rdunajewski

Sorry about that, I responded to your email with some more info.

I have a small network set up using a modified version of app_rpt. I use my own registration server so there's no dependency on the AllStar network, and no way to accidentally connect to a Ham repeater. By keeping them separate, we're in compliance with the FCC regulations for GMRS in that we're preventing unauthorized access. You just need a PC you can wipe clean and put Linux on (or even a Raspberry Pi), and a piece of hardware to interface with the repeater. We've used the URIx board from DMK Engineering (about $70), and the RTCM board (no PC needed, but more expensive at about $270). The RTCM is tricky to set up but the big draw is that there's no need to alter the firewall settings at the repeater site (some people have no way to forward ports). If that's something you're interested in, let me know and I can PM you with more details.

Ed, the issue should now be fixed. We had an issue with the forums and they went offline for a couple of days. Your myGMRS account should let you log in here now like it did before. If you still have trouble just send me a private message.

Hey Drake, Could you send me a private message and let me know which repeaters shouldn't be assigned to you? I'm not sure why that happened yet.

Hi Seven, Welcome! Let's see if I can answer those questions for you. Others may chime in and lend their expertise as well. 1. This is a Ham radio, and is not certified for use on GMRS frequencies. According to the FCC Rules (Part 95), any radio used on GMRS frequencies must carry Part 95A certification. However, as you may find if you do your own research, it's very hard to find a currently-produced Part 95A radio which is repeater capable. It's kind of a niche and most manufacturers don't bother with it anymore. For us, that presents us with a dilemma. Either we are stuck using very old and obsolete equipment, or we could use Part 90 radios (virtually all commercial-grade radios for business or public safety use) which adheres to stricter technical requirements. I don't recommend or advocate it, but many people have decided that a Part 90 radio, when operated properly, is just as good or even better. Many of the Baofeng radios and their clones now carry Part 90 certification when the user is unable to change the frequency on the fly. So the short answer is, yes it's a Ham radio. The longer answer is, it may have Part 90 certification and would then perform similarly to a Part 95A radio, so you would be using it at your own risk. The argument has been made with the FCC but to date no answer has been given. 2. For simplex, you can use any GMRS frequency that is not a repeater input (467.xxx MHz). You can speak in another language, but you are required to state your callsign in English every 15 minutes during a conversation, and at the end of the conversation according to the FCC rules. Yes, you can set a PL tone on simplex for you and your friend. It will not provide true privacy, but would prevent you two from hearing other people on the same channel unless they happen to be using the same tone. 3. Yes, your GMRS license allows you to use a GMRS repeater. However, repeaters are privately owned and you need the permission of the owner. Some repeaters are posted on this site as "open" which means any licensed user can use it without permission (just follow the rules), while some are private or require explicit permission. The listing for the repeater on this website should indicate which, and you can contact the owner through this site. The repeater will retransmit your audio over a wider area so others can hear you who would not normally be able to hear your radio directly. It's not private, and anyone else who has the repeater programmed in their radio could talk back to you. 4. English isn't required, but you may want to talk to the repeater owner and give them a heads-up that you intend to speak in another language but will be complying with the FCC rules. Some people are alarmed by not knowing what someone is saying on their repeater, so it doesn't hurt to state that up front to avoid confusion. Nothing in GMRS is private, so others would be able to hear you if they're within range of the repeater (typically 15-30 miles, perhaps more) 5. Only one person may transmit at a time, so if there's a conversation going on already, you'll have to wait your turn. If you have something to add to the conversation, you can jump in and introduce yourself. Most people are happy to talk with you, so don't be shy about it. Just don't interrupt another conversation with your own. Good luck, and let me know if you need any further clarification!

Yeah, 50-60 mile radius is hard to achieve with one repeater, and very hard to achieve a good enough signal to make it practical over all 50-60 miles. I agree with the others, you need to get your antenna VERY high up to have a chance. The alternative is to set up multiple repeaters to give you the coverage you need. There are methods to link them via VoIP that are within the Part 95 rules as long as you protect the linking from unlicensed users (don't use something open to the public or you're asking for trouble). More repeaters means more money, but the cost of getting access to a tall enough tower (if you can even find one who will let a GMRS repeater up there) may be more than setting up several smaller sites. Send me a PM if you're interested in linking them privately, I have quite a bit of experience there.

