rdunajewski

I use a Cradlepoint mobile hotspot on Verizon for 2 of my sites. Generally speaking, they're pretty bulletproof. The issue with using mobile Internet is that the cell companies block port forwarding, so you won't be able to accept incoming connections from other nodes or open up SSH access if you want remote access for yourself. However, you can use a VPN server with some fancy routing to get around the limitation, or you can add the Static IP privileges to your Verizon account (costs a one-time $500 and allows unlimited static IPs, I believe). One of my repeaters is using the static IP method, but I don't hold the account so I don't know every detail. It may only apply to business accounts, not sure. I do hear it's one-time and NOT per-IP). The only thing I recommend is that you have a way to reboot the Raspberry Pi remotely (i.e. via DTMF or if a ping to a server fails and a power outlet can be set to reset everything). It's rare, but once in a while I lose the VPN connection to my server and it won't reconnect automatically. Not all of my repeaters are nearby (one is in Florida), so I need backup methods to make sure I can reset everything if the normal connection fails. If you can easily get to your repeater site to fix something, then that's fine.

It's possible there's an issue on that particular hub. It was recently added so I'm not sure if something is up with it. Sometimes if you just power on your node the other nodes haven't had a chance to learn about your node, so when you attempt to connect they will reject you since you're not on the whitelist of registered nodes. Waiting 5-10 minutes at most will solve that issue since they will fetch the list of known repeaters and yours will then be on the list.

They didn't even ask me to pay, they just wanted me gone. Either they were upset they agreed to no rent and wanted to kick me out, or they saw the non-compete clause in the contract with the wireless companies and wanted to clean house. Either way, I ended up scoring a much better site with patience and hunting around. I'm on a 500' tower a few miles away now. There was a company who needed a new site to cover their customers so I found the site and piggy-backed on their combiner. It helps to know people in the industry, so I lucked out there. There were other issues where the person who granted me access to the site was on the board, and got approval from the president of the association, but the whole association didn't vote on it. So I think there was some bad blood between the members and I was the casualty. As far as the install, I had a local radio tech do the install since I live in NJ, and that way everything was done professionally and someone could be on-site with a day's notice to fix anything. We did a minimal install, small antenna, small wall-mount rack out of the way so it didn't bother anyone. He worked with the building maintenance guy to make sure everything was good. I also think the antenna drew the attention of the wireless companies because they figured that condo had contracts to lease the roof space already, so it'd be easier to talk to them than to start from scratch with another building.

Sounds like this was a Midwest net on Saturday, and not the regular regional or national net. That's run by the Midwest GMRS group, so I would mention it to them if there's a problem. I know the Midwest group has some nets throughout the week and the regional net is on Thursdays (whereas all the other regional nets in our network are on Sundays before the national net).

I was able to get free access to the top of a condo in Florida on the beach by mentioning that it would be perfect for emergency use and residents of the building could get a license and use it for free. I eventually lost the site because wireless companies were snooping around and wanting to kick any "competition" out, and the condo association was wondering why I was there rent-free when they had a paying tenant looking to come in. My mistake was not getting a contract or lease agreement with them. If I had that, they would have been able to tell the wireless companies tough, we already have an agreement and you'll have to deal with it. It can be an informal contract, just says why you're there, what you'll pay, and for the longest period of time you can negotiate at a time (so you're not having to renegotiate each year, for example).

You can run a NOAA weather alert from the node, it'll fetch high-priority alerts like tornado warnings and such, and announce them over the air.

I sell them on the store but I don't have any in-hand. I'm testing the waters and shipping them from Retevis directly but was just about to place an order for some stock. Sounds like I should play around with one and provide feedback to them before placing the order!

4G has many bands which vary by carrier. None are in the 400-500 MHz range of course, so it should be okay as long as harmonics don't pose an issue with one of the bands. Even so, that usually wouldn't be catastrophic to 4G as I believe multiple bands may be leveraged concurrently depending on the area.

Unfortunately, no. The database is synchronized with the FCC database so we can't go in and manually enable licenses. The FCC publishes a copy of their DB every week with updates given every day. However, these updates are always at least 1 day behind. Your license was issued yesterday, so it will either be in today's update or tomorrow's. So far, we have not received the Wednesday update.

