone has a cell phone. Your wife, the kids, the neighbor down the street. So when you tell Jr to take a portable radio you get met with "Dad, I have a phone, I don't NEED this stupid thing" or better yet, try putting an antenna on the wives car. "That ugly shit is NOT going on MY car." Figure out how to get past that and you are getting somewhere. Otherwise, be happy that you have a hobby that you enjoy and hope it doesn't go away in your lifetime.

I just realized that the repeaters on the map site don't actually show the call sign of the repeater. I went looking for a repeater I am hearing from the tower but there is no way to search by call sign or even review by call sign looking at each repeater in Ohio. I was sort of surprised by this.

Oh I know about not being active any more with HAM. I was very active until I got a job doing commercial radio and it seemed I had all these ham friends that I had never met come out of the woodwork wanting to know about old equipment and what was done with it. Wanting me to look at their broken radios (for free) and all sorts of other stuff. Then I ran into the issues of offering to assist with building and maintaining infrastructure (ham repeater) and being told they were different and what I knew about commercial radio didn't apply to ham repeaters (while they were using Motorola repeaters that I serviced daily). That pushed me away from the service for a long time. I am slowly getting back to it and doing my own thing. The problem it created, is I now ONLY do my own thing. I help some folks, but those groups I had issue with are shut out. I refuse to do anything for them. The one group I even offered tower space and a backup repeater to. Completely free, their call sign and all on the machine and would only require a phone call to get it activated if their stuff failed. They balked about it, Said they would need access 24/7 to the site. ( There are two people having access like that, me and the site owner) when I said they would need to schedule, but their access was not needed as I would host it on my gear as a backup and they didn't need keys to the site they again balked and said no. So the tower their repeater is on will be coming down soon. They have no where to put their repeaters and have zero options to stay on the air once the tower is down. I see it as being NOT MY PROBLEM.

Yeah, there is this as well. And even if some GMRS Karen were to call the FCC, if you are on a shared GMRS / FRS frequency, and actually got a response from the call with the FCC inquiring what happened. You just tell them that the minor's all had FRS radios. At that point the situation goes away. I don't believe there is any age limitation on FRS since it's a FAMILY RADIO SERVICE by name. ANd of course no license is available. We as GMRS users can communicate with FRS users so you are good on all levels. And what radios the kids are actually carrying isn't going to be known by the FCC since they aren't going to be tracking through the woods looking for kids carrying APX8000 radios, I am thinking you are pretty safe. Truth is as you sit and look at it, the FCC sort of screwed up with putting FRS and GMRS on the same frequencies with regards to ID enforcement. If you are on a GMRS repeater, then it's pretty cut and dried. You are operating within the capacity of your GMRS license. Outside of that. Since there is no specific text in the regulations that state once you have a license that you are always operating within the scope of that license. That would apply as long as you were not operating any sort of base station at a higher power with an external antenna. FRS radios of course have no ability to have an external antenna, so be mindful of that. So the way the regulations read. If you are in possession of FRS radios and GMRS radios, no one has any idea what radio you were using when you were talking unless directly observed. So what did you use? Only for you to know and there are other laws on the books that apply to requirements of self incrimination. So there is that too. Further, and yeah, I am splitting hairs, but I don't know if there is a requirement for a specific radio to ID or if there is just a general requirement for an ID when it comes to family use. Meaning, can YOU ID for both stations during a conversation so that it's aired? I don't know, but it's completely possible, you would need to ask the FCC for clarification.

I agree with the expensive statement if he were to use off the shelf SCADA gear. It's not even cheap on ebay used. But, since you know the stuff well, you know that it's data packets that are almost spreadsheet simple. It's a 'sensor X value Y' sort of thing. And could be easily written into a combination Raspberry Pi / Arduino setup with both digital and analog I/O being monitored by the Arduino and fed to the Raspberry Pi via serial or USB then converted to the data packets via a conversion app and broadcast. The Pi could then also be programmed to receive packets off air and react to certain values or I/O inputs from the remotes. Including launching status messages via MDC. I did something sort of similar once with a CDM radio and some base logic. A CDM can be commanded to change channels via the rear accessory pins. It's 4 input pins and can select 16 channels. If you build a logic output to control those pins. Programming the radio channels to send individual MDC1200 status packets for each channel then changing the channels and keying the radio it lets you send 16 different messages. The commercial LMR license wouldn't be a requirement on this either. GMRS allows for some basic 'digital' signalling on the service. I don't know how much SCADA type data he would need to be moving around. But if he's writing the software to do this, it would be easier to use a known working solution and copy that instead of reinventing the wheel by writing his own system from scratch.

