RayP

Great idea! There used to be a company that made such antennas for VHF and UHF ham applications. I believe their name was Ventenna, or something like that. If they are still in business, surely they could be persuaded to make a GMRS version. Edit: Sorry. I just read elsewhere that the gentleman who owned Ventenna retired and closed up.

I was not aware they had expanded the channel capacity of the 500 by that much. I stand corrected on that. Thank You!

...

I have long suspected that Midland GMRS design engineers suffer from some form of arrested development. So many things, they missed the boat on. With regard to ht's that are promoted for use in the wilderness (also their Base Camp radio), they have woefully deficient battery capacity. I believe most of their ht's are packed standard with something like a whopping 700mAh battery. Additionally, and as far as I know, none of the Midland ht's are repeater capable, yet they promote use of their ht's and repeaters (along with mobiles) for farm and agriculture use. The mobile designs also are a mixed bag of weirdness. Some mobiles may only do narrowband FM while others are capable of narrowband and wideband on GMRS. Some of the smaller mobiles may not allow for different encode/decode CTCSS/DCS tones on repeaters that use differing encode and decode tones. The biggest issue with their mobiles that I see is they do not allow for programming additional repeater or simplex channels above the standard 22, 23, or whatever they come packed with. This means if you regularly travel into and out of areas where the repeaters might use the same frequency, say 462.675, and one repeater uses a 141.3 PL and the other uses a 67.0 PL, you will need to pull over and change PL's when driving out of one repeater's coverage area and into the coverage are of the other. Midland lamely tries to excuse this deficiency in design by saying they are making their radios simple to use for those who just want to hook up their radio and talk. Never mind that as you gain knowledge and/or benefit from the experience and wisdom of friends, you will likely want to expand the capabilities of your mobile radios. If your radio doesn't allow for such expansion, you are just out of luck. None of the Midland GMRS mobiles include a cooling fan, something you will quickly understand the need for if making multiple key down transmissions in a short time or extended transmissions. As WRYX926 correctly noted above, you will get a much better bang for your buck with a KG1000G or KG1000G+.

With growing children, a small attic antenna (provided you aren't using a metallic roof) hooked to a repeater might be great for your family, or other friends in the neighborhood to use. Something like the low-power (5-10 watt) Midland or similar repeater would allow for decent portable-to-portable coverage around the neighborhood, especially with something like the tiny WLN KDC1 ht's. Yeah, they technically are ham radios but I "hear" they work great on GMRS freqs if programmed for that. Of course I have no actual experience using them for such.

A few months ago, watching this Mr Ballen YouTube video, I couldn't help but wonder if a ham, CB, or GMRS, radio in their car would have gotten this family help much sooner. Ideally, they would have had all three but even a CB or 2m ham mobile might have made the difference and the husband and father might be alive had they been in possession of something other than their cell phones. A firearm would have provided additional comfort given the interest that bears were showing the family in their unenviable situation, but this was the West Coast and they were from California, areas where the government keeps citizens generally disarmed.

Not sure as I have never owned or used an 805G.

Sorry. I forgot that you believe all ideas and concepts can or should be adequately explained in 15 words or less, much like the original form of Twitter.

It was usually one or two tones out of a template that I was putting together in a radio out of about 60-80 channels. Not a lot, but enough to be annoying because of the problem. My guess is, not very many people program much if any beyond the thirty channels these radios come packed with. Those people use standard tones of 156.7 or below and rarely use DPL. This allows the problem to go undiscovered and un-reported or under-reported. I seriously doubt that I am the only one who has noticed this issue. I wish anyone ele who has would chime in.

True, but I have noted issues with the 905G (four individual radios), the 935G (one radio), the 935G+(one radio), and the S88G (one radio). Every 905 I had, exhibited the problem. Two were gifts for friends who I did not get a chance to pass them on to for a couple of years after purchasing them. The day before I knew I would be seeing these friends, I programmed them with a collection of area repeater channels and some PL'd simplex channels I had put in for off-road or on-property use. In testing them, some (but not most) PL codes would not decode between these two radios. Some PL's (pulling 250.3 out of the air) might allow one radio to encode and be decoded by the other, but the reverse was not true. I generally like Wouxun over the other GMRS specific brands, but they need to tighten up on QC regarding PL/DPL encoding and/or decoding of their radio models.

