rdunajewski

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.

The Green Brook machine is back online as of today. Let me know if you have any trouble with it.

I just heard back from Paul. He said the power supply failed as well, and a new one is due in on Wednesday so it should be up sometime next week. The site is also having heat issues in the shelter. I'll update if I hear anything else.

Cash, Paul Nannery, WQBC441, manages it for the most part lately. Paul said a jumper needs to be replaced at the site and he'll get to it next time he's up there. I just tried to bring up the machine and it's still down, so I'll ping him a reminder. Thanks!

Hi everyone, Since myGMRS.com has been around for about 8 years now (thanks to everyone who has helped to make the site great!) and is continuing to age further every day, I've been planning a new website that will streamline they way everything works, will be more stable, has new features, and can cover Amateur Radio as well. While I have some great things in mind already, I'd like to take the opportunity to reach out to the community and ask what features you thing would be important in a new site. For example, I plan to have a mobile app for iOS and Android at some point in the future that will let you access the repeater information on the go much easier. We may also publish an API that radio programming software can tap into and download repeater information right to your radio without having to manually program each site. But again, I need your feedback to understand which features are most important to you! So please feel free to post below with your feature requests and/or tell us what your favorite current features of myGMRS.com are and you want to make sure are kept going forward. Thanks again for making this community great and I look forward to working with everyone well into the future!

If there is significant interest in this, I would be happy to add it to the website. I like RadioReference's approach of making classifieds free to browse but require a paid membership of some kind to post listings. On one hand it helps fund the website, and on the other it helps prevent spam postings and people who aren't serious sellers from posting nonsense. If anyone else is interested, please chime in!

bharvey, If you click on the repeater owner's username, you should be taken to a page that shows his profile, and his email address should be visible if you're logged into the site. See if this works for you to get in touch. It can be counterproductive if a repeater owner chooses not to allow members request access via that button, but I presume that they are either getting spammed via this link or just a lot of users requesting permission needlessly. For instance, my repeater in Green Brook, NJ is listed as open, yet people will still contact me for permission (which is fine, but I would rather them go ahead and use it without me being the bottleneck). Thanks for bringing this to my attention, PastorGary, I haven't logged onto the forums in a while and didn't see this until now. Thanks, Rich

Jerry, You should be able to do it using the following code: [IMG=http://i1276.photobucket.com/albums/y462/staffpicks/Tilt%20Shift%20Photography/train.jpg] Example Output: http://i1276.photobucket.com/albums/y462/staffpicks/Tilt%20Shift%20Photography/train.jpg If you're browsing photos on the PhotoBucket site, you may see links on the right-hand side for sharing. Use the "IMG" option which will copy the code above to your clipboard so you can paste into forums that accept BBCode. Click below for a screenshot from their site:

What do you think about adding a private forum here just for registered users? It should be used sparingly because we want the search engines to index all the posts with excellent information so others can find us. I do think it would be nice to have somewhere to unload some members-only info though. Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

I decided to add the forum to Tapatalk. Let me know if you notice any issues with it. The only thing I need to clear up is the logo I uploaded is the wrong size so it looks horrible.. I'll get around to fixing that soon. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm really going off of memory here, so don't yell at me if I'm wrong ( ), but I think it's 255 characters. Try anything you want up to that length, and if you break your account for some reason, just let me know and I'll manually fix it for you. You won't do any permanent harm if you try something that long. If it lets you enter MORE than 255 characters, it should only store the first 255 of whatever entered. Hope that helps!

This was a bit of a mixup. There should not be a warning anymore, as I've reinstated SSL (secure) connections to the forum. Logins should be encrypted once again. For the more web admin-savvy users, here's the gist of the story. The maintenance caused an issue with the administrator panel, whereby enabling SSL would create an infinite redirect loop. Without the admin panel, I couldn't undo the setting even if I manually went into the database to toggle the setting back. I eventually had to reinstall the forum software and reimport all the data causing a lengthly downtime. So now we should have SSL working as before, the admin panel is working for me (hooray!) and the bug with resetting your password for the forum has been fixed. Apparently the reCAPTCHA form was not showing over SSL, so you could never bypass the CAPTCHA prompt. My apologies if users have tried to bring this up to me in the past and didn't specify that it was a forums issue. Typically I presume bug reports are related to the main site unless you specifically mention that it is a forums issue. At any rate, thanks for your patience. If you notice any issues, please post on the board or feel free to contact me via email.