Hi Frank, Can you see if you can edit now? I believe the issue is fixed.

What is your callsign? I will look into it if you still can't connect. As of late it appears the delay can be as long as 48 hours. Basically we get a dump of the FCC database every day at noon, but whether a new license is in that dump yet is up to the FCC's system. Sometimes they come up, sometimes they don't. It's a bit frustrating, but for now that's their limitation.

The email notifications sent to you should include a "Reply-To" address, which is the email address of the person requesting access. Most email clients will automatically send the email to the right party. Could you forward the email to me? I'd like to take a look at the email headers and see if they're being set properly in your case. Forward to rich@mygmrs.com.

Hi Everyone, It's come to my attention that a few members may be posting advertisements for their business in an aggressive manner. For example, they may not be interacting with the other members in a productive way, only pushing their products or services. I think it's a good time to enact a new policy for the forums whereby member advertising is prohibited without written consent from me, the owner. I don't mind a simple signature line that includes your company name, but I do not want to allow posts that are advertising your business. We cannot be held responsible for these posts and we certainly do not endorse any companies other than our approved advertisers. If you'd like to advertise with us, please get in touch with me to discuss. I'm very flexible on rates; doesn't matter if you're a small company or large. Our moderators Gary, William and Scott, as well as myself, reserve the right to edit or remove any posts which serve as an advertising platform that isn't approved by me. This serves to protect the other members as well as myGMRS and its parent company, RepeaterFinder, LLC. Thanks for your understanding, Rich WQEJ577 N2DLX

Yeah, there's a Twitter account but no activity. I post occasionally to the Facebook page, since that has more followers. We may use Twitter in the future, but right now it's not terribly useful for this site.

We don't have a public API anymore, since no one took interest in it. I do have a private API I can give you access to, so I'll PM you with the details. If there's renewed interest in this, I can certainly provide an API for others to use as well.

You beat me to it! Glad you were able to get in. Let us know if you need anything else. Welcome!

Hi Ken, Thanks for posting about this! There was indeed an issue with linking the forum accounts to the accounts on the main site. For users who were already signed in like Gary and I, this was working fine still. For everyone else, you would have received the error message. Try to log into the forums again, it should work for you now. Just be sure to enter your real email address during the login process; it will generate a fake one based on your username that won't allow you to get messages from the forum.

Based on feedback I've received over the last few weeks, I thought it would be a great idea to open up a dedicated forum that allows guests to post. Some visitors don't have a GMRS license yet and have some questions to ask, and some people may be trying to register but need help for one reason or another. Since the forums use your regular myGMRS login, these visitors were unable to seek help from our community, and I either had to respond directly to them or they'd be without recourse. Hopefully this will help out some prospective members who need advice or the right nudge they need to get signed up. For now, posts do not require moderators to approve them. This policy may change at any time, however, if we get a lot of spam posts or notice any other prohibited behavior. Only guests can create topics in this forum, but all members can reply. If you're already a member, please use another forum for creating a post.

The FCC has taken down the ULS for system upgrades and maintenance, starting today, Wednesday, September 2nd through Tuesday, September 8th. During this time, myGMRS.com will be unable to fetch new license and callsign data from the FCC. The biggest impact will be for licenses issues within the last 24-48 hours, as we may not have a copy of the licenses before the FCC has shut down the ULS. Presumably the FCC is not granting any new licenses during this time, so we will sync up again after they are back online. We maintain our own database of license data separate from the FCC. We only use the FCC's system for pulling in updates and new licenses. New users who had a license issued more than 48 hours before the shutdown should have no trouble logging in, as we should already have your info on file. Curiously, the License Search page has been replaced already with a redirect to the below link, so we were caught a little off-guard. Please report any issues to our Contact Us page, which will create a new support ticket. Please don't contact us about new licenses not showing up unless they were issued before August 31, 2015. Please note that it will take myGMRS.com a further 24 hours to synchronize with the ULS once it's back online, since we are forced to be 1 day behind the FCC's database. More Info: https://www.fcc.gov/blog/modernizing-fcc-s-it Thanks for your patience!

