rdunajewski

You want less for the same price? ?

Be careful what you wish for.

Hi Steve, Thanks for the suggestion! I was kicking around the idea of a way to allow users to support by going ad-free for a little less per year, but without the extra features just like you describe. I will mull it over but I'm interested in feedback from other members.

Please see the above post we just shared regarding this topic.

As some of you may know, we have been trying to get myGMRS integrated into CHIRP, a popular open-source radio programming software created by Dan Smith, for several years now. I finally heard back from Dan in December and shared our API (Application Programming Interface) resources to him and test credentials for the website. Given that this was a new feature and a big convenience to users, we wanted to offer it as a perk to Premium Members of the website who support our efforts to be the go-to GMRS community. Dan expressed concerns about having any paid services such as RadioReference.com in his application, because developers would be unable to test unless they had a membership at the website. We agreed to table the discussion until we had a solution for developers to test the myGMRS integration, and he implemented the new feature into CHIRP-next, the next generation of the CHIRP application. Dan released a version of CHIRP-next on December 24th with myGMRS integrated into it. Yesterday, I sent Dan an email letting him know what changes to expect to the API once I require accounts to have a Premium Membership to download repeaters through CHIRP, so he had time to make the required changes to show the appropriate error message rather than a cryptic "Got error code 403 from server" message. Long story short and omitting the gory details, Dan decided it was best to completely remove the myGMRS integration that he had finally added, rather than work with us on how to reach an amicable agreement that makes everyone happy. We offered several solutions to provide developers with Premium Membership so they could test the feature, eliminating the concern from Dan. We are surprised by this but respect his wishes, even though it hurts the GMRS community which utilizes his product for GMRS and/or Amateur Radio. Understandably, I know many people will wonder why this wasn't just a free feature and that be the end of it. However, myGMRS is a small business and it needs to be profitable to survive. myGMRS is a one-person operation (not withstanding all the amazing members who contribute the repeater listings and forum posts) and it takes considerable resources to just to keep the lights on with there being so many users. Since the founding of RepeaterFinder, LLC, the corporate entity behind myGMRS, I have not taken a salary. We intentionally minimize the number of advertisements we show because we hate ads too, but they alone don't cover the cost of running the website for nearly 50,000 users. Very few members have been kind enough to support us by subscribing to a Premium membership, so we're always looking for new perks to add for Premium Members to draw more people to sign up. To those who do support us, I sincerely thank you! If you'd like to utilize the myGMRS lookup feature and are a Premium Member, you can download the last working version of CHIRP-next from 01/09/2023 here: https://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_next/next-20230109/ If you receive "Got error code 403 from server" when trying to authenticate to myGMRS, it means you do not have an active subscription and you can subscribe by going here: https://mygmrs.com/profile/subscriptions You can see the commit notes from Dan regarding the removal here: https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/repository/github/revisions/12301814e238458766f1f7bf06476b39a4e3ab93 Here's the original ticket tracking the feature request: https://chirp.danplanet.com/issues/9169 Thank you for understanding!

Please check your call sign format. It should be four letters followed by three digits.

That would be great if their API didn't take multiple seconds to return a response. The local database option is the best option currently.

There seems to be a lot of licenses held up by the FCC. They did have an outage recently but we probably won't see the new licenses until after the Sunday full database gets released. The daily files are missing some records but the weekly file resyncs the whole database.

https://community.allstarlink.org/t/allmon2-monitor-vs-local-monitor/13074 Monitor causes other nodes that you are linked to to also hear the received traffic, but Local Monitor only lets your node hear the received traffic.

Even worse than losing one customer, they lost a partner who was bringing them business from multiple customers. It's really sad, but their loss will be someone else's gain.

Many people lately are asking to change their myGMRS username from their callsign. Seems that they think this is providing some kind of extra security, but it really isn't. Any site user can easily look up a username to see the associated GMRS callsign or vice versa, so picking a different username provides no extra security. I've been using the PO Box method for many years now, and it's really the best way to go if you're concerned about your home address being visible. However, as others have mentioned, you might want to Google your name first and see all the websites that publish a copy of your public records such as your property records and phone numbers. These websites are much more dangerous, and you should go to each one and request they remove your information. There's usually a "Do Not Sell My Information" link in the footer of the website and you can fill out a form to have the information purged. It'll be available for a while in Google, but eventually it'll be gone (notwithstanding websites or people that already grabbed the information). And if you're worried about the Federal government using any of these tools to "find you", you've been living in a hole. If they really wanted to know, they could know which room of your house you're currently in and all your dirty secrets from over the years. Unless you're living off the grid with no technology, you're very easy to find. So try to be a little more rational.

