TDM827

Your attic antenna set up is almost exactly the same as mine. Ours is in our third story attic. I intended on replacing it with an external. But after doing some testing and realizing our topography meant an external antenna was not going to give us much benefit, I just stayed with the Midland / Pizza sheet set up. Low tech for sure, but it does exactly what we need it to do.

Kind of missing the point. Which is, I want to use GMRS. You have the equipment I "want to use." And I am willing to pay for access to it. So it's a win win if it solves the problem. And if I comfortable relying on older forms if communication I just won't pay to play. No Harm, no foul. Before GMRS I used lot of forms of communication. None of which I really want use as a reliable "secondary" form of communications. I mean, my primary and most reliable form of communication since the mid 2000s was and remains cell phone. Which as of today I still can find plenty of dead spots and experience occasional downtime. Especially in rural areas. Which coincidentally may not have many repeaters. So cell really really doesn't address people who really want to have GMRS radio as a secondary / back up comm. Otherwise, back in the day we used: FRS (Not even a close second to GMRS when it comes to range),CB (Still limited range). Land Line Phone (Fine if you are home. I find it a good form of communication if the person you are calling also has land line or has working cell service). I mean, I could really go far back to the old Navy day's, and relearn basic semaphore / flag signaling, LOL

Not sure how common this is, because lots of us are fortunate enough to have easy access to public and high quality repeaters. But what if you are in area with no public / open repeaters which work for you? And the repeater owner just happens to own the only repeater in the area you can reach? And without it you have no repeater to access. And your comm plan includes the use of a repeater. Meaning you have no other options than to pay to play, or build your own high quality repeater. Not looking for specific examples of this scenario. Just wanted to let any members in this situation know paying might indeed be your only option. And if paying is their only option, they really are not breaking any boundaries of human stupidity if paying is the only way to meet their needs. They are simply meeting market supply and demand expectations. Not apples to apples, but kind like the person living in a very rural area is not stupid for paying a lot for satellite internet if they want it.

Exactly, If I were a repeater owner using "creative accounting" to avoid showing a profit, I would be much more worried about the IRS getting involved. If those folks think you aren't declaring income they can get pretty intense. In other words, Audit TIme.

You can petition your lawmakers / elected officials to change things..... but it's a long shot. petition the fcc with you concerns, yeah......right Get a PO Box or use a service to hide your data....gonna cost a little money. But as others said, you want the best results just go off grid and move back a century. I understand this guy is the guru to start with.....

Kind of comes down to personnel preference and how you plan on using things. Sounds like use of a repeater will be part of your plan. Option 3 is cool because it justifies spending more money and having more toys! LOL Seriously, option 3 seems like pretty good way to go if you want to meet your communications goals and have some flexibility on multiple radios to use without too much hassle. If you want to save some cash initially, and see if you actually like the handhelds you decide on, option two should meet your needs if you have close by and reliable repeaters available to you. Once you figure out what option you will choose consider implementing external / removable antennas. Of course this is not really needed if your handheld "rubber duck" antennas hit the repeater fine. Removable antennas include a vehicle mounted GMRS antenna (Midland, and other manufacturers make lots of them), check Amazon. You can connect a removable antenna to your mobile or handheld and it will almost certainly improve your radio experience in the car . If you want to use your mobile or handheld at home like a base radio. You can connect either radio to a larger external (outside the house on the roof, on a tower, or in the attic) omni-directional antenna. Again Amazon is your friend, and you can find plenty of recommendations here using the search function. You can get a decent entry level external antenna for around $80 to $150. And you would need to calculate cost of your cable run, depending on quality of cable and length of run. This will most certainly improve your simplex, radio to radio, experience and increase you coverage / range overall>

Yup, I stand corrected. FCC likes to enforce "rule." Or at least they say they do. LOL

OffRoaderX is correct and Like others said, charging for repeater access or a club fee is not illegal. Making it a commercial venture and profiting from it is illegal. If a person properly sets up a non-profits and "plows" back any potential profit and keeps the rest for maintenance, administration, upkeep, more repeaters etc... its not hard to do. As mentioned, be a pillar of the GRMS community, spend the thousands of dollars to set up a high quality public use repeater, hundreds to thousands a month on tower fees, set up good back up power, and put up with all the BS that goes with repeater ownership. Do you think you your thoughts on charging for access to a repeater might change a bit? Perhaps.

Just tell the HAMS this is your "First Step" in your radio journey and will be following up with a HAM license. Probably will get all the help you need, or is that false advertising. lol

I hear you. My adult sons take great pleasure in telling me if I forget to be a "normie" and get a little to military. I usually start with, "well at your age I was blah blah blah," as if they care. LOL

GMRS is very very informal. If you expect find users talking like you are used to in the military and the associated protocols you will be disappointed and a bit surprised. Like others said. Do some monitoring on the repeaters to get a feel for the usual flow of communications on that repeater. Familiarize yourself with the requirements to self id and your responsibility if immediately family members are operating on your license and you will do fine. I would avoid being too military on the radio, or you will just be made fun of. I am retired military and LE, and really had to commit to just using plain language and continually remind myself not to sound like some overly tacticool individual. Now I can sound like some rag chewing old man like the best of them if I want to. LOL

Of course they will "improve" this radio. Their business model demands it. Not saying this won't turn out to be a very nice radio at an affordable price, but.... In 12 months an updated version will be available with some of the features you want, but not all. In another 18 months a newer version with even more features and capability will be released. That hamster wheel of "improvement" and release of "updated" radios will continue to spin indefinitely. But manufacturers will always stop short of giving us exactly what we want. I may be wrong. But I suspect it would not be too hard for BTech to build new radios with all the capability, bells, whistles and unicorn features we all crave right now. But then how would they get us to repeatedly spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars every year on new radios when we could just get we wanted in the first place and use it for a decade. LOL I'm sure it goes the same for all our other friends in China who manufacture radios. And, would probably hold true if an American company started manufacturing budget style GMRS radios. Kind of joking....But kind of not.

You live on the 1st story, 2nd story, got a balcony, access to an attic? Your unique situation is going to determine if a repeater is going to do you any good.

Not sure exactly what you were expecting. But compared to some forums this one is pretty active. Perhaps the greatest benefit is using the search function. I think I have always found the information about GMRS I was looking for once I understood how to use the search function. And using the repeater list or location map is an outstanding feature. It took me about a month of casual use to figure out all the features. So I would give it more time. So there a lot of GMRS licensees here. Did you find thirty users in your area alone? Or the whole website? Also keep in mind there are a ton of GMRS users who want nothing to do with being part of a website for many reasons. Locating those folks and establishing a conversation with them is a challenge. But worth it. Sorry you got attacked by an advertiser. While most site owners do their reasonable due diligence on vetting and permitting good advertisers things just sometimes happen. In those cases, not sure what Anti-Virus service you use. But it's 2025 and even the most basic anti-virus services are great at sniffing out bad-advertisers / malware. So a lot of this is on the computer owner making sure they are using a quality Anti-Virus service. Hopefully you will give it more time to explore the site and it's features.