Went back and read the original post again. What you are also talking about beyond alerting is SCADA (google this) SCADA is a common radio system that is used in utility and industrial systems for monitoring and control of water, sewer, electric and a host of other applications. It's a bi-directional system that uses short data bursts to pass control information and data to and from remote sites and operates on established standards. It could be implemented along side the alerting that was discussed before with the correct squelch setting in a radio so that the datagrams were NOT audible in the subscriber radio unless the alert tones were sent opening the radio up. There are adjustments for the delay and duration of the datagrams being sent so it wasn't constantly busying the channel up with packets. This would certainly require your own repeater and the rules pertaining to using it on GMRS might need to be researched to verify it is legal. But if you are wanting to go this route, spending the money on your own LMR frequency (commercial frequency) wouldn't be a bad idea.

If the application is to do alerting to the radio, there are a couple methods to doing this that are straight forward and commonly used in public safety communications. First being Quick Call 2 in Motorola speak or two tone alerting. This is a method that two tones are transmitted over the air that the radios are pecifically looking for and can be programmed to react to. Think old school fire paging. Low tone, high tone, tweedle tweedle tweedle, and then some voice announcement. The radio when programmed correctly for this sort of alerting can remain silent until the tone group is received or be actively monitoring a channel and alert to the incoming message. The voice announcement would be computer generated, either through a text to speech engine where the alert notification is stripped of the pertinent information and run through the speech engine or conversely could be canned messages, pre-recorded WAV or MP3 files that are played over the air. Their selection of the message would be a function of the alerting engine. Issues with this are simple. The frequency of the tones are specific. They must be generated within about 2 Hz of the programmed values in the radios. And QCII tones are delineated to the tenth (0.X) of a hertz. So accuracy is a must. Interfaces can be constructed with a simple CM108 based sound card that will handle the audio generation and PTT function as well. Search CM108 All Star interface for more information. DTMF codes are also a possibility but may cause issues on repeaters that are owned by others since DTMF signalling can be used for repeater controller function changes over the air. If your DTMF tones turn off their repeater, they may well ban you from their machine all together. But Motorola and other commercial two way radios that are typically used for public safety will also recognize this type of alerting. MDC1200. MDC1200 is of course used for radio unit IDing, but it can also be used for Status messaging. The status programming in all radios that are receiving the messages must all match. Then once you have the status messages figured out you put them in radios that have displays. The display on the radio will show the preprogrammed text message on the screen. This method does NOT send texts. It has a set of 10 or so status messages that are set by the 10 or so MDC1200 data packets. You would need to program your software application to create those MDC1200 datagrams and feed them into the radio for transmission. Remember that you HAVE to identify your transmissions. So in addition to any voice or datagram announcement you have to have the transmitter ID. This can be done via a recording being played, a speech engine or Morse Code at 20 WPM. And remember that if toy are doing this across someone else's repeater, you need to get their permission. Don't simply do it and expect them to be happy with it. I have a local repeater that mirrors the coverage of my linked repeater. It's for local traffic only and I PERSONALLY wouldn't take issue with this on my machine, but if you're not in the Central Ohio area on my repeater, you need to seek out the owner of your local repeater and get their blessing. Moreover, I would offer them the programming information if they would like it so they can set their equipment to receive the alerts as well. Any of this is going to require radios that support the signalling methods talked about here. Your cheap import radios and standard part95 stuff will not work with any of this other than the straight voice announcement. Bear that in mind. CDM1250 and CDM1500 mobiles support these functions. THe 1250 and 1550 HT series portables do are well. The XPR series that are FULL DISPLAY support these functions will also work. If you want to spend more money the XTL radios do this as well.

Thought on this some more. Couple more considerations with regards to the battery chargers. A 48 volt plant is actually -48 volt supply. Meaning the positive side of the end of the battery string is connected to the ground or 'return' in battery plant speak. So again, if the output of the battery charger / power supply HAS to be isolated. So again, you need to be aware of what you are doing and what you are working with if you are going to mess with this. But again, 48 volt battery plants have serious current producing abilities and doing something incorrectly when it comes to this level of energy can have disastrous results.

Oh, BTW. If you decide to try independant supplies. You need to verify that the ground is ISOLATED. Meaning the battery side output is NOT connected tot he ground pin on he power cord. If it's connected on two or more of the chargers, the 12 volt power in the batteries will back flow from the adjacent battery back through the power cord, into the building ground and then into the ground of a battery effectively creating a dead short. With a set of even partly charged batteries, you will cause a fire at that point and things will get out of hand quickly.

