SteveShannon

Your heart is definitely in the right place! Alex (Axorlov) explained it well.

There are no standard CTCSS tones for a particular area and in general it’s a bad thing (very inconvenient) for radios to arrive with any tones set. However, there’s nothing wrong with using tones with simplex.

According to the FCC license search utility, 1221 GMRS licenses were granted in the past week, 5,165 in the last 30 days, 65,178 in the past year.

If you get moisture inside any coax you’ll have an issue, whether the shield and core are dissimilar metals or not. That has happened to people here on the forums and they end up lopping off the last couple feet or completely replacing the cable. But that’s not strictly the fault of LMR400 and I wouldn’t avoid LMR400 for that reason, especially if you already have it. I would take great care to waterproof the connections. In answer to your question about what to use, professional radio people would specify “hardline” and N connectors. If you have access to it, it’s measurably better in terms of losses and resistance to the elements, but it’s also more costly and less flexible. The link kits, as I’m sure you are aware, are unobtainable right now, but if you don’t mind paying a scalper high prices for a Raspberry Pi (or if you’re fortunate enough to already have a Raspberry Pi) you can assemble one yourself. [Edited to add: in other posts/threads of yours, it appears you have got all the parts, but were looking for help, so I’m confused. Did that not pan out?] I haven’t done it, but there are some threads on the forum. Take heart; Raspberry Pi models are reportedly expected this summer. We will see. Rpilocator.com is a good website to use to learn about availability. Here’s a link to a website that discusses building nodes: http://pascogmrs.us/video/how-to/ I have seen a video on YouTube that shows using a NanoVNA, using both port set up to measure insertion loss, to tune each side of a duplexer. I’ll see if I can find it. If I do, this is where I’ll place the link: The same person has another similar video:

I went and looked at the manual for the Rugged Radio GMR2. It's a nice looking radio. It looks like it only has the 30 preset channels. That's not the end of the world, but it makes it impossible to program multiple repeaters on the same frequency. Fortunately you can set custom, receive only channels. So, your repeater is on 462.675 MHz. That's already programmed into your radio as channel 20RP with the correct offset for transmit, so it will automatically transmit on 467.675 MHz. So, all you have to do is set the correct tone for transmit. If you're hearing the the repeater ID itself (and it certainly sounds like you are!) then you either have the tone cleared out or you are set to the correct tone. Based strictly on looking at the manual for five whole minutes, C-CDC, R-CDC, and T-CDC appear confusing. It appears, based on the third column, that the only entries for each are either "OFF", a CTCSS value, or a DCS value. I don't know if that means that both tones are set the same if you put a value in C-CDC, but that you can use different (so called "split tones") if you put different values into R-CDC and T-CDC. When you were hearing the ID, your receive value must have been correct. Setting them to 146.2 Hz might easily be why you no longer hear it. Try changing all three to "OFF" to see if you hear the Morse Code ID again. Then you can experiment with the R-CDC value to see what happens, but it would be horribly slow if you have to change it and wait another hour. Some radios have the ability to scan for a tone so you could determine what tone is being transmitted by the repeater. I didn't see that in the manual. What you can to though is set several of the receive only channels to that same frequency but with different tones to see which tone works. It's still slow. The best way is to find out from the owner what the tones are.

@WRWE511- Welcome! Drive closer and see if you can hit it. If you haven't already, clear out the receiver tone for your radio. That will allow you to hear all transmissions on the repeater frequency. Do you hear it when you just listen without any set tones?

Many repeaters have some "hang-time" programmed into them to continue transmitting for a short time after a person transmitting to the repeater stops transmitting. This is clearly audible and an indication that you have reached the repeater and that you're using the right tone.

Yes, 3-30 MHz is HF; 30-300 MHz is VHF; 300 MHz to 3000 MHz is UHF. GMRS uses channels in 462 and 467 MHz ranges. I’ve seen my satellite receiver fade out during heavy rains and snows. The higher the frequency the more moisture affects it. I haven’t range tested my GMRS radios in the woods. People use receiver tones to filter the signals that are reproduced. So for instance if there were several people using their radios and i didn’t want to hear them, but I wanted to hear from you, I would set a tone on my receiver and tell you the tone so you could set it for your transmitter. Then, when you transmit using that tone (tones are usually under 300 Hz) my receiver will reproduce your transmitted sounds after filtering out the tone you sent. But if I want to hear everything transmitted on that frequency all I have to do is remove my receive tone. Nothing will be filtered. It’s the same way with a repeater. The receiver half of the repeater only transfers audio to the transmitter that have the right tones when received.