I imposed this restriction for a few reasons: Depending on the skill level of the person wishing to join the network, it may take a lot of hand-holding to get them set up. Unfortunately a lot of people want something completely plug-and-play and that's impossible when you have different radios being used. If we allowed every individual to purchase a kit and had to spend time helping them get their audio levels right and open up the ports in their router, we'd have to charge way more money just to cover our support time. When you have hundreds of nodes trying to link together, you end up with problems with audio loops, poor audio quality, audio level problems, and too many people connecting and disconnecting during a net. This becomes very disruptive when nodes announce the connect and disconnect events, and this makes the net almost impossible to listen to. It goes against the spirit of GMRS and two-way radio in general. If you want to just sit at home and listen to the network, you don't need to use GMRS as an RF link. You'd be better off using a bluetooth speakerphone to your PC or just listen on your phone. I personally don't believe GMRS is meant as a personal hotspot service. Use the RF to cover a wide area, more than just your house. When it comes to expending the least amount of effort for the most amount of return, the best option is to prioritize high-level repeater systems for joining the network. If we have to spend an hour tuning audio for someone and their repeater covers maybe 50 users, that is much more efficient than having to spend 50 hours of effort to get the same people on the air each with their personal "hotspots". If the goal is to sell as many linking bundles as possible, then we'd want to allow simplex nodes on the network. However the goal is to build a robust network, and we really sell the bundles at-cost so we can easily add more repeaters to the network.

There is no forum access via the app. The Tapatalk app should be able to be used with this forum, however, plus there is a mobile web version of these forums when used on a mobile device.

Hey John, can you PM me the info as well? I had both but I think you've changed PLs over time. You can list the repeater as Member's Only so people know it's private.

Welcome! 1) The Midland radios have the ability to enable the 8 extra channels for repeater use. These will transmit on 467.xxx MHz and receive on 462.xxx MHz, whereas the simplex (direct) channels will transmit and receive on the same 462.xxx MHz frequency. In addition to the frequency a repeater transmits, there is also the CTCSS tone (also known as PL tone) which allows a repeater to selectively repeat transmissions from one group of users when others may be on the same shared frequency. On more advanced radios, you would set up a channel for each repeater in the radio's memory, where they would each be one of the 8 repeater channels (i.e. 462.550 MHz), but the CTCSS tone would vary for each repeater. On the Midlands, you need to manually change the tone to use a different repeater. So in the example above, you'd tune to channel 15R (repeater channel) and set the tone in the menu to whatever the local repeater on Channel 15 (462.550) requires. If you go to a new area where there is another repeater also on 462.550, you would stay on Channel 15 but change the tone to whatever that new repeater uses. 2) A repeater will extend the range a single radios has by many miles, depending on the height of the repeater in elevation. If two radios are nearby but suddenly cannot communicate due to the terrain or distance, a nearby repeater located in a tall spot (a tower, a tall building, or a mountain top) will allow those radios to communicate by retransmitting the signal at higher power and at a higher location. UHF frequencies are almost line-of-sight, where two stations can communicate if there is an unobstructed view between antennas. By putting the repeater antenna high up, it will be able to "see" a much larger area and thus extend the mobile units' coverage over the greater area it can "see" from its height. So a radio with a 1 mile range can suddenly get 15-30 mile range if there is a repeater in a good spot high above the average terrain height by having the repeater retransmit its signal at a higher power and elevation. Repeaters have a limit to their range based on this elevation, as the visual horizon distance changes with regard to height above the ground. Since the Earth is curved (flat-earthers will be disappointed), the further away you go from a station, you begin to curve below the horizon and eventually the Earth itself will block the signal. The only way around that is more height, and that's how satellites can have such wide coverage. They are essentially a repeater at an extreme altitude and thus they have visual line-of-sight to a much, much larger area than a tower on the ground could ever have.

Just a caution to be civil here. This thread has the potential to get political fast, and that's not okay here. For casual listening to the protesters, I have no issue with sharing that information. I do have a problem with using that information for nefarious purposes, however. Just like how it's okay to share information for monitoring police and the military within the confines of the law, but once you try to use it for nefarious purposes that goes out the window and becomes a problem here.

Travel Tone is when a repeater enables 141.3 Hz as an open tone for travelers to use when in the area. For example, you could tune your radio to each GMRS repeater channel with 141.3 as your tone, and the repeaters with a Travel Tone are open for temporary use without permission. Good for when you don't have time to program each repeater along your route. ORI stands for the Open Repeater Initiative which was created by Popular Wireless many years ago. It was a way to indicate a repeater is open for any licensed GMRS operator to use without having to ask the owner's permission. These repeaters you can just jump on and use as long as you follow GMRS rules and use your callsign.

