WRKC935

Open or not? That is the question. Well no, not really. But I guess I need to determine what your definition of closed is. Are you referring to it being closed as requiring permission for access, or are you referring to closed as no one outside your specific group as having access going forward. And I will warn you that even having an OPEN repeater on this forum with POSTED PL's but the ability to request access will fill your email box with permission requests. I get them all the time. No one has ever been denied, but I still get the requests. So will you. If you are going to make the access semi-private, not post the PL / DPL information publicly, like I have, and wait for requests, you will get MORE requests. But at least the repeater is publicaly posted for frequency and area of coverage. This will cut down on the possibility of someone else parking a repeater on your frequency with a different PL. Not posting it publicly at all can get a repeater parked on your frequency if no one else knows about it. Or posting it as being PRIVATE, or fee based membership. Then you will get to deal with assholes like me that absolutely abhor the idea of taking a shared resource and trying to charge money for it. My way of dealing with it was building a repeater that completely covered the other guys coverage area and making it fully open. Of course he did have a for profit business of selling access to his GMRS repeaters, so I really had ZERO heartburn doing so. He was the only one that suffered form that since his users could access my repeater for free, so they didn't need to pay him any longer. But those are the breaks. I work very hard in this area to work with anyone trying to setup repeaters for any type of use outside of that. I have run coverage maps for all the repeaters in my area, referenced this site and others trying to locate all the operational repeaters around with their PL / DPL information so when someone is talking about putting up a repeater I can assist with something resembling frequency / PL coordination so interference is kept to a minimum and everyone is happy. I have programmed repeaters and tuned duplexers for others to get them on the air. And I have provided equipment to people to get a system on the air if they had a location to get something up and running. I just refuse to support it as a business, and will attempt to scuttle ANY attempt to turn GMRS access into a business for profit. Now understand that this stuff is EXPENSIVE. SIte access, electricity, equipment and maintenance all costs money. Requesting donations, having raffles, and other fund raising operations are well within the scope of getting the bills paid for keeping gear on the air. But GMRS is not there to enrich you financially. So in truth, leaving it open for use is the best option. Here's why in my opinion. First is management of access. There frankly is none. For those people that get on there and act dumb, the other operators will deal with them, typically by just ignoring the stupidity. And that is the best way for dealing with LID operators. They get bored and go elsewhere that they can get a rise out of people. You will have more users if there are fewer restrictions for access. But there is a requirement of good equipment for that as well. My linked repeater on the MidWest system gets over 1000 PTT's a day and 4 to 6 hours of talk time on a normal day and twice that on the days there is a net. You can't get a couple mobiles in a box to stand up to that usage level for long. But it's always better to have good equipment from the start and not need to worry about it. The other thing with more users and activity is you can see the fruits of your efforts. And there are people there if you want to just chat with someone.

Yes, Quantars will work like that. MTR2000 software however doesn't, or at least I never had any luck with it. MTR2000 software, Astrospectra /XTS 3000's needed something older as well. You get into the old 3 digit model number Kenwoods and the Maratrac / Maxtrac / Spectra Motorola's and you are DOS only. But the software will run on a fast machine. The stuff that's older than that generation like the Syntor's needed a 386 / 486 at MAX to program them. I actually have an old 286 for the oldest stuff. Not even sure if it works any more. Those old MFM and ESDI drives could have the heads stick to the platters of the drives if they sat too long. I haven't done any work on that old equipment in 10 or more years. But I maintain the ability to or at least try to maintain it. And I have seen older Motorola radios get bricked by people trying to use Windows XP and a DOS window to program them. For some old mobile or HT, so what, you're out 30 bucks for another radio. Got brick an MTR or older Kenwood repeater and things get a bit more serious and costly.