How do you know I haven’t done a MARS-CAP mod on Oscar? ?

The ISS doesn’t do GMRS, but it does converse with ham radio operators. There’s absolutely no correlation between the range between two handy-talkies (HT) going north and the range to a repeater to the west. Different directions, different obstacles. Maybe, maybe not. The best predictor is to tune your handheld radio to the repeater output frequency, leaving tones completely turned off, and listen to see if you ever hear the repeater. If you never hear it you are probably out of range, or nobody is using it. You cannot use FRS radios on a repeater. Yes, at higher frequencies like UHF, foliage definitely absorbs signals. So can rain. So can snow.

That background helps. Some of the FRS channels are limited to only half a watt. Some use two watts. You probably will get better range with GMRS. Now, as far as seeking permission, first you have to get a GMRS license so you can get a full login here. That will allow you greater access to the repeater page. There are two different logins: one to mygmrs.com, and one to forums.mygmrs.com. You must be logged into mygmrs.com in order to request access to a repeater on the repeater pages and you must have a GMRS license, verified to the site via the FCC database, in order to have a login. Sometimes it takes a couple days for the verification process. Once you have your login you go to the repeater page and click on the repeater you want to know about. Then you can click on a link to request access.

There’s nothing wrong with having a conversation and sometimes, in a conversation, a person will circle back to a question for more detail or even out of skepticism. “Maybe I didn’t hear that right?” “But what about this case — it seems different?” And sometimes, those of us who are explaining things answer the question we hear, not the one you asked. So, go ahead and ask as many questions as you want. But, understand that we might get testy if you ask the same question over and over in the same way. Repeaters do not need to be in-between two radios geographically. They just need to be within range of both of the two radios and the two radios must be within the coverage pattern of the repeater antenna. That pattern is usually described as fanning out circularly and horizontally. There are a few characteristics that makes a repeater more effective at achieving greater range: Their antennas are usually placed on high terrain and then installed on towers that raise them even higher, to improve the line of site, Their antennas direct their transmission power outward horizontally (and often slightly downward) to target a specific region. The better commercial repeaters are designed to have better receivers than off-the-shelf GMRS radios, usually much better. Being better quality makes a big difference. They have more sensitivity to pick up weaker signals and they have greater selectivity to help reject interference from other signals. The commercial repeaters are also designed with better transmitters, but for GMRS they are limited to 50 watts. What makes them better is the accuracy of their frequency oscillation and the absence of spurious emissions. Having higher power will help increase the range, but less than you might expect. The important thing is visibility, line of sight. There’s nothing about duplex communications that enhances range over simplex communications. If you and I each have a radio and we cannot reach each other, placing a repeater where one of us is standing, with its antenna placed down low like our antenna are will probably do nothing to help, but replacing one of us with an antenna that pokes out above all the surrounding buildings and hills will help a lot. If the repeater antenna is up high enough, and there’s a straight line of sight between your antenna and the repeater antenna, it’s entirely possible to get 10 miles or further. I live in the mountains. There’s a repeater to the south of me that’s 4000 feet above me and 9 miles away from my house in town. I can travel 16 miles farther north to my cabin and still easily reach that repeater with a five watt handheld radio, even a very cheap radio.. The people I have talked to using the repeater have been as far south of the repeater as 45 miles, as far east as 70 miles, and as far west as 20 miles. But because of an intervening peak of another mountain there’s one direction that’s probably less than a mile. It really depends on terrain, topography, structures, and quality. So the only two correct answers to your questions about flat suburbia and ranges are “it depends” and “maybe.” If you’re willing to spend the money to install a high quality commercial repeater with a high quality high antenna, it’s highly probable to achieve the range you want. In fact, simply connecting high quality antennas to your radios and raising those antennas up high might be able get you the range you need. So, more specifically, yes, a five watt radio can reliably reach a repeater five or ten miles away if the conditions are right. Can it work in your instance? You’re the only one who can answer that. Try it. If it doesn’t work with your handheld antenna put an antenna on your car roof. Or try it with a fifty watt mobile unit and a good mobile antenna on top of your car. Finally, hook up a fifty watt mobile radio to a base station antenna extending above the roof of your house. Please let us know. And feel free to ask more questions.

Correct! Cross band repeat is okay because it’s all within the Amateur Radio Service. As far as I can tell, Cross Service Repeat is not permitted for any of the Personal Radio Services. Definitely repeaters are prohibited in MURS.

