SteveShannon

Think about that a little bit. You would have to transmit on one frequency to the handheld and the mobile would have to transmit on the repeater frequency. Then, the repeater would transmit any response back to your mobile. How would you handle that? Do yo intend the mobile to transmit to the repeater and the repeater to respond to the handheld side of the relay? In that instance it would be immediately retransmitted back to the repeater, causing problems. Or, do you expect the mobile side of the relay to receive the repeater transmission and then relay it to the transmitter in the handheld side of the relay. That would require two "relay systems", right? And you certainly couldn't build this to be full duplex. What you propose can be done. Professional radios in EMS vehicles sometimes provide a relay function to nearby handhelds, but it's not likely it can be easily done for cheap.

Technically and very generically, yes. You would connect both radios to the same antenna through the duplexer and to each other through a repeater controller. The repeater controller doesn’t care as long as it gets the signals it needs. But you may discover that you have wasted your money. You might find that your receiver desenses or becomes deaf to RF whenever the transmitter is transmitting.

You’ve obviously gone to a lot of effort. I commend you for that. Personally, though, I just refer to the actual regulations here: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95 Or for just GMRS: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95#subpart-E

I’ve done it also. You’re right; it feels odd.

Have you clicked on “report” to report your post so Rich sees the information? I don’t think he notices when he’s tagged.

I knew nothing about it other than that it was the highest power advertised crap imported radio directly ordered from China. Just a couple posts later I pointed out that I wasn’t recommending it. My post was intended to be a humorous response to an unrealistic question. I’m sorry you ordered it.

Here’s a list of the repeaters listed here:

I have a plum tree that’s neither tall nor particularly large. It’s probably only 17 feet to the highest leaves. I wouldn’t put an antenna in it, but if I did I would expect some attenuation. I have no idea the dB amount but it would be absolutely miserable to have to get up in the tree to remove it. Not only that but for UHF you want the shortest feed line possible. Instead I would put an antenna on my house.

No, not for GMRS. There are 70 cm and 2 m repeaters but not GMRS.

The only GMRS repeaters that I know of in Montana are in Billings and maybe one up in the Flathead.

The MyGMRS forum is free, unless you want to become a premium member which is $50/year. If the club has a private forum I didn’t find it. I would recommend asking what the benefits are for a club prior to joining. I haven’t always followed my own advice.

Look at the list of members of the club and write to the owner. But $30/year x 7 members doesn’t begin to cover the cost of four repeaters. I’m not sure what you expected.

If they're touching, an ohmmeter will show continuity between the shield and center conductor. But once you straighten out the coax the short might no longer exist. If your installation puts the coax in danger of getting bent consider using a right angle coax adaptor:

Hi Dutch, Welcome! I’m from Butte, so nearer to you than most on the list. I bought a couple Radioddity DB20G mobile radios. They’re probably about 17 watts and type certified for GMRS, plus they are affordable at less than $100 each. Also they’re very small. They’d make great pack radios. They’re not fancy, but they seem to work just fine. I have a coupon for $15 off if you or anyone else wants it. I get something for sharing it also. Hopefully it’s not expired. I should probably say affiliate link below but Randy does it much better: http://portal.referralcandy.com/5VJR4T3/share_redirect?location=reminder_email&message_id=1104859301&type=referral_link_email_click

Maybe. Some coax cables have dielectric that will allow the center conductor to contact the shield. If that happened you’ll probably need to cut the bad spot out and reterminate.

Unfortunately, not all radios have all digital codes. DPL 246 is not standard to Motorola. This page shows some others.: https://www.repeater-builder.com/tech-info/pl+dpl/pl+dpl.html

Motorola called CTCSS PL, for Private Line (their marketing term) even though it doesn’t truly provide “privacy” in the sense of preventing being overheard. Thus, the digital ones were called DPL. The digital codes can also be inverted. When entering in Chirp you could see NN or NI or IN or II meaning uplink and downlink codes are “Normal, Normal”, “Normal, Inverted”, “Inverted, Normal”, and finally both inverted. There are a number of terms for these, but don’t let that fool you. Many manufacturers even provide a simple number to the tone, but they are not standardized. My Garmin says tone #7 is 82.5, which Motorola calls PL #6. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Tone-Coded_Squelch_System As Marc pointed out, all of the CTCSS tones are expressed in terms of Hz with a single decimal value. DCS are always whole numbers and sometimes people include some letters.

CTCSS and DCS do the same thing, just using slightly differently encoded tones. DCS encodes the tones as digital signals, whereas CTCSS actually generates an analog tone between 62 Hz up to almost 300 Hz. It’s just a choice, but there are more digital tones and they can be inverted as well. Just use whichever the radio or repeater you with to transmit to requires. The receive tone can be left off. If you leave it off you will receive everything transmitted on that frequency. If you correctly program the receive tone you will only hear signals that are transmitted with the same tone. That may prevent you from feeling interrupted, but your radio hears everything so there can still be interference. I tend to leave the receive tone off. It’s one less thing to go wrong and I live where there’s very little traffic.

It really is perfect for this. The 2 watt power and VHF range, plus simple radios and clear frequencies make MURS ideal.

This link will take you to the different posts about that radio: https://forums.mygmrs.com/search/?q=GMRS-50V2&quick=1

That’s alright; I’m old and demented.

INPUT Tone = TX Tone OUTPUT Tone = RX Tone The words “Input” and “Output” are relative to the repeater. So, your radio transmits the Input tones the repeater requires, and receives the repeater’s Output tones. Set your TX tone to the Input tone needed by the repeater. At first leave the RX tone empty. Once everything is working you can try putting the Output tone in for the RX tone.

As @BoxCar and @WRUU653 both said, the first step in diagnosing reception issues is to clear out the receive tone or turn off tone squelch. The reason is that a radio without a tone for receive will hear everything within range on that frequency. A receiver with a tone set will only break squelch for transmissions that match the tone. Some radios have a “Moni” button that gets around all of that. But you said you get absolutely no sound. If so, check to see: are you able to receive audio from other channels? If not, then have you recently plugged in a cable to program your radio or an earphone cable? It’s not an unknown problem for an earphone or microphone jack to fail, leaving the owner puzzled why they cannot hear or why nobody can hear them. A friend of mine with a UV5R was transmitting to the repeater and we all saw a good signal strength, but none of us could hear him. His microphone jack failed, leaving the radio in a state where the internal microphone is bypassed. It sends carrier (and roger beep, which is how we knew who it was) without audio. He’s able to plug-in a microphone and use it though. If there’s a possibility something like that happened, plugging in an earphone might help.

Welcome! If I have correctly parsed your message, it sounds like maybe you would also like to get your ham license. It’s as easy as it ever has been. If you need any help with that I can recommend a good teaching tool.

Another thing to try would be to have the actual owner add them back in to his/her list of repeaters. Don’t blame yourself. This seems to me to be either a bug in the code, a case of incorrect permissions, or really a poor design.