Originally "Handie-Talkie" from the old Motorola terminology for a handheld radio (I believe they were the first to have one that "fit" in your hand, so they coined the term). Now HT is more of just a quick abbreviation for a handheld radio in general, many of us aren't thinking of "Handie-Talkie" unless we're REALLLLLY old.

CCR is a common one for "Cheap Chinese Radio" which includes Baofengs, Wouxuns, and such. I think having a list would be good!

For now, yes. We don't want simplex nodes right now because: 1. It kind of goes against the spirit of radio. If you're using a simplex node to just cover your house to talk over the Internet, you don't really need GMRS to do that. 2. Having one node per person adds a lot of complexity and load to the network. It's a lot more that can go wrong and then you have audio issues, announcements or IDs going off, and people connecting and disconnecting a lot. 3. We (mostly me) don't have the time to hold everyone's hand and set them up with a personal node. There's still a steep learning curve to setting up a node if you've never used Asterisk before, and it requires some comfort with running Linux commands. A lot of people don't have that experience and we just can't spend hours on each person for free setting them up. It's much easier to spend time on a single node that is on a repeater with good coverage so you're potentially linking many people together and not just one at his house. We're more interested in covering as many people as possible with as few nodes as possible to keep the overall quality of the network up and minimize problems. Lately we've started to have some growing pains during the National Net where the nodes aren't all cooperating, and trying to fix things with potentially hundreds of new nodes would just be a nightmare. Zello is one avenue I've explored as a way to tie into the network. Zello is a great app but it has several issues that make it hard to adapt to our network. Zello sends the audio to their central servers, then forwards on to the recipient in a non-realtime manner. This is great for ensuring the message got to the recipient and is fairly clear, but there is latency introduced in sending the audio to the client particularly on a poor connection. The problem is people end up doubling over one another. It's still a possibility but it would probably be a single node that people can choose to connect to, rather than many nodes.

Where were you when you heard it? I see you're also from NJ like WRAK968 and I. You may have been hearing his Little Egg Harbor machine or my Mercer County machine. We're working on one in Woodbury Heights as well. It's a network of over 50 repeaters across the US linked via Internet. Everyone is welcome, you just need to be in range of a repeater that is linked into the network.

I seem to think Retevis has a type-accepted intercom very similar to the one WRAK968 posted. I was digging through the OET site and found it. If I have time I'll go look it up and post it here.

I see that your callsign is in our system now. You should be able to register. We screen the guest forum posts so we don't have a bunch of spam show up.

CQ CQ CQ DX NJ

I've seen shady radio shops set people up on FRS/GMRS frequencies illegally, if this is a random repeater you've found and not one you know personally. My favorite was a FedEx hub operating a repeater on the FRS frequencies with a range of like 15 miles or more to cover their warehouse. F-bombs day and night constantly, just shocking crap you'd hear. They thought they had a private channel, meanwhile they were splattering all over FRS. Needless to say the FCC paid them a visit and got them on business band literally overnight. They had a STA grant the very next day for a business pair and their FRS repeater went silent. Not sure if they were fined, but the visit was effective.

And here's a link to our repeater network map: https://mygmrs.network/map

Hey David, Welcome! You were most likely hearing the Bronx Zoo repeater in NYC. We run a network of repeaters which use Internet for linking them together. Every Sunday we hold a National GMRS Net with a given topic, and everyone who is checked-in is welcome to briefly have the floor in a round-table discussion. We stream our nets live on YouTube, and we also have most of our previous nets available on YouTube. The net grew to be pretty popular and it was taking over two hours most nights to get to everyone. Starting last week, we changed up how the net works so check-ins are handled in advance and we can jump right into discussion to shorten the length of the net considerably. Anyone with a valid GMRS license is allowed to participate, there are no membership requirements. You will need a repeater-capable radio (which the FRS radios you were listening on are not capable of), and a GMRS license. A license costs $70 and covers you and your immediate family for 10 years, making it a great option for backup emergency communications. If you're not familiar, a repeater is typically placed on a tower, building, or other tall place and contains a transmitter and receiver to boost the signals from handheld and mobile radios to increase the coverage range. By linking them together, you can get even further range which is how you're hearing people from across the country. To get a GMRS license if you're interested, you can follow the instructions posted here: https://beta.mygmrs.com/help/get-gmrs-license We also sell repeater-capable radios through our shop: https://shop.mygmrs.com/collections/repeater-capable