The only instance where GMRS repeaters are not required to be separately IDed, are those where the only users are those people who are legally entitled to operate under the call-sign of the repeater operator, and even then they must follow the regulations for individually IDing (which is the ID of the repeater). If those people talk longer than 15 minutes they are required to ID every 15 minutes. Will anybody care at the FCC? Probably not, but the rules are clear.

Sorry, my post above is a moving target. Taking audio received by one radio and transmitting it with another is the definition of a repeater, so regulations prohibit this, but it's simply not feasible to connect two duplex GMRS repeaters using simplex unless you're only going one way and deaf in the other direction. That's still a repeater.

Something that forwards audio via RF is a repeater. The fact that you're crossing services is a regulatory problem, but there are technical issues also. How exactly would it work? Two MURS simplex radios connecting two full-duplex GMRS repeaters? From a technical standpoint (disregarding the rules temporarily) that's not possible. The only way to connect duplex repeaters requires duplex communications. Would they be working automatically? Are the two GMRS repeaters within range of each other? If not, how are the MURS radios within range of each other?

That's pretty clever using a quick-link as the core. I'll have to remember that.

Handheld radios and mobile radios are not usually capable of receiving while transmitting. In order to receive distant transmissions, the receiver circuit must be sensitive to millionths of volts. Your transmitter is capable of putting out a lot more than that. They're both connected to the same antenna, so when your transmitter transmits, that power would overwhelm your receiver. So, while transmitting, your receiver is effectively disabled. Depending on the convention (and whom you're talking to) that's either called half-duplex or simplex. Repeaters however, must be able to transmit and receive at the same time in order to do their job. That's referred to as full-duplex. But the problem still remains; how do you keep the transmitter power from overwhelming the receiver. So they transmit and receive on two different frequencies and a special device called a "duplexer" provides even more isolation. So, a repeater transmits into a duplexer. The duplexer filters out everything except the frequency being transmitted (as much as it can) and routes that signal to the antenna. Simultaneously, the antenna is picking up signals over a wider bandwidth, which go to the duplexer. The duplexer filters out everything except the frequency that the repeater must receive, which it sends to the receiver. A duplexer is like a traffic cop. In order for the duplexer to do a good job, both sides of it must be pretty precisely tuned and it must be capable of aggressively filtering both signals. If your handheld or mobile radio had a duplexer, you would be able to hear what the repeater is transmitting at the same time as you are transmitting. That should also make you appreciate the fact that cell phones are full duplex. Does that help?

Try exchanging the antennas to see if that helps (assuming they both use the same gender of SMA connector.) Yes, the tone acts as a filter. No set receive tone means nothing on that frequency is filtered out.

The preset tones would be a real annoying thing. Turn off the display off timer if that’s a setting, but set it for lower brightness and/or pick up a spare battery. I have a radio that turns its display off also and it annoys me also, but I haven’t decided what to do about it. I turn the volume up/down to get the display.

A good rule of thumb is to always leave the receive tones out when first configuring your radio for a repeater. Any tones you enter for receive filter your reception and could hamper your ability to hear the repeater. If you enter the correct receive frequency, but no receive tones, you will receive everything transmitted on that frequency that is within range. If you’re not sure if you’re in range, get closer. Seeing your meter deflect while you press PTT, probably means the transmitter is transmitting, unless it’s an SWR meter during transmit. Your radio does not receive while it’s transmitting. Seeing the meter deflect when you’re not transmitting can be an indication of signal strength, assuming that’s what your meter is set to indicate. Knowing the radio you’re using helps us to help you more easily.

1. Yes, but you only have eight frequency pairs to choose from. 2. Yes, but you’re limited to no more than 50 watts. 3. Yes, or Morse Code, and it must also happen during long conversations and at the end. 4. Here’s where I’m going to let others review what you listed.

Repeaters (well, all stations) are required to be identified using the call sign of the operator/owner. That ID must be transmitted every fifteen minutes during a conversation or at the end of a conversation. The identification can be transmitted as voice or Morse Code (it’s the sound of Morse Code, not truly CW). It’s usually done for a repeater by an automated process as part of the repeater controller or by a separate device such as the ID-o-matic. That’s what you are hearing.

Well, the icom brochure lists them as 5 watts for both the UHF and VHF version, even intrinsically safe models. Are you saying that someone might have turned the output down to further reduce the risk potential? They're nice looking radios and of course I have no idea what the person bidding on them right now wants them for. I don't really need them. I think I'll let the other person have them for a good price. There's no point in just running up the price for them.

4, 5, and 6 are typically sold in a single box, called simply a repeater. If you don’t want much power you can even buy a single box that includes the duplexer. The shopping area of this site has both types of repeaters. So would most commercial radio stores or online radio shops. Good luck!