I wonder if they are a hold over from back in the day when there were business licenses and non-family members could operate under the group license. If that is the case, they wouldn't be required to ID as long as the repeater was IDing for them. It would all be under one license. As far as requiring a test, fee's or any of that. It depends on how it's structured. If you are 'paying' to be a member of the group and one of the perks of being a member is repeater access, then it's probably OK. But I will not go any deeper than that. To the testing. You are joining a group. The group can have any sort of requirement for membership they want to have. They can also limit the conversation topics to whatever they want on the groups repeater. So that's a decision that you are gonna need to make for you.

I fully agree with what you are saying, but with Part95 licenses, but there is no requirement to list the repeater location on the license like there is with the Part90 licenses. I don't know how the FCC would look at a vehicle mounted temporary repeater specifically with GMRS under the rules. Might be an interesting thing to inquire about to the FCC and see how they respond.

Best investment you can make if you are going to get into working on radios seriously. Another piece of advice. Have someone reload the machine with DOS 6.2 then reload Windows XP for DUAL BOOT. Some of the older radios never had a Windows version of programming software and you will have to use DOS to run the programming application.

Just noticed, this will be my 400th post. I guess it's worth noting. That being said, portable / vehicular repeaters can indeed be useful in certain applications but need to be thought through during the design phase to get them right. First question is what are you going to be using for subscribers on the repeater? If it's only going to be portables (hand held radios) then there is zero need for a 50 watt repeater. The portables will never be able to take back across the full coverage of the 50 watt repeater. And the repeater is going to have an elevated antenna that further extends it's range beyond the range of portables or mobiles. If you will be talking to a combination of mobiles and portables, then you need to consider that and POSSIBLY increase the repeater power output but again, the antenna is 20 or so feet in the air, range will be better on the repeater. Antenna mounting for a portable / vehicular repeater. Best option here is some sort of 2 inch hitch mount that hinges up and into place. This allows one person to deploy the repeater. Have a mast that nests together or uses the 4 foot mast pipes that are military surplus and prevalent for amateur radio use. A quick trip to walmart will get you some heavy velcro straps to fasten the cable to the mast, and make a clean setup. 12 volt POWER Another reason to NOT have a 50 watt repeater is the power that it will consume.A 10 watt repeater will consume 40 watts LESS power than a 50 watt repeater. And power source is important. Simply plugging the thing into a cigarette lighter port will no doubt leave you with a dead battery at the end of your weekend of fun. Building some sort of isolated battery plant for the vehicle is important here. But a couple storage batteries that are in parallel powering the repeater is a much better option than running your start battery dead 2 hours before you pack up in the middle of the woods and everyone else has left the area. The idea of 2 portable radios should not even be a consideration. At minimum you will need to mobile radios and a 'mobile' duplexer to do it right. And there is a requirement for the repeater to ID. Now there is no specific WAY it needs to Identify, just that it does it. This can be YOU the owner or family using YOUR call sign to ID on the repeater while it's being used. Yes, there are little CW IID boxes that can be used, but that might be something for down the road once you see if it's going to fill your need prior to spending the money for it.

Wow, lots of talk over a topic that's WELL covered. You can use 10 codes on GMRS if they are the standard 'published' list of 10 codes. Making up your own does skate into the questionable side of things however. Bigger issue is WHERE are you going to be using them? If you are either talking simplex or talking on a repeater YOU own, then again, nothing wrong with that. If you are on a repeater that is owned by someone else, they have the right to ask you to NOT use 10 codes or for that matter they can control topics of discussion in general or ask you to NOT use their repeater at all. And once told to not use the repeater, you have to comply with that. There seems to be too many interpretations of the rules for GMRS. But this is my version.

