SteveShannon

As far as a beep when changing channels, that’s probably the key tone, menu 1.9 according to the manual. Turn it on. It’s not surprising that updating the firmware would reset that. As far as losing communication you’ll have to explain that. Does the radio no longer transmit? Does it no longer receive? Maybe the tones were cleared (again, fully expected in a firmware upgrade). I have no clue what e1-e2 means; maybe nothing.

Welcome from Montana! Look for videos from Notarubicon. There are a lot and they cover nearly everything a person needs to know to get started. Andd of course don’t be afraid to ask questions and try things!

Notice the word “dedicated” in my quote above. I think GMRS is great for regular community communications. But a repeater for the community is hard to dedicate to emergencies. People will use it to chat, kids will play with radios, and hobbyists will talk about antennas. The community has no legal way to reserve the frequency for emergencies. As a result some people will leave their radios off. How do you tell them to turn them back on? Remember, this is a ten mile radius community.

Are you talking about the vertical null?

Perhaps because it can’t get down to 0.5 watts ERP?

Based on what I’ve read, the ones made,of copper tubing are about equivalent to a dipole in performance, not high gain, but decent omnidirectional performance. I intend to build one this spring sometime. It’ll be single band, possibly 6 meters. That’s the only vhf band I don’t have an antenna for now.

You’ll get quite a range of different opinions.

No, the repeater is required to ID also, unless the only people using it are authorized to use the same call sign as the repeater and they correctly ID.

It’s menu #59 for the 935h:

I gave you an up-vote. SoCalGMRS voted you down just so he wouldn’t be at the bottom. The word “Gain” doesn’t appear in the manual for the 935g. Squelch tail is referred to in menu #51, aka RPT-TONE. Here’s what it says: Enables or disables the squelch tail sent to the receiving radio.

Also, if a high tower must be erected that could cost a few thousand depending on how high, new or used, and who does the work.

Interesting. Garmin got a waiver even before that to send location data. Theirs is a really neat feature that works very well with their gps map also.

We like the Brookings area also. It has been years since we’ve been there, but we used to stay at a Best Western which had rooms that opened up right above the beach. One thing I would do is make sure the radios I picked for this community communications project are all capable of receiving the fire department’s transmissions and make that a priority channel on power up. That communication system is much more likely to receive the needed funding to make it reliable.

In GMRS relay repeaters which are networked to the original repeater are discouraged by the most recent interpretation from the FCC. A lot depends on what infrastructure already exists. Does your fire department already have a communications tower that a repeater antenna could use? GMRS is really not a good choice for dedicated emergency services. The only positive attributes are price and availability. Each of your families will have to make a choice for which radios to buy based on price and features. They range from under $20 to hundreds of dollars. Repeaters can range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars. If it must be reliable in an emergency don’t go cheap. If you’re serious about wanting a price hire a commercial communications contractor to put together a quote backed by path studies and whatever kind of special needs your community has.

And I believe that the FCC has issued some experimental waivers to some repeaters to allow them to test digital on GMRS, so we cannot immediately assume that a repeater with occasional digital users is in violation of.

Here’s a link to the R56 document: https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/Lands_ROW_Motorola_R56_2005_manual.pdf

I agree that the interface is less than intuitive. And it’s inconsistent. Sometimes you have to use the up and down buttons on top of the microphone to scroll through options, other times it’s a pair of buttons on the front of the microphone next to the FUN buttton.

I think it really should be 2 channel mono to single channel mono combiner. Yes, it’s taking two outputs, which we typically considered stereo, and combining them into a single speaker, but specifying a mono to stereo Y adapter may result in one of the connectors being a stereo connector. @OldJunk2 really needs an adapter that has two mono plugs (tip and sleeve only, no ring connector) with the tips connected to each other and the sleeves connected to each other leading to the appropriate mono connector (depending on what the speaker he’s trying to use has; if it indeed has a stereo plug then you’re right, but if it has a mono plug then he needs a mono jack with only a tip and sleeve connector.) Most of the adapters out there are two TS (which is mono with a tip and sleeve) to a single TRS (which is stereo with a tip, ring, and sleeve). Someone who is hoping to combine two separate mono speaker outputs to a single mono speaker doesn’t want that. Instead they want two TS to a single TS, mono on all three connectors. Here is the one I found on Amazon: https://a.co/d/2wMGnEy

It wouldn’t hurt to connect it at both places, but the NEC says to use at least one right where the coax enters the house. The bible on this is a document from Motorola named R56, and it has been linked many times, but for a person wanting to understand the basics I really like this document: https://reeve.com/Documents/Articles Papers/Reeve_AntennaSystemGroundingRequirements.pdf

Well said!

Electrically this should be simple. Are you certain both output ports work? If a single mono speaker works fine plugged into either of the outputs individually then you know the ports both work and are active. Better yet, plug two separate mono speakers with mono plugs. Do they both work simultaneously? One last thing to try is to use a mixer to combine the two separate audio feeds. Most mixers are meant for line level outputs rather than speaker level, but if you can find something that matches the impedance and will accept speaker level output it should work. Or you can use speaker level to line level converters and then run the outputs into the mixer, and then take the mixed output and amplify it to feed a single speaker, but that seems like a lot of work.

PL is the same as CTCSS.

Which function?

So you were pulling our legs. Given that fact that silver, copper, gold, aluminum, brass (5% Zn), calcium, rhodium, tungsten, zinc, brass (30% Zn), cobalt, nickel, ruthenium, lithium, and even iron (in that order) are more electrically conductive than either platinum or titanium, there’s simply no reason to expect any performance improvement from their use singly or combined as an antenna material if all other factors are equal. Source: chart of electrical conductivity on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity

I’d be interested in seeing data supporting that claim.