SteveShannon

If the VNA is accurately calibrated it will probably be more accurate than an SWR meter. Unless you are using something like a Bird meter with the right size slug, the directional RF coupler in most consumer SWR meters are non-linear in detecting the very wide range of RF power that’s transmitted forward and being reflected at low SWR. The good news is that it really doesn’t matter much at such low SWR values.

I have done tests with people listening to me while I change from narrow to wide and back to narrow. The difference was just not very noticeable.

What channel are you on?

That’s what I remember too.

Over the years I’ve argued against people who condemn “cheap Chinese radios” for GMRS, but one thing I cannot argue against is the fact that documentation is better for higher quality radios. Of course that can be taken to an absurd degree also; my Yaesu FT5dr has a general operations manual, a manual for APRS, and advanced manual, a manual for the software used to program it and one more for use on C4FM. My Alinco is better. It just has two manuals. It’s a variant on an Anytone radio also. With that in mind, maybe this will help. It’s the manual for the Alinco DR-638 which is their version of the Anytone 5888. http://www.radiomanual.info/schemi/Vari/Alinco_DR-638H_user.pdf Many (nearly all in my experience, from Baofeng to Yaesu) radios should be able to send a 5-tone signal. For the 5888 to decode them you want both menu 9, 5 tone additional signaling, and menu 11, CTCSS Decode, to be set. Be careful with your experimentation. Stun and kill mean different things for different radios. See this thread:

What do you mean by “a simple power adapter?” If you’re talking about a wall wart, probably not. As @wayoverthere said you need to understand the current requirements and the voltage needed. Most mobile radios prefer 13.8 volts of clean DC. Wall warts are not always designed to provide clean DC. Also, a 25 watt radio, again as @wayoverthere said, probably needs 5 amps of DC current at 13.8v. A bad power supply can be a source of problems.

Many of the repeaters are not mapped accurately. Drive around and see if you can find it or write to the owner at the address for their call sign. Or see if you can find a website for the repeater.

And Archer and Archer Space Patrol Realistic tended to be their better brand. They had handheld ham radios that were built for them by other companies. I bought a pair of these after I was grown up and newly married, although this picture is from a radio museum website. Apparently I was a latent ham even then!

I agree; it sounds like you have a radio problem, not RFI or antenna.

An aluminum hood is fine. I think maybe wrxp381 thought that your antenna mount doesn’t couple to the hood somehow. without knowing more about the mount you’re using I can’t tell, but most do. Keep in mind that the position of the antenna on a ground plane affects the propagation of the signal.

Welcome!

M&P Ultraflex or Hyperflex 10 is the same diameter as LMR400 or RG8 (not to be confused with RG8x), but has stranded center conductors for greater flexibility. They also make a 7 mm variant but with greater losses of course. What's nice is that they make a POTA coax that's brightly colored to help prevent accidents and make it harder to lose.

You won’t find an American made GMRS radio. The pagers and radios issued to Hezbollah didn’t explode merely because they were made in China. In fact if they were really Icom radios they would have been made in Japan. If they were counterfeit I don’t know where they were made. It appears that someone intercepted the pagers and radios at some point after they were made but before they were delivered to Hezbollah and inserted explosives. Unless you’ve come to the negative attention of the Israeli intelligence forces I doubt you’ll have explosives in your radio. Welcome to the forum!

Just set it to Tone mode instead of TSQL and the receive tone is disregarded.

I’m certainly not bothered by it. It’s impossible to know everything that has been posted.

There are two different logins for this site. One for the repeater pages and a separate one for the forum. I think that’s because of the forum software. But once your browser remembers both logins you shouldn’t have to re-login. If you decide a post goes too far, close ck on the three dots and report it. Rich has been very responsive when I have done that, but I don’t report something just because it is personally offensive to me. l have been the target of OffroaderX’s “humor” from time to time, but he does more good than harm. He does a lot of good stuff for GMRS without ever patting himself on the back. So, if he refers to me as “Some People” or a “Sad Ham” occasionally I guess I can live with it. And yes, the forum software does automatically try to replace ascii emojis with bad blobby emoticons. Wait until you see what happens to @Hoppyjr quotations!

Welcome to the forums. * I use Safari, Chrome, Edge, and even Internet Explorer and have never stumbled across anything that failed to work. * I haven’t had to re-login for years. As you say it might be browser related. * The repeater map only shows what repeater owners enter. If otherwise verifiable repeaters don’t appear on the map it’s most likely because the owners didn’t add them, or you have the map set to show only active repeaters. After a year of not being touched by the owner the status changes to outdated and they disappear from the map unless you click that characteristic. * I disagree about the need for moderation. The site is moderated; it just isn’t constantly monitored. If something is too reprehensible or violates the rules we report it and Rich moderates. Although there are occasional disputes, we know how to report them, ignore them, or walk away. Again, welcome!

I’m waiting for a pen communicator “Open channel D” And now we know how old we are!

You might see a change to SWR, but comm results are the only thing that matters.

Absolutely. Those are two different things. Hams who want to help when a disaster strikes should not expect to just jump into action without training with the folks who have trained to provide emergency services so they can help accomplish the larger plan.

Maybe, but keep in mind that the magnetic mount is designed to stick to the metal with a designed in separation for the rubber pad that’s part of the magnetic mount base. Adding an additional sixteenth of an inch might be enough to reduce the effectiveness of having a ground. Try it and see. Or you might be able to remove the rubber pad that’s part of the mag mount base to make up for the additional rubber pad.

I’m on Spectrum, which advertises wide availability because they use the Verizon network. When I learned of the Verizon outage yesterday I fully expected to not be able to make voice calls. My friends with Verizon had no service, but I was able to speak to my friends in town on Spectrum. I don’t know if local calls are handled fully within Spectrum before being transferred to Verizon for interstate calls. In any case I had no service interruptions on my cell phone. Later in the day however I had really bad service using Teams on the Internet (also Spectrum) with frequent reconnections. After about half an hour it settled down and worked reliably but during that half hour I was cursing.

Watching on Device Manager, when I plug in my cable (with the other end inserted into the radio and the radio powered up) I see that Windows adds a serial port using the CH340 driver. The radio doesn’t say clone. When I choose write or read from the radio I see that it’s working. But, both of my radios were purchased about two years ago and they could be using a different chip now. A friend bought a new db20g a couple weeks ago and tomorrow maybe I can see what his has.

Cables don’t install drivers. Operating systems do based on what they read from the chip on the cable. The problem is, the operating system doesn’t always have the best driver to work with the radio. Sometimes they simply have a stub that was provided to them by the chip manufacturer. That’s why almost every radio manufacturer explicitly instructs users to download and install the driver before ever plugging in the cable.