Tough to say. If you are just getting into the World of GMRS and not sure about it, I would stick to the preprogrammed Chinese stuff from Woxun and Anytone. If you are a ham operator and a GMRS user, you might look at the more programmable stuff that will operate on both services. Once you get into the commercial radios from Kenwood, Icom, Motorola and others, you need to track down programming software, programming cables and sometimes slower computers to get the radios setup. The other thing you need to do is get familiar with the model numbers for some radios beyond the radio family number. Motorola is the worst about this as they made CDM radios in all different bands and they were all CDM 750/1250/1500, but they could be low band, VHF, 220 or UHF. Buying the wrong radio sort of sucks. Kenwood's model numbers would at least tell you what band the radio was for. And then there were frequency splits of bands in the Motorola stuff as well. An S split was 450-512 and would do GMRS but not ham. A R split would do 403 to 470 and would do both, but a T split was 470 -590 and wouldn't work for either. Batlabs.com is a good source for model number breakdown if you are looking that direction. Another Motorola radio that seems to be well accepted is the XPR line from Motorola. Again actual model numbers are key here to getting the right radio for GMRS / HAM use. I personally favor the Motorola stuff, but I work for a Motorola dealer and repair shop so that's what I know. I have radios from many different manufactures but I use the Motorola stuff almost exclusively. As mentioned, there are some radios out there that are down right expensive. They have a number of functions that have zero application to GMRS or HAM operations. They are very good radios but have a 4 digit price tag to go along with the prestige of ownership. Yea, I have a couple of those too. But for a guy just starting out, getting an APX radio is really NOT the think to be doing. But again, I would start with something inexpensive but don't have high expectations for the actual radio. The cheap stuff works. How well it works can be debated but it WILL properly function and allow you to get on the air and talk. The manufacturing quality of that stuff isn't the highest available, but you are not paying 500 bucks for it either. The bottom of the barrel portable radios are under 50 bucks (Baofeng) but will allow you to get on and talk. I would advise a mobile / base first however not knowing where you are. Portable radios are great if you are close to a repeater and can get in it well. But lack the power to talk much distance. And a base station can be a simple mobile radio connected to a 12 volt power supply sitting on a desk with an outdoor antenna that will significantly increase your range.

Yep, went back and reviewed his other posts. 6 to 8 lines max and then all of a sudden this stuff. Personally I think we need to put a stop to this nonsense right now. If you want to get on here and write a novel about a topic, then YOU need to be writing it, not ChatGPT. Because screen scraping someone or someTHING else's work and calling it your own is still plagiarism and BS. Is this what the world is coming to that people refuse to have an actual thought or opinion and instead ask some AI thing on the Internet to form an opinion for them? We just gonna forgo free thinking and jump on the InterWeb bandwagon of BS and allow others thoughts to be combined by some computer system and just go with that? Ok, how about we just forgo voice communications of any kind, run some voice recognition program on our computers and and then connect that to our radios and let the computers talk on the radio and not bother to actually communicate with each other any more. Personally I think this stuff is getting out of hand. And we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the coming dumb. The WORST is yet to come.

dead horse beater

Gonna stick something ELSE in here that I don't think has been covered. If you are on a LINKED repeater system, even if you are a repeater owner on the system, you have to identify. Reason is that your transmissions are not only coming out of your repeater, but other owners (call signs) repeaters as well. That being said, I don't know of any owners on the linked system that don't identify. So this isn't a ding on anyone I have ever heard or talked to. But it's worth mentioning for others. I see this being debated here and in several other threads. And I frankly don't understand why it's a big deal to identify. And thing for a second WHO it is that consistently DOESN'T identify. The clowns that are causing hate and discontent with their beeps and burps and other crap being jerks. So you are wanting to fall into that group and act that way? Not sure what your motivations is for that. Repeater ID requirements. What the regulations say has been covered, several times. What you choose to do on YOUR repeater is up to you if it's stand alone. If it's linked, it has to ID every 15 minutes. And you are better off to set the ID for 10 minutes so that if it's held off by traffic, it will still go out in time to be compliant.