So here's the issue with using "battery chargers" referring to the normally available 12 volt car battery chargers that would be readily available. They are non-regulated and non-filtered. Due to that the an AC hum would be superimposed on the DC power and would show up it the audio signals of the radios. Proper way's. First is a site generator. Most current 48 volt rectifier systems are modular. Meaning they are not one huge DC supply but a number of independent supplied in parallel that charge the batteries and power the connected equipment. So a full failure of that equipment is very rare as opposed to a utility power fail that renders them inoperable due to no input power. Any properly constructed cell or communications site will have in place a manner to connect a large generator that will run the site during a grid down event. A medium sized (30 to 60KW) tow behind generator and the correct cable would be the correct way to run the site. ANd you are going to need something larger to run a bunch of 200 amp battery chargers anyway if you tried to do it the way shown here. Second way is a purpose built 48 volt generator. The phone company has had these for years. They look like a standard large portable generator with an 18 to 20 HP motor but the output is 48 volts and not 120 / 240 volts. They are built specifically to power a 48 volt battery plant during maintenance or replacement of a 48 volt battery plant rectifier. Something of this nature could be constructed with rewiring a couple alternators with external regulators and running them in parallel to produce the required current level needed for such a thing. Contact your local telephone company or industrial generator dealer for more information. Lastly, and the way to NOT do it unless the chips were down and there was no other way. Similar to the manner that was shown but with switching power supplies of a current rating that meet's or exceeds the load at the site, but with a clean output and not a bunch of noisy battery chargers. Still need a generator if the grid is down. But a better way is find a proper 48 volt rectifier and a generator, put it all in an enclosed trailer and drive the whole thing out to the site. Remember that you are going to need wire to get to the power distribution breakers to feed the system. SO if you are serious about doing all this, you need to prepare ahead of time and not think that you are just going to wing it during an actual event.

Anyone built a solar powered repeater. I might have access to a site that doesn't have any power currently. I would have roof access to install a couple solar panels and run a repeater. Repeater would most likely be a 25 watt XPR8400 that would not be linked for the time being. Thinking that two 100 ish watt solar panels with a battery system should be enough but would defer to others that have done this and been successful with their efforts.

OK, FPP and the XTS5K. First thing is defining what you want to do with it. And how you want it to lay out. You can 'assign' some number of zones in the radio that are FPP and others that are non-FPP that you would program with a computer. The first thing to know is don't screw with the personalities assigned to the FPP channels. Each FPP channel has a specific personality assigned to it. If you mess with those, the channel will no longer function with FPP. So figure out how you want the radio laid out. FPP is cool and all to add channels on the fly, but 15 zones of it is a bit much. You can program the radio with standard software with FPP. But as mentioned there are restrictions to having FPP in the radio. The biggest being EVERYTHING in the radio has to be conventional.

If I run dual ISP connections with fail over, will the servers see my node change IP addresses and update the working public IP address of the node? If it does, how long does that take to happen?

Well, the truth is the antenna system more than ANYTHING else. You can have the most expensive repeater on the planet with an antenna at 50 feet and I can out distance you with a couple garage sale M120 radius radio's and a repeater link cable and an antenna that's 400 feet in the air. And you have to understand there are three measurements of height when it comes to all this out. First measurement is AGL. That means Above Ground level. If the antenna is on a 300 foot tower but mounted at 200 feet the antenna is 200 feet AGL. Then there is AMSL or Above Mean Sea Level. That is the height at the ground where the tower is above sea level PLUS the AGL level of the antenna. Then the most important one that is really important. That one is HAAT. Height Above Average Terrain. Now this one you are not going to measure with a tape measure. It's a multipoint averaging calculation. To figure this out, you create a circle around a tower out to some distance. I believe the FCC uses 20 miles but it could be more. Then you draw circles within that circle, typically 5 that are equally spaced. Then you draw a cross and an X through the circles to create the points of reference. The lines can vary from every 22.5 degrees to every 5 degrees depending on the type of calculation you want to do. You then get a topographical map of the area in the circle and document the ground level heights at every one of the intersecting points on the map. Add all those together, divide by the number of readings and then subtract the number from your AMSL. That will give you HAAT. The FCC website will do this for you, so don't think you need to do it manually. This is why an antenna on a 500 foot tower that sit's in a 1500 foot deep valley can be out talked by an antenna on a 10 foot mast pipe on any top ridge of the peaks above that valley. Sure the 500 foot antenna will talk gangbusters in that valley, but not at all outside it. And the 10 foot one will talk then entire valley plus down into all the neighboring valleys. We have one repeater on the MidWest system (Crete600) that talks 120 miles across it's coverage area. I have personally verified this by starting in Chicago and driving over half way to Indy before I fell out of the coverage area of that repeater. And it all has to do with the height of the antenna. Interesting EXTREME example of this. Ham radio has satellites that are repeaters. The repeaters are limited at 2 to 4 watts. They are 200 plus miles above the earth and you can hear them on a portable radio (HT) with a meager beam antenna. And you can also talk on them with the same portable radio and beam antenna.