This is a little off-topic, and maybe it deserves its own post, but my take on linking is that it is perfectly fine providing the below criteria are met: The link does not use FRS/GMRS/MURS/Ham frequencies as the linking channel (900 MHz, WiFi, ISM [where allowed] would be OK) The link is not over a telephone line (Part 95 rules refer to this as "interconnection to the Public Switched Telephone Network [PSTN]") There is no way to make autopatch phone calls (if you're using VoIP as the link technology, that's fine, but if someone can dial in or out using a real "public" phone number, that's NOT OK) Common sense is used: there should be some reason to link machines. Long distance links are fine in my opinion but if you have 5 repeaters all within earshot of one another, do they really all need to be linked? No, of course not. That's just cluttering the few GMRS repeater channels we do have.I know the FCC's opinion on this is still very nebulous. Some people take a pure approach and believe any linking is not allowed, and some believe that if it's not explicitly banned in black and white, then it's perfectly legal. I have played around with using Asterisk as a linking mechanism and I believe it's stable and secure enough to be used on GMRS provided the above conditions are met. If anyone has interest, I have set up a central Asterisk server and a web interface for monitoring the system here: https://link.mygmrs.com/stats/view/20042 I'd love to get more people on board as this has the potential to bring "responsible" linking of repeaters to GMRS without willfully violating any FCC rules.

I made an improvement to the load time of the icons. Rather than waiting for all the repeater details to return, I'm only returning the barebones info needed to render the map. When you click on a marker, the rest of the information such as the rules/description are fetched from the server on-demand. At least on my PC, I see a big improvement in how long it takes the map to initially render, but I'd like your feedback. In case you see any errors or strange behavior, try refreshing the page a few times (pro tip: if you know how to clear your browser's cache, please do so as this will ensure you have the latest version of the map available). More improvements will be on the way.

This would be the colorful "Bluecom" guys. Here's an old post regarding them: http://www.popularwireless.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002299.html

Long story short, I got fed up with waiting to get around to a whole site redesign. The site is so old it needs an update badly but I don't have the time required to redo the whole thing from scratch. So I took a shortcut for now, and updated the map feature. Over time I will add to this map, so you can filter the results to better suit the search you're interested in. The long-term goal is to turn the map into the whole website, you can search, view, contact owners, add repeaters, and update your profile from that one page. This will take some time, however, because I will need to update the backend server software that makes much of the magic happen (which will make the site many times faster). By focusing on the map first, I was able to get something out with a quick turnaround and you may see tweaks to it as I see areas of improvement. Feel free to provide feedback. The slowest part of the map loading process is the loading of repeaters because the server/database is the slowest piece generally. Since I haven't formally announced the new map and its features, here's a short list of what's new: Fullscreen map that makes browsing many times easier whether you're using a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.Mobile-ready HTML5 map page -- header collapses to a dropdown making navigation easier. Animations may be slow on mobile devices, but anything modern should work quite well. Fine tuning will happen over time.Map is completely rendered on the browser, the only dependency on the server is loading the repeater information from the databaseIf geolocation is supported and you allow mygmrs.com to access your location, the map will load centered on your current location so you'll see the repeaters in your immediate area, not the entire country. Right now, we do not store your location using GPS. We do use your IP Address to estimate the city and state you are located in for traffic reports. Any website using an analytics service is storing this rough location information about you and is not considered a privacy risk.Coverage circles are hidden by default (you're welcome California users), just click on a marker and the coverage circle, if available, will appear.Selected marker will bounce so you can see which one was selected, especially useful in a dense area where you may have clicked on one of several markers.Info window is much more refined, and shows more information about the repeater including description. If you are not logged in, you will not see the Frequency and Tone information, and a warning banner should appear on the bottom of the map asking you to log in if you'd like to see this information.Clicking on the repeater name in the info window popup will take you to the old-style repeater listing. Here you can report the listing or request permission from the owner to use the system as before. Eventually this will be available all from the new map. So just make sure you're logged in to the regular site before going to the map if you want to see Frequency and Tone info. Let me know if you have any positive or negative feedback!