Yeah, if you are going to be messing with radios to any great extent and your not going to be buying radios and repeaters that are new. You need to look at an old XP laptop being as necessary as a screwdriver or a Cresent wrench. Yes, they are old and not supported. But while you can do work around's with DOSBOX, and other things on the newer operating systems, then you are getting into needing to understand PC's at a higher level as well to get things done. And that adds complication to getting things done. I have a couple old ToughBook laptops that are XP and Windows 7 that I use for programming. They are rugged and well suited to be taken out and worked with. Batteries are still available for them so that's the route I went. As others have said, that stuff is cheap to get and is a good investment.

OK, to simplify it Simplex. Yes it will work but it's questionable if it's legal or not. Repeater. NO would require it to be DMR and not analog, which isn't legal on GMRS so the repeaters SHOULDN'T exist. But if they did yes it would work. Ham frequencies, not legal either.

Hmm, why would an owner need to update information on a running repeater that is active? I can understand if the repeater isn't on the air but if it's running what sort of update is needed?

If they are motivated enough to break into the safe, and then the vault in the safe and steal the info or the keyloader, I will know about it of course and have to rekey anyway. The reason for all that is simple. I have my keys and the keys for others there as well. And like I said, it's a little overkill, but the safes are in place for other reasons. And besides that, I don't keep ALL my firearm's in the safe at all times. Ohio is now a Castle Doctrine state and there are other security measures in place to access the gun vault that would alert me within seconds of a breach of the perimeter, structure and room the vault is located. Figuring that the outer vault is a 2 hour T n T (torch and Tool) rated enclosure I don't worry a lot about it. I had a buddy that got called about his front door being open on his house by the Sheriff years ago that had some of the same hardware I have. He told them the firearms in that safe due to the caliber exceeded the ratings for standard body armor (300 WinMag and above). They established a perimeter and brought in the SWAT team to clear the house. Turns out it was nothing. The door didn't latch that morning and the wind just blew it open. This was determined after the fact by reviewing the video of the door. Of course newer systems have motion recognition and email alerting with pictures inform the system owners of these types of things in almost real time. Some of those systems are now open source and freely downloadable and require inexpensive IP camera's to setup. They are also smart enough to segregate area's within the overall view of the camera (create an active perimeter) so a camera pointed in the front yard doesn't trip when a car on the road doesn't trip an alert but a car in the driveway or other motion in the active perimeter will trip an alarm and send an email to me. And that's stuff you can just go download and install on a spare computer and build a network of 'cheap' camera's with. If you get into the high end stuff, and the pricey camera's they will do LPR (license plate recognition) facial recognition and can be integrated with access control, physical alarm systems, phone, radio and cloud based monitoring and alerting so the video and photographic evidence of an event is elsewhere and not delete-able. I don't go THAT far, but I do have dual DVR's (digital video recorders) with one being off site at a remote location that see's everything the other one does and sends the same emails. Since Motorola decided to get into the access control and video surveillance business, I got the nod to be the guy at my office to learn all this crap. And of course learning it means doing it somewhere. Sort of a hands on training. When you are sitting in meetings and your phone beeps when Amazon drops a package on your door step with a photo from your video system it happened, they figured I would be the guy to learn the product. I just haven't convinced them to let me borrow the facial rec camera's yet.

