SteveShannon

What’s your call sign so Rich can look you up?

“That idiot’s talking to a brick!!!” is less of a chick magnet than a good belt clip handheld.

I have wanted to go to Promontory to watch some of these tests for years. I’m envious. Good for you taking your kids!!! It’s never too early to get them interested in science.

They released a press statement saying their engine failure was due to a stray radio transmission.

Terri’s post nailed it. The only thing I would add is that when asking a question like this it’s helpful to include a link to the precise item ordered. There are often several listings for each model, with listings by different vendors. Yes, you ordered “from Amazon” but it’s more important knowing who the actual vendor was. That also greatly affects the return policy. Personally I try to limit my purchases to Prime, but that’s not always possible.

No idea, but if the screw threads don’t match you’re screwed. Pun intended.

It seems to work for everyone else. The only thing I saw was the password reset requirement. The website always resolved correctly within one refresh for me.

Nothing says you have to throw BTech or yourself under the bus to make a suggestion for a rule change. Frankly, I don’t think the FCC knows when there are violations. They have neither the people nor an interest in challenging the certification atteststions submitted by manufacturers unless the problems are so egregious that someone reports them.

From time to time my browser displays something like you posted, but a quick refresh almost always results in the correct look. It usually happens when I have limited service and slow speeds. What does speedtest tell you? https://www.speedtest.net/

That would be a good thing to send to the fcc in response to their request for regulation simplification suggestions. I agree that it absolutely makes sense to look at the output of the box, but that’s not how the regulations are currently written.

I think that’s a problem on your end. Here’s how it looks in Chrome (and Safari) on my iPad:

Thanks, Marc. The test report (not performed by the FCC) doesn’t even mention the existence of a duplexer. Although the test setup photos do show that the repeater output is what’s being tested, I wonder if the FCC even realized that there’s an internal duplexer.

I’m not sure why you think regulations are different if the transmitter and duplexer are packed into an enclosure. The regulations very clearly state that the transmitter output power must be limited to 50 watts, not that the all-in-one box output power must be limited to 50 watts. You obviously understand the difference because you clearly distinguished between the transmitter output power and the duplexer output in your earlier post. But that was really the least of my concerns. The fact is that the transmitter is putting out 71 watts, which is harder on the circuits. That’s 40% higher power than designed.

The excessive RF power will take a toll on the circuitry of the transmitter as well as being non-compliant with GMRS regulations. I would suggest adjusting the RF output down to 50 watts at the transmitter output, before the input to the low side of the duplexer. Many times repeaters are run at reduced power levels to prevent early failure.

Good edit!

I agree. Fortunately, the behavior that Marc described is becoming less common, at least in my area. I don’t know of any hams in our club who look down their noses at GMRS licensees, but most of us would be very happy to help an interested GMRS licensee become a ham also. For any widespread emergencies amateur radio has an advantage, but for nearby emergency communications GMRS and FRS are much more easily accessible to more people. Ham clubs should be studying how these services can be complementary to each other.

Maybe they fixed it in the past six years…

It would probably be too difficult to send them all in and ask for updated batteries. You should label or otherwise permanently mark the good new battery. Am I correct in believing that the bad batteries work in every way except negotiating ultra-high voltages once they hit fully charged?

Your username is mdyoungblood if that helps.

You don’t owe me any thanks. I literally did nothing other than reporting problems to the owner. Rich @rdunajewski is the owner and administrator. My guess is that he did something.

If all it’s doing is asking you to select a new password, I think that’s happening to all users. If the webpage is jumbled, try doing a refresh. If it’s still jumbled, report it.

I found this snippet in a bunch of articles on hackaday: MURDEROUS “USB-C” PSUS AT YOUR LOCAL LIDL Remember the power article, specifically, how you get to higher voltages? Let’s recap: you get 5 V first, and then only after resistor detection. Higher voltages require negotiations over a digital protocol. This is a safety rule – it’s how you can use the same USB-C charger for your laptop, your phone, your wireless headphones, your devboards and whatever else. Now, what happens when someone builds a power supply with a fixed higher-than-5 V output, say, 12 V, and puts a USB-C plug on it? The answer is – seriously bad things happen. Such a power supply isn’t safe to be used on actual USB-C devices – it’s likely to destroy your phone or laptop, and it’s at a glance indistinguishable from an adapter that follows the USB-C rules laid out for everyone else. If you must use such an adapter for something every now and then, you ought to mark its cable with red tape in a way that covers the connector plug, so that you (or your loved one) don’t grab it to charge something else. Seriously, it’s easy to make a mistake, and the more you get comfortable with USB-C, the more likely you are to make it. Who does this? Well, many no-name manufacturers do, but also Lidl Parkside tools, for one. CrowPi does this too, in their recently released CrowPi L laptop. Both of these come with dumb “USB-C” 12 V power supplies, and neither of them should be sold to consumers, especially given that the CrowPi laptop is designed for kids and educational purposes, and Parkside tools are designed for non-tech-savvy people. When your kid burns a $500 smartphone or your granddad burns his laptop due to a $2 power supply, that’s when the gravity of this standard violation really sets in.

My Alinco dedicated charger tops out at 8.41 vDC once the light turns green. That’s typically considered the max charge voltage for a lithium battery (actually 4.2 vDC per cell and the 7.4 vDC battery is made up of two cells). I wonder if the issue is that it’s a usb-c charging device rather than a dedicated charger. That would rely on the internal battery circuitry to regulate the voltage because the usb-c charger has no idea how many cells are in the battery.

Yes, we’ve been talking about it for a couple days in the section of the forum dedicated to this site.

That’s just about ideal. So the charger is definitely putting out 12 volts once the battery is fully charged. That seems completely wrong to me. For the example I listed earlier, the Baofeng charger displayed a green light and was putting out 8.08 vDC. The Alinco charger is still charging and it shows 8.34. When it turns green I’ll measure it again.