Blaise

Wait. This is a thing?!?!? How would that work? Do you stick it out the top, off the side, or what?

WHATISGOINGONHEREIDONTUNDERSTAND

There once was a man named Roger Beep He got accosted by a radio creep Told him to leave, like a good little sheep 'Cause his presence made the weenies weep!

this message has been disregarded

I literally just got off a cruise (Royal Caribbean). The boarding security took out my GMRS HT's, turned them on and off to make sure they weren't bombs, and handed them back to me. I'm sure you'll be fine! FYI, Greece, Italy, and Montenegro apparently couldn't care less, either...

As far as *I* can see, it's turned into a ghost town...

I absolutely think we need more repeaters. I'd have put my own up already, but for the fact that once I got out the topo maps and found the best place within thirty mile, I discovered that a) the whole hilltop is owned by the water company, b) it has a large water tower on it that's already covered with ham repeaters, c) a local ham group convinced the water company to let them manage all antenna placement, and d) the ham group won't even discuss details like access/rent/maintenance/etc. unless you're a licenced ham who's joined their group. Instead, I'm trying to convince my wife to let me cut a hole in the tower ceiling of our victorian and place one up there. It'll likely get a quarter the range, but no one gets to tell me how things are going to work! As for the "don't be stupid, that's what ham is for" brigade, I'm ignoring them. My group wants to build reliable emergency comms for our region that *doesn't* require gatekeeper hams to use it. You'll never get churches, schools, and community centers to fund/maintain personnel to get and stay trained so they've always got a ham on staff, but a $35 license and a $100 HT is completely feasible. And that's not to mention being able to interoperate with actual community members for the price of $15 walkies from Walmart! A school or community member can keep a whole box of those things in the basement and just hand them out with ten minutes' instruction in an emergency, and they can even just listen in to repeater outputs to keep track of what's going on locally.

I don't think the concern here is that it's possible to find your address if someone is already targeting you by name. I think the concern is more that anyone who hears your call sign as you broadcast it over an area that could contain anywhere from dozens of people to hundreds of thousands of people could successfully target you based only on the call sign...

I think this is a business I need to look into....

I just have to make one correction here: You are *all* spelling "'Murca" wrong!

I'm no radio expert yet, but I've seen a number of posts saying that if you ground to frame, rather than battery, you can avoid most of that noise. YMMV! I run a 20 watt Radioddity DB20-G from my lighter socket, and experience no noise I can detect with my ears.

Most cigarette lighter sockets are fused to 10 Amps, and most vehicles alternators run between 13 and 14 volts. Being conservative, you should be able to manage 130 Watts max. The question is how long will the socket/intermediate wiring hold up under long term use at that wattage. If you've got a good quality vehicle, I'd stay under 100 watts. If you've got an economy job, maybe 60?

OK, I tried not to do it, but it's every day in groups of Facebook *and* reddit now: "GMRS is not a hobby" "GMRS is only for talking to your family and friends" "There are no GMRS groups to join. You should just take the test and be a ham."

Can you please expand on this statement? I have several, and have used them at altitudes from 30 - 3000 feet (mostly listening for satellites), and have never experienced anything I would remotely classify as "going bonkers". Are you saying they can receive more signals at altitude? And if so, why wouldn't that be expected?

Hey all, so I just this evening received my 2-month delayed T801s to use with my wife on family hikes. I know they may be sad little FRS units, but they really are kinda cool. So far, I can say that they communicate just fine with my other FRS radios (even non-motorola), my DB-20G, and my Baofengs in terms of voice quality, and the bluetooth phone app, which I haven't used extensively yet, seems really feature-rich. Anyone else using them? I'd love to hear your tips and tricks! [Edit] Forgot to mention. I picked the pair up from Amazon for just over $100 with standard accessories and the app is free. So far, that seems like a pretty reasonable price for what you get!

This fascinates me, so I read that whole thread. One statement stood out for me: "in fact, they were trying to manipulate the emergency response to save some of their own equipment" Assuming this poster knows what they're talking about, I feel like "interfering with the intent to prioritize personal interests" would be a lot more scandalous than just "trying to help, but being a nuisance"...

The repeater output frequencies are already the standard GMRS frequencies, so yes, you can do that by definition.

LOL No, it's mounted to the vertical fixed window at the back of my truck's cab. (I'm new, not dumb!) (I hope...)

It has a strange secondary antenna that extends out inside the glass which I assume is the equivalent of a "ground plane" for it, but I still know almost nothing about antenna physics, so I could be wrong!

Yes, I've had my NanoVNA for about a month now, and it's how I finally got this dumb thing tuned as well as I have. It saved a whole lot of time being able to see the whole curve! With the SWR meter, all I could do was map the local slope, so I kept getting caught in local minima...

Woof, I was kind of expecting it to be that complicated/expensive. I certainly hope you're right about the negligible losses! Sadly, as far as I can tell, there is no way to determine the identity of the manufacturer for Tram-Browning antennas, much less contact them. That's actually what got me interested in going down this path. Most comments I've gotten about these antennae are highly negative, and in the vein of, "You're losing 50% of your power just getting through that glass.", "That 25% tint on your window is eating up your transmission power", "Incoming signals will be so attenuated you'll lose half your range", etc... I opted for through-glass because of the low cost and extreme ease of installation, and they *seem* to work quite well, if you can get them tuned (which does seem to be quite a challenge), but I'm just wondering about the veracity of those claims...

Here's the thing, though, the connector for the antenna is on the transducer, which is inside the glass, so measuring at that end of the cable would ignore what I assume will be non-trivial losses due to a) the transducer's internal circuitry, and b) the through-glass connection itself. Is there a way to capture that data too?

After a fair deal of work, I've tuned my Tram-Browning through-glass antenna to an SWR of about 1.2 at 465 MHz. So now my question is, what about other losses? SWR, as I understand it, is measuring the transmitted energy that bounces back to the transmitter, but that can't be the only potential power-loss mode for transmission, right? Resistances must also play a part, as well as some of the bizarre LCR effects I vaguely remember from my circuit design class several decades ago, right? I'm assuming the inductive coupling in the through-glass transducer must produce a loss too, given the distance travelled through a dielectric... So how do you measure these losses? Obviously SWR is most important, what with how it can burn up your radio, but I'd also like to know how to measure the real power making it into the actual transmission...

I think you have that backwards. You rely on your diaphragm because you need a diaphragm to diaphragmy things...

I mean if you use a repeater, don't you by definition depend on it for use as a repeater?