That right there is frankly terrifying. There are standards and requirements for encryption to keep it secure. At least for P25 equipment. One of which is the fact you can't see the key other than when it's typed into a key loader. Once it's in there, it can't be read by others. And it's never fully displayed on the key loader beyond that. From what you are showing me here, someone could take one of these radios and read it and have the key. In any compliant radio, if you open the radio and attempt to access the UCM (crypto module) the module dumps the keys in it. The backup battery for the memory actually gets grounded through the cover that protects the module. Removing the cover disconnected the battery from the module and the memory gets erased. Again, this is a P25 standard, DMR standards are not gonna be that high. There are a number of other standards and requirements for securing the keys in a compliant encrypted radio. It seems that this radio doesn't meet any of those requirements. But I am thinking these radios are DMR and not P25. I have not messed with AES on DMR. The MOTOTRBO radios in the US I don't believe are available with AES encryption. I know there are some that have it, but the ones I know of had it hacked into the radio . It is available in other countries however. All that being said. I would question if the Anytone radio does any sort of analog encryption AES or otherwise or if it's JUST for DMR specifically. Both DMR and P25 are both digital formats that a data stream gets transmitted and not analog audio. Both have added parity and other information in the data stream beyond the audio intelligence. But I also remember that DVP and DES OFB in analog would significantly decrease range because there was no error correction on it at all due to there not being any overhead data stream being transmitted for error correction to take place. And those were significantly less secure and complex than AES referring to the complexity of the key and the algorithm. It did require a full quieting signal and any interference on the frequency in use would stop the ability of the receiving radio to decrypt the signal. But being able to read out a radio and see the encryption key in that radio almost completely defeats the purpose of having encryption to begin with. I guess I should preface this with the fact I keep my encryption info and key loader in a vault located in my gun safe. So it's stored in a vault within a vault. The paper documents that have my keys written down on them are in the same place. While I do have keys that are shared outside my equipment with others, I load those radios and key loaders for those that have them and I don't share MY personal key with anyone. All my gear is multikey and the stuff I have in my inventory get keyed with a number of keys including my personal key that only exists in my radios. Do I have a specific reason to take it that far? Not really, other than personal OPSEC. But I can do it that way and the 'family key' isn't loaded on any gear that someone outside the family would have access to. But when I switch to channels that are strapped secure and say something on those channels, I have little doubt that no one else hears what is said.

Yeah, the only analog (WIDE BAND ONLY) encryptions that were available were DVP and DES OFB. Those would work through SOME analog repeaters and not in others. There was a 'SecureNet' encryption that Motorola had back in the day but your getting WAY back. To run AES (any version) you are gonna need a few things. First is radios that support that encryption algorithm. Then you will need a way to put keys in the radios (a keyloader or some hardware tool that will load keys) Radios will of course need to have the same keys in both of them to make it work. And range is reduced when running secure because the error correction works better with plain P25 and the added encryption will require a lower BER (Bit Error Rate) to function correctly and not pixelate. I run secure on a number of radios. I will not get into where these are run, but I have equipment that supports DES and AES on VHF, UHF and 900 Mhz.

Not sure how this has much to do with wanting to install a repeater. Other than maybe buy the property at the top of the 300 foot hill and install a repater there so you can talk on both sides.

OK, program your radio for the input PL of the one repeater that does need it and do NOT program a RX PL in your radio on that channel. It will hear BOTH repeaters. Both repeaters will hear it because you will be transmitting the correct PL for the one that needs it and the other one doesn't care about the PL. It's just gonna receive anything on the frequency regardless of the PL being used.

Wait, you HAVE a tower and building and want a repeater there? Is this YOUR tower site or something that belongs to others that you have permission to be on? If this is YOUR site, where is it, and how tall is it? Getting equipment can be difficult, depending on your financial ability to afford it, but there are ways to get money together to get it done. There might also be an option for others to provide some or all of the needed equipment if it makes sense to put a repeater on the site.

OK, there is NO WAY that can work. If there are TWO repeaters in the same area, and one doesn't have any input PL tone on it, that repeater would come up every time the other repeater was keyed up if the user could be heard by both repeaters. And if both repeaters could be heard by the user, their radio would howl and have very poor receive audio due to the frequency difference (slight mismatch) between the two repeaters. Now one of them might not have a TX PL tone. That is completely possible. But the receive PL would be required on both and both would need to be different to keep both repeaters from transmitting when someone keyed them up.

