SteveH

I'm running about 40 watts into 30 ft. of RG-213. (Shack is on the 2nd floor of our house.) The antenna is a Comet commercial antenna with 9dBi gain. I could probably get the antenna up another 10 ft or so (it's about 25-28 ft now) but I was impatient and didn't want to wait for assistance. I run a BPQ32 BBS with ports on HF and 6 meters. Now that was a learning curve! The GMRS repeater will hopefully give some local non-ham friends a way of staying in touch with family w/o commercial infrastructure. Steve

I just got my first GMRS repeater on the air yesterday. It's listed in the directory as Ballyhac Cove and it's located at my home in Owl's Head, ME. The intent is to have a repeater that will cover the immediate area which includes Owl's Head (of course), Rockland and Thomaston to the north and the small towns south of us on the peninsula. Crossing fingers I went out today with a mobile rig in the car and my wife Chris on a HT at the house. I headed north through the Owl's Head village and then up to Rockland downtown, then south on Rt. 1 to Thomaston and then looped back along the St. George River. I could hear the repeater very well except for a couple of dead spots around buildings in Rockland. Chris had more dead air and crackling, probably more related to my cheapie mobile antenna than anything else. The center of the village was also pretty dead but you can't get cell phone reception there either. Obviously having the repeater at my house (which is on the shore of Ballyhac Cove) instead of on a high spot is not helping anything but my goals are modest too, at least for now. I do have a question regarding a glitch when I posted the info on the repeater. Owl's Head properly has the apostrophe in the name. When I entered it on the page with the map, it comes out on the graphic on the page as Owl/'s Head with a slash before the apostrophe. Any way of getting rid of that without dropping the apostrophe? Steve WQQB941/KB1TCE

I've purchased a few Motorola GM300 radios off of eBay. These are 25 or 40 watt mobiles and have 8-16 channels. Best auction prices seem to run in the $40-$65 range depending upon accessories included. Some sellers will program for free. There is a freeware called RadioDoctor that can program the GM300s and I'm setting up that software now. Crossing fingers. Steve

Interesting. Didn't know any of these radios were repeater capable. Steve

And another Welcome to the Forum also. I am also new to GMRS but trying to learn the ins and outs. Typical "bubble pack" radios always (or at least usually) don't have the capability to key a repeater as you have to program in the Rx/Tx offset (the radio transmits on one frequency then shifts to another for receive). The bubble pack radios only transmit and receive on the same frequency (simplex). However, nothing (except propagation) will prevent you from listening to a repeater. Steve

I'm using Firefox on two computers, one is a WinXP the other is running Linux Ubuntu. No issues with the tool. Steve

I presume you are referring to the installer that gives you everything. It does make it a lot easier to work with. Steve

Antenna's a Comet CA-712EFC, 9 dBi. Steve

Thanks John. I had looked at both the ERS 650 and 575 threads but 1) I missed the changes you made to the default field strength settings and 2) I didn't read far enough to see your explanation. Duh. Thanks for repeating it here. Below is the plot I showed above but with the adjusted field strength ranges. Antenna is a 9 dB Comet, knocked down a couple for losses. Steve http://belljar.net/OH_Coverage_2.jpg

I have a couple of Dakota Alert base station radios. One is currently at my brother-in-law's place, across the cove about 2 miles from here. The radios put out a full 2 watts per my meter. I can cover our little town pretty well with an outside j-pole antenna. Since I do a lot of digital stuff on the ham bands, an appealing feature of MURS is that you can do digital modes. I just audio couple between the PC and radio's speakers & microphones. If I read the rules correctly, you can also encrypt. The telemetry units that use MURS (e.g. http://www.raveon.com/rv_m3_m.html) used encrypted digital transmissions. In our area, there is almost no MURS traffic (and not a whole lot more GMRS). Steve

Thanks Jeremy.

The battery of the GU-16 is interchangeable with the battery on my KG-UV6D. Part number is the same - 1A17KG-3. As for Part 97/Part 95, we (hams) repurpose Part 15 WiFi gear all the time for Part 97 use (e.g. HSMM) where Part 15 routers, access points etc. are run on the ham 2.4 GHz channels with higher power than permitted with Part 15.

I programmed it for 446.000 MHz and it worked. I'm not sure how wideband the ducky is. Now for the Part 97 on a Part 95 radio debate! Steve

I purchased one a few weeks ago from Powerwerx. The standard Wouxun cable works with it and the Powerwerx site has the GU-16 software. I did try CHIRP with it using the software for other Wouxun HTs but those did not work. However, I was also messing with the com ports (forgot which USB port I had used before) so that info might be bogus. Powerwerx programs it with the simplex channels but has PL tones for 2-8. The repeater channels likewise have PL tones. I modified all of these with ease. Besides the "official" Part 95 cert, this radio is nice for people who don't know radios that well and tend to mess up the programming by hitting random keys. I recently programmed 3 Baofengs and within 2 days I had to reprogram two of them because the owners had hit keys they shouldn't have. Steve

I am new to GMRS and basically a novice in UHF in general. My ham life has pretty much consisted of using 2 meter repeaters plus (to a much greater extent) HF and 6 meter voice and digital. I am thinking about setting up one or two GMRS repeaters to provide service to some areas along the midcoast of Maine. At least initially I want to avoid the bureaucratic hassle of trying to locate the repeaters on commercial towers. So, our group is looking at who amongst us has houses that are in somewhat favorable (from a coverage perspective) locations. For example, although I am basically at sea level on the coast, it does appear that I can give good coverage to most of the nearby towns as well as possibly to some of the nearby islands. This all brings up the use of coverage prediction software and the proper application of those tools. I am coming up the learning curve with Radio Mobile but it looks like many of the people here use the online calculator that's at http://lrcov.crc.ca/. Compared with Radio Mobile, this one is very easy to use, at least for first order coverage estimates. Radio Mobile allows you to provide a pretty complete profile for all stations in the network as required to complete the full two-way picture whereas the online tool only gives estimates of field strength around the transmitter. That said, I'm curious as to what tools the people here are using and, especially for the online tool, how you evaluate the 3 default field strength ranges (45-60, 60-75, 75-100 dBuV/m) to actual useful coverage for mobile and fixed users. Also, anything else in your experience that relates these tools to real life. Below is a sample plot using the online tool. http://belljar.net/OH_Coverage.jpg Thanks, Steve