SteveShannon

The officer emailed me a copy of the "Information Exchange Form" and the guy had his son and girlfriend with him, which I didn't realize at the time. I'm still not sure why he reacted that way. I've gone over it a million times in my head, wondering what I might have done to trigger him, but I just can't come up with anything. Fortunately nobody was hurt in either vehicle. I wasn't about to jump out of my vehicle when he did. I've seen too many reports of a person dying after a road rage incident after both parties jumped out full of testosterone. The estimate (new front door, new fender, new step, paint, and labor comes to $9403. That seems incredible to me, especially since blue book on this is $10-11k. That may result in his insurance declaring my vehicle "totaled" which I don't want. It has been such a good vehicle and it's fairly low miles on what some people consider the best engine Toyota has put in the 4Runner. I'm assuming his insurance will pay, but even that hasn't been communicated to me yet. I'll call my insurance tomorrow to see if they have heard anything. I have too many vehicle as it is. I have the 4Runner, a 1998 Dodge Ram with 70k on it, and my wife's wheelchair van, a 2010 Toyota Sienna/Braun Rampvan. My wife can't drive anymore, so maybe I'll reduce my stable to just two vehicles. The wheelchair van is crucial. A pickup is really helpful. I could probably get by without the SUV as long as I have a crew cab, but the smaller size of the SUV is really nice for going up to the repeater site. Oh, well.

Exactly, and some of the codeplugs I’ve done for Maurice have hundreds of channels for DMR and at least 100 analog.

My off-road ride is a 2006 4Runner Limited. Stock except for some kind of 10 ply all-terrain tires. It’s my favorite vehicle, comfortable, small enough to safely follow most jeep trails, and only 123,000 miles on the original v8 engine. Last Saturday I drove up to our repeater which sits at about 9700 feet. The last 1500’ of elevation is on a shale trail that starts at a forest service gate. I was given permission by the Forest Service to go around the gate on a trail created by recreational riders who scoff at the USFS gate. After surveying the condition of the repeaters (2 m analog and 70 cm DMR/analog) we returned to town. We (three of us in my vehicle) fell in behind a white Chevy Silverado. The road was plenty wide for two way traffic. When the Chevy stopped and pulled a little bit to the right at a wide spot in the road, I pulled to the left and passed. I was nearly read to pull back to the right side. Apparently, my passing set off the Chevy’s driver for some reason and I heard him romp on the accelerator. I glued my eyes to the road ahead thinking he was trying to overtake me and pass on the right but my front seat passenger said the white Chevy turned right toward us. He hit us with his tire at the very front of the right rear door, just a scuff, and then his left front tire ground itself into my right front passenger door before his fender wrinkled my fender. His tire also bent my step down. We both pulled to a stop. He jumped out and started back towards us. I rolled down my window. He yelled “What the f?!” I yelled “I thought you pulled over to let me pass!” He threw his hands in the air. I yelled “What’s your name” He got back in his truck and drove off but not before we got a picture of his truck and license plate. We were in an area without cell service so we drove back to town. He stayed ahead of us the entire way, even stopping just ahead of us when traffic was stopped for construction. As soon as we got back to cell service one of the guys with me called and reported the incident to the Sheriff Department. They asked if we wanted to meet an officer somewhere or come to the station. We chose station. A highway patrol officer took our statements and then called the other driver based on the license plate. He had gone to his house several miles west of town (the accident happened south of town) so he had to drive back to Butte. I don’t know if he was cited or not. The patrolman let us go before the other guy. I reported it to my insurance company who reported it to his insurance. He hadn’t reported it. When asked about it he said he didn’t think anything had been damaged. I don’t understand that at all. Here are some pictures:

The TYT MD UV380, when loaded with the open source OpenUV380 firmware does an excellent job of speaking menu words that are in its vocabulary, but spells everything else, letter by letter. I sent mine to my blind friend after loading the firmware and I don’t remember for sure whether it spells channel names or speaks the channel number.

“Off with their heads!” cried the red queen.

Yes! Sorry, I thought I included the phrase “all other things being equal.“ I meant to anyway.

Because RF is emitted in all directions equally from an isentropic antenna, one way to compare the range of different power outputs is to think in terms of the volume of a sphere: Two watts fills the volume of a sphere of a radius of 0.78159 (the units in this case end up being the cube root of watts.) Five watts fills the volume of sphere of 1.06078. So, all other things equal, the range of a 5 watt radio compared to a 2 watt radio, to produce the same RF strength, will be approximately 36% further. Increasing it to 10 watts (five times the power of the two watt radio) results in 70% greater range. Increasing power to 20 watts gets you a little more than twice the range of the 2 watt radio (2.14 times to be exact). Finally, increasing it to 50 watts gets you less than three times the range of the 2 watt radio. (a factor of 2.917). Hopefully this illustrates how little/much RF power actually matters.

I can answer your questions on electronic theory if you need.