Yeah, looks right to me as well. I would have used a different antenna line (LDF4-50 hardline) but I have thousands of feet of it on hand and connectors for it so it's not just cheaper for me (I don't have nearly that much LMR400) it's actually free for the most part. If you happen to have a dummy load that you could connect to the duplexer in place of the antenna I would be interested to see what your power readings were with a dummy load on the antenna port on the duplexer.

Right next to my log book for ham radio contacts. No, obviously I don't. Never saw a need for it.

OK, when I say MY repeaters,,, I mean the repeaters I have on the air personally. Not the ones I use that belong to others. The ones I actually own and maintain. I think you are getting confused on what I am trying to say here. As a user, when you ask for access to a repeater, you have to put in your name, phone number and email address. That information pops up in the request when the repeater owner gets the notification that someone wants to access your repeater. I was referring to those email addresses being accessible as a contact list or in some manner usable to email all registered users that maintenance was going to be performed and the repeater would be down for some reason. This could be either a downloadable contact list to import into an email application, or a broadcast email from the mygmrs.com system to inform registered users that the equipment would be down. It's not something that repeater users would even have access to directly or indirectly.

If your SWR is 3-1 that's a big part of it. Duplexers are tuned circuits that require a proper impedance at all points connected to it for it to work right. A 3 to 1 SWR is NOT a 50 ohm impedance. And it WILL screw with the functioning of the duplexer a lot. The KG1000 radios are not an ideal repeater setup to be sure.... but having that sort of mismatch on the antenna is certainly going to have an effect. When you tune a duplexer, you connect the VNA / spectrum analyzer to two ports of the duplexer. One port is obviously the antenna port and the other port is the side being adjusted. You then connect a 50 ohm load to the other port so the duplexer has a proper 50 ohm impedance on all ports. You can see the change in tuning when you connect the load if the monitor is already connected. I have never tried connecting a 75 or 100 ohm load to the port simply because there was never a situation that called for it. Without a proper service monitor with Duplex functionality, it would be hard to measure the desense caused by the mismatch, but I would certainly expect to see it.

I would assume that email goes to every member of the site. I am referring to just my repeaters. I could go through while it's still only 200 ish registered users and copy paste their email into a distribution list myself. But there are repeater owners that have thousands of members. That would be quite an undertaking for them

Yeah, this effort to run this on an X64 machine is turning into a headache. the repeaterfinder.sh file is nowhere to be found (didn't create a 'repeater' user on the system before I loaded everything) is this needed for teh scripting to run correctly? Had to manually exit the rpt-extnodes file with the info on the web for the nodes and then rename to rpt_extnodes_gmrs and move the file to the correct location so it can be accessed. The node isn't showing up in the nodes list on the management / connections web page. I am assuming that's due to it not connecting correctly.

Was thinking that an email list / contact list for individual repeaters or something to that effect so communications can be sent out when a repeater will be down for service or other reasons.

Yeah, I don't do contests either. I will get on during field day and operate, but like you, I don't bother with logs. I do toss my contacts up on QRZ but that's about it. But I really don't do a ton of HF to begin with. So it does give me a chance to make overseas contacts to places I haven't talked to before.

Reminds me... I was in a facility that was under construction. I can't go into where it was due to it being a very recognizable company, and part of it was literally a government black site. But there was discussion of what was going on in that part of the building. All BS and conjecture. So I announced it was where they killed the puppies. I ended up needing to buy three guys new coffee's because they spit theirs out laughing. Got questioned about what I meant. I ask them if they told their young sons that when they caught them touching themselves if told them that every time they do that, someone kills a puppy. And that this is where they do it. Mind you these were all construction workers. I heard that story being told from trade to trade for the rest of the day.