As the shop owner, I wanted to follow up on what happened on this scenario. We used Tessco for shipping the CommScope base station antennas rather than taking on inventory of these antennas. They are very large, and the freight is very expensive, so it doesn't make sense to ship them to us, have to store them, then ship them again to the customer. You may be familiar with this as being called "drop shipping" where the item gets shipped directly to the customer. In this customer's case, we received his order and sent the information to our sales rep at Tessco. Days went by, and we never heard confirmation that they received the order and couldn't reach the rep. I tried to find a regional manager to contact, but still couldn't get ahold of anyone. Now being a week later, I escalated to their generic sales and support team, and explained the issue. They replied with the retail cost of the item, and a shipping charge of about $700. If we placed the order, we would have lost about $400 due to the super-high shipping quote and the non-discounted cost of the antenna that we already had negotiated with a sales manager in the past. So unfortunately, we had to cancel the order and refund the customer. I sent a message to him apologizing and explaining the scenario above to show why we couldn't fulfill this order, because of course it looks unprofessional if you don't understand the details of what happened. Needless to say, I pulled all products that we ship from Tessco and informed them I was done with their company do to this colossal issue. Almost a month later, none of the people I reached out to ever contacted me except their main support rep. Never again.

I updated the last modified time for the repeater so that it shows as fresh again. Eventually there will be a better method for reporting dead or working repeaters so we don't rely on when the repeater was last updated to determine if it's stale or not.

At this time, we do not. We only support repeaters that are directly connected to a node or via a link radio. Simplex nodes will add a whole new level of confusion and complexity for the users, and each node would typically only benefit one user. It makes more sense for us to devote our time and effort toward repeaters which generally cover more people.

Hi Tim, When you say you're having trouble transmitting, what exactly are you referring to? Are you using a radio trying to get the repeater to transmit? Or the repeater itself is unable to transmit to other radios? Bridgecom has a document that explains how to set up the repeater to connect to an external controller: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0833/9095/files/Interfacing_the_BCR_Repeater_to_Amateur_Radio_Controllers.pdf?7143532249708900618 Our cables follow the same pinout as the MV-1 from Bridgecom: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0833/9095/files/BCR_Repeater_to_URI.pdf?7576387813378094434 It depends if you have the repeater set up to act as an independent receiver and transmitter, which requires the Raspberry Pi to cause the transmitter to key up when a suitable RX signal is detected, or if you're letting the repeater function as a standalone repeater and the Pi will only key it up when there is traffic coming from the network side. Most likely you will need to adjust the SimpleUSB settings to match the repeater settings. The file can be found at /etc/asterisk/simpleusb.conf. You can edit the file with "sudo nano /etc/asterisk/simpleusb.conf", and use CTRL + O to save the file, and CTRL + X to edit the nano editor. I recommend backing up the files before changing them in case you make a mistake and can't figure out how to revert back. If you have the original files, you can replace any broken files and get back to where you left off.

New clubs have to be approved but I usually approve them within an hour or so of creating them. Maybe the club hadn't been approved just yet. You should be able to invite a member to a closed group with no issue.

Hi Robert. Your GMRS license is now in our system. You can now register at: https://mygmrs.com/register https://mygmrs.com/license/WRPL668

You can find the Clubs feature here since it's part of the Forum software: https://forums.mygmrs.com/clubs/ You can join an existing club or, since you're a Premium Member, you can create your own club listing. Just click on the "Start a Club" button on the upper right side of the clubs page. You can create a free or paid club listing depending on the type of club you have or want to create. As far as the charge, we don't offer a free trial, we only offer 2 free months if you purchase an annual subscription over a monthly subscription. You're charged the $5 or $50 (depending on monthly or yearly term) immediately at signup and your privileges are granted right away. The website was recently redesigned so there are some improvements that still need to be made, so that's why it's not a completely smooth experience right now.

Hi WROY767, It looks like you signed up as a Premium Member and have the upgraded account on the main myGMRS.com and here on the forums. Looks like you're all set up.

No, this is not right. The only thing that we charge for on the forums is if you join a GMRS club that has a membership fee. There is no charge to create a forum account or a regular myGMRS account. Please be careful that you're not being scammed by someone or visiting the wrong website.

I created it and deleted it just to see if there was an obvious error, so by the time you went to verify the email, the test account was deleted. If you can't get through the issue I'll create an account with your callsign as the username for now.

Hi Rich, I had no trouble creating a test account with your info. Could you please reach out to me via the Contact Us form with the following information (since the forum isn't private): - The email address you tried to use - The username you tried to use - Any error messages you may have seen https://mygmrs.com/contact Thanks!

Yes, it looks like it should be in tomorrow's update.

Hi Bill, What is your GMRS callsign? It can take 24-48 hours after the Grant Date listed on your license before our system can see the license data. The FCC database updates are always a day or two behind what the actual website shows.

"If you build it, they will pay." - Anonymous Who knows, we might also include the frame!