You are going to be looking for a MTR 2000/3000 or a Quantar. There is the GTR8000 but those are hard to find and very expensive, so I would consider them outside the realm of a hobby GMRS / HAM repeater in all but the most well funded groups / clubs. I would advise the MTR over the Quantar as they are a bit less expensive but are mostly the same electronically. Gonna see similar performance from either. I will say this, the MTR software will not run natively on Windows 7 or above. This creates a small issue that needs to be addressed. But finding a Windows XP laptop isn't a bad thing regardless as there are numerous other radios that you will need an XP or even a DOS machine for. An old laptop set to dual boot between DOS and XP is a very handy thing to have as a radio hobbyist. There are two versions of the MTR platform. One is 40 watt and the other is 100 watt. DO NOT get it in your head that the 40 watt units should be avoided since they will not TX 50 watts. The difference in performance between 40 and 50 watts is NOTHING. NO one will know the difference and it's not going to add any measurable distance to the coverage. If you don't believe me, go download Radio Mobile and run a coverage map from a tower site, run one with a 40 watt transmitter and then run the same map with a 50 watt transmitter. The second thing you need to be looking at is a GOOD duplexer. The little 'mobile' duplexer's work ok for a small setup that's not got much antenna height or is NOT in a high RF environment. Those will cost you coverage on receive due to allowing out of band RF into the receiver. That OOB RF will cause the first RF stage AGC to lower the gain of the first RF stage and make the repeater less sensitive to incoming signals. So you need to be looking for a pass / notch duplexer for a tower site install. I would advise against jumping into this with both feet straight away and instead setting up a repeater at your house or some spot you have access to. Get a feel for what it takes to do it and how much effort it takes. The other thing it will do is get you familiar with the money it takes to put together a system and get it on the air. EXPECTED COSTS for a large repeater system. I am looking this stuff up on eBay as I am writing this. So these are the expected costs for USED gear. MTR2000 UHF 100 watt repeater $1000 CELWAVE DUPLEXER $600 7/8 cable around 3.00 per foot used if you can find it. 7/8 cable connectors $30 each DB-408 antenna $100 - $200 another 300 in misc stuff Then a tower crew to install the antenna and line on a tower. Looking between 2000 and 5000 for that, at bargain doing yo a favor prices. Not Cheap.

No, UHF (GMRS frequencies) do not 'skip' like HF (CB frequencies) does. What you can experience occasionally is tropospheric ducting where a warm air mass gets in overtop a code air mass and creates a tunnel for VHF and UHF frequencies to travel in far beyond normal line of site. This is NOT a common occurence however and shouldn't be relied upon for consistent communications the way it is with HF communications. HF 'skip' is caused by the RF reflecting off the Ionosphere and back down to the ground where it's then reflected back up again, over and over until the path loss of the signal becomes too great for a receiver to hear it. With ducting, the greatest path distance that can exist only extend slightly past the area covered by the air mass inversion since frequencies above 50 Mhz typically do NOT reflect off either the ground or the ionosphere. VHF and UHF frequencies also do not have any 'ground wave' propagation like the lower HF and VHF frequencies do. Ground wave is a phenomenon where the RF wave 'hugs' the ground and carries long distances past normal line of site (past the curvature of the earth) by staying on the ground. This only works below 5 Mhz or so in frequency. There are several web sites and books including the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook that discuss the propagation of different RF frequencies at length and might be a good source for a better and more detailed explanation than a half away guy posting at 4 in the morning while half awake.

Of course using RAC will require your users to have specific radios and not just anything that will program UHF frequencies. Same thing with MDC. It's of course a bit more supported but still not available on many radios that don't carry a Motorola label on them. Putting them on a logging recorder (do this myself on the non-linked repeaters I have) seems to be a good idea, but can you get an enforcement effort to proceed even with recordings? Lastly, how has all this effected new repeater owners joining your group? Are you requiring repeater owners to pay for access when they bring infrastructure into the fold? How do they feel about the rules? Are you linking your repeaters together to enhance coverage with significant overlap? Or are you limiting overlap and being good stewards of the repeater pairs by either not linking or ensuring that linked repeaters don't have a ton of overlap?

It wouldn't need to be directly on frequency. Could be a second or quite possibly a third or fourth harmonic (triple or four times the originating frequency) which would fall in that range. It would also explain why it's only being heard at that distance.