By querying the data in myGMRS for all active licenses, here is a sampling of some states: Total: 149,797 Active: 39,837 Expired: 109,197 Canceled: 716 Terminated: 47 6067 California 2870 Texas 1980 New York 1911 Florida 1526 Pennsylvania 1097 New Jersey 1019 Massachusetts 482 Connecticut 96 Delaware (!)

Scary. Apparently no repeater offsets, which is probably for the best. The innovation award still goes to Radio Shack for their "mobile" FRS unit from many years ago that I'm sure a lot of you will remember well. I don't see this being much better aside from the respectable (for this grade of radio) 5W output. For the uninitiated, in order to get around the fixed antenna requirement of FRS on the Radio Shack FRS radio, they put the RF components in the base of the antenna, and the remote control is nothing more than a speaker mic with a display. No RF is carried over the cable. Pretty genius! http://support.radioshack.com/support_electronics/doc64/64766.pdf

Patrick, I will add this to a feature request list I'm developing. At some point I will open up a poll for members to vote on features so the most popular ones get added first, and hopefully all suggestions get implemented. Thanks for the suggestion!

Quarterwave, in the particular system I'm referring to, GPS is also used on the receiver sites, not just for the simulcast transmitter. The reason is that since the transport mechanism is the Internet, and not RF or hardline links, packets will be arriving at different times due to the network routing over the Internet. If you were to compare the receiver audio of all streams in realtime, it's virtually guaranteed that none of the streams would be in-phase, thus comparing SNR is moot. By timestamping each audio stream with GPS time, then having a GPS at the TX site, you can buffer all the receivers in such a way that they are in-phase and your SNR calculation would be accurate. You're right though, because when you're using RF or, say, a leased phone line, you don't have such a drastic delay in the audio from the receivers, so you can vote much easier. This is the device I was referring to, which is used on the Allstar link on Ham. You can repurpose it for GMRS as long as you don't connect to a Ham network in any way (such as the system I'm running: https://forums.mygmrs.com/topic/295-repeater-linking-discussion/). http://www.micro-node.com/thin-m1.html

I haven't scoured the rules again to see what would prevent this, but the major issue is how do you get your RX audio to your main TX site? Given my knowledge of the rules, you cannot use RF (whether in or out of the service) and you can't use a phone line. That leaves running your own hard wire (not a phone line, and not practical) or using the Internet. Allstar has an "RTCM" which is a thin client computer that interfaces with your RX or repeater and the Internet to send/receive audio to an Asterisk server at the TX site. You can use a receiver and an RTCM at each voter receiver site and another at the transmitter site. With the proper oscillator and transmitter, you can even run a simulcast system. A GPS is also used to keep the voter receiver audio streams synchronized in order to avoid issues with network latency. After all, there's no sense in comparing the SNR if your streams are all coming in differently! Not sure how any of that fits in with GMRS offhand, though. It's an interesting idea, though.

Thanks everyone! 8 years and going strong thanks to everyone here who participates in this modest site. With that said, I do realize there are some (mostly minor) pain points with the site and they will be addressed moving forward, so don't think I've forgotten about you! Spread the word to every GMRS user you know. It seems to me that this site, in some capacity, is proof to the FCC that GMRS is still alive and well especially with regard to repeaters. In my humble opinion, I think this is a big reason the FCC's proposed rule changes have stalled. The more active we are, the harder it will be to pass rule changes that could harm the service. Keep up the great work! And special thanks to Gary and William for volunteering to be a daily presence on the forum helping our members.

My personal best, without tropo enhancement, is 43 miles between Green Brook, NJ and Point Pleasant Beach, NJ on an HT. Our machine is at almost 550ft ASL with minimal terrain to the East and South, so depending on location you can have a straight shot to the repeater for many miles. With tropo I've heard a repeater full quieting somewhere in Virginia from Edison, NJ but I did not try to respond back.

We have a discussion going on over here, for more info: https://forums.mygmrs.com/topic/295-repeater-linking-discussion/

We've just added a new repeater to the network in Brick, NJ and it's undergoing testing. So when you see more blue lines, it means we're growing! Anyone else who may be interested can send me a PM and I will give the details.