Well, actually, it can be and is. Many do not grasp what PL/DPL (hereafter shortened to just PL) can do to enhance the radio experience. To many (most maybe), PL is just an annoying selection you have to make in your radio's menu or on the programming software, so a given repeater opens up when you transmit. They don't grasp how helpful it can be (provided it works properly in your radio and the radio you are talking to or repeater you are using). Let's say you regularly use a repeater on 462/467.675 that uses a 141.3 PL. You monitor on your home base, mobile, or ht much of the day as do family and friends of yours for calls from each other. You also transact business on the phone, watch TV, listen to broadcast radio, and interact with others in person. Another repeater at a distance on the same frequency but using a 67.0 PL generates a lot of noise and traffic during the day, too. Being able to set your PL decoder so you only hear the repeater your family and friends use makes the whole experience of listening for them more enjoyable and less annoying when engaged in other activities. The same can be said for keeping out other noise sources such as kids or construction workers on the channel nearby, or computer noise, and other stuff that the carrier squelch in your radio just is not screening out very well. This is one of the reasons it is so annoying that some people go to the trouble and expense of setting up a repeater (whether open system or for a limited group), yet somehow just never had that extra thirty seconds it would have taken them to set a PL tone encoding on the output. This forces end-users to have to listen to every bit of noise from whatever source, in range of their receivers. In a downtown big city, there are endless sources of noise that will regularly break through a carrier squelch and become like Chinese water torture to your ears after a while, especially if your radio is direct conversion, like a KG-935G or KG935G+. A PL module that works properly is a real ear and sanity saver. Yes, it is a major issue for some.

Hi Sshannon! They aren't. If there is one thing in radio that I have an intimate working knowledge of, it is PL's. I suspect many do not discover a problem because they don't set the decoders, to begin with. The problems I have experienced with Wouxun GMRS radios, pretty much across the board can, as I noted earlier, seem to even vary with the day of the week, leading me to believe there may be an inconsistency somewhere.

If you are within the warranty, you are probably good to go. If outside the warranty, you are SOL. These radios are a "rig on a chip" and from what one of their guys told me, not much of anything can be done in the way of adjustments. This is why I mention checking before it goes out of warranty.

Au contraire. The first time I saw it mentioned was a few years ago, from a commenter on one of your vids.

Absent some expensive test equipment, you will need to check the tones against another radio or other radios, or against a repeater known to be encoding and decoding certain tones. I had a 905G that would not decode a local Motorola repeater's output tone of 210.7. There were other tones I discovered by accident that would not encode and/or decode with another radio of the same model, when only a few yards apart. I forget which tones. I have seen one or two comments from viewers on Randy's YT channel regarding this issue a few years ago. I asked the poster for details but never got a reply. Then I had radios that exhibited this undesirable tendency. Recently, I was testing simplex range between a friend's KG1000G+ and my own S88. We were using a 245 DPL. I had set the DPL in both radios and later double checked to ensure that I had not put in the wrong tone on one or a reverse tone. I had not. We were on simplex with varying signal strength between very good and very poor as I drove down the road. For whatever reason, when he transmitted on that simplex channel (between 1 and 7, I forget which), he would not open my decoder. I had to hit my monitor button to hear him. This is a real issue, despite apparent lack of reporting of same.

PL is the same thing as CTCSS.

Congratulations on the new radio! I had a couple of the 905's as well as 935's and a S88. While Wouxun overall is superior to Midland, B-Tech, and similar brands, one place I have found where they seriously drop the ball is their PL/DPL encoding and decoding. I have had issues with all models I own(ed) with regard to PL/DPL encoding and decoding. It seems to be different tones or codes based on the particular radio and maybe even the day of the week. I would recommend checking the tones against repeaters or known simplex operations in your area. If you find a problem, contact Buy Two Way Radios ASAP and make them aware of it. If you wait till after the warranty expires, you will be SOL. I hope at some point Wouxun finds it in their hearts to remedy the issues with their PL/DPL encoders and decoders. Best of luck to you!

Also, other repeaters are not the only possible victims of interference from a linked system where distant stations cannot monitor local outputs for traffic. Simplex operators on those eight 50W simplex/repeater channels can also negatively be impacted.

Not sure what others' motivation is, but I just got kinda tired of ham. Most of the interesting guys either died off or otherwise ceased operating. Then there was a population explosion of what Not A Rubicon excellently dubbed "sad hams" that I just lost my tolerance for. When the interesting guys were talking, and you were enjoying listening to their all-too-rare in ham interesting QSO, the needy sad hams would break into their conversation "just to say hi" or to tell one of the guys he just worked Brazil on 20m, or maybe he worked Germany on 40m, or share some equally useless and unwanted bit of information such as he just bought himself a new $8K radio. For some, on that last item we would be glad for them, but this guy is Mr Gotrocks and loves to brag, brag, brag, all the time. By the time he got off of the radio, the guys having the interesting conversation had lost their place and were sidetracked for the rest of the day, or night. A couple of them do this like clockwork as though destruction of an interesting QSO were an aspect of the hobby for them. Then there is the camaraderie! The GMRS guys I know, when we get together like at our monthly meet-n-greets, the friendship is genuine. You feel like you are with family. It's actual fellowship rather than everybody trying to measure and see whose is biggest. Another thing I prefer about GMRS over ham, we meet at different restaurants, in differing nearby towns each month. We have never met in a Gun Free Zone, the places statistically most likely to be hit by an active shooter terrorist. The ham groups I know of in a 50mi radius, they just cannot help themselves. Every place they find to meet is a Gun Free Zone under state law. Schools, churches, court houses, hospitals, government, buildings... I get regular invites to attend the ham gatherings but prefer to pass on them. There are other hams in our group, but they are some of the good hams not the sad ones. I can't speak for the guys you note getting on GMRS more than ham, but maybe they have similar reasons to mine. Oh, I do keep ham gear in case it is needed. I just don't use it a whole lot as of late.

Okay.

If only GMRS ops would adopt trendier-looking traffic vests and hard hats, they would get a bigger response

Not sure. I know some years back, Kenwood made a dual band (VHF/UHF) mobile for ham that had a feature similar to what you describe. I think it was the TMV71A. I had one and I believe the feature was called "Reverse PL" or similar. I played with it out of curiosity but was underwhelmed by its performance in actual use. You could set it to "silence" a repeater using say, a 162.2 Hz tone, but it wasn't completely silenced, as I recall. The station transmitting the tone selected for "silencing" would occasionally open the squelch for brief periods of time. It did not offer the quiet that a properly-working PL or DPL does against a station not transmitting the selected PL or DPL did. In other words, with my specimen, the technology had not yet been perfected.

Sorry, but I must disagree. Given the original intent of Class A Citizens Band/GMRS radio, of facilitating reliable local area communications between family and friends, linking is neither normal nor expected in this radio service. In areas with cellular dead spots, or where people may wish to have backup comms for the possibility of a cellular outage, a well-engineered and fortuitously located stand-alone repeater can be a real blessing to the community, county, or larger area that it provides coverage to. A cellular outage lasting a few hours could create a minor panic if a family member were not heard from in some time when they normally call or "check in" by a given time each day. Likewise, emergencies such as severe weather, missing persons where a community fields volunteers to search an area, etc, could be well served by such a repeater. Linking to other repeaters outside of your area, especially across the state or across the nation provides no practical or necessary comms for your local area. Instead, more often than not, they jam up one or more of the only eight repeater/50W simplex channels with inane and pointless chatter from other areas which have little or no bearing or interest to your local area. Frequently, chatter on only one or maybe two of the linked repeaters, ties up multiple repeaters and frequency pairs unnecessarily, hampering efforts to use the remaining repeaters in their local area, or just someone wanting to use 50W simplex to communicate locally, only to be washed out by the linked repeaters. The only real purpose I have seen in linking to distant repeaters and networks is to give the repeater owner doing the linking a level of Freudian "compensation", as they imagine the masses gathering to admire how far theirs can reach. In reality, most who are not newbies are not impressed. The technology used in linking is the same technology that allows most cell phones to make long distance calls. If you really get your jollies talking long distance over a commonplace network, call a friend or relative in another state. If you have no friends or relatives in another state, call a motel desk clerk elsewhere and ask them questions about their rates. You have just achieved the same exact thing as you do talking to or listening to a bunch of ratchetjaws many states away on a GMRS linked system, but without jamming scarce spectrum. If you really want to do VOIP DX, talk with the nice man or woman in India who calls to help you get a better rate on your credit card, next time they call. YEEEE HAW! IF that still leaves you dissatisfied, do the minimal studying required to get your Technician Class ham license and put up or utilize one of the many VHF/UHF networks there. While the linking there is annoying too, they at least have a lot more pairs (than our GMRS eight) to do these networks on.

Thank You! I found the other thread!

Can you tell us more? Sounds great!