Blaise

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?

Here in the NYS Capital District, we have at least one station using digital on channel 17(.600). It renders the channel unusable for an hour at a time sometimes, and pops up several days a week. It's quite frustrating.

Well you're in about the same boat I am. As I said above, I'm not too interested in general in ham-style rag-chewing, but I'm trying to start a local emergency-preparedness group, so I need more experience/familiarity with both simplex and repeater comms before I feel comfortable teaching/recruiting others. I'd be happy to make your acquaintance in radio-space! I keep an eye on a couple of the Seacom repeaters and scan simplex in general, so I'm out here. Come find me!

Yes, well, you can't delete your post, so I just wrote a reminder to myself... Elsewise, I do have questions about your suggestion of a UHF NVIS... But that's for another topic!

[Don't start fights]

No kidding?

Was it something I said?

That's it! You guys rock.

Hey all, I've slowly been building out a communications system for my family, a mixture of FRS/GMRS handhelds and GMRS mobile units. My goal was to program a channel into each labeled "Family" (well not on the FRS units, but you get the idea), all set to the same CTCSS code. The hardest part of this (I thought) was digging up the CTCSS frequencies for the units that only use a "code" for CTCSS, but I eventually got it all figured out. So now, my mobiles and handhelds all have a common channel which should filter out any outsiders' transmissions. So I started testing... And I almost immediately discovered that my Radioddity DB-20G, on which the channel is confirmed to have a CTCSS tone set (i.e. the "CTCSS/DCS Encode" and "CTCSS/DCS Decode" fields for the channel are both not empty and set to the correct frequency), the channel happily receives transmissions on that channel which have no CTCSS tone set at all... Anyone have any thoughts as to how this could be happening?

I second the BaoFeng BF-F8HP/UV-5R8W. I have four now. I can't see any performance/range difference between the Nagoya NA-771 and Nagoya NA-771G antennas, but both let me communicate easily with a repeater 40+ miles away. Honestly, I can even sometimes hit that repeater with the stock antenna, but it doesn't reliably open for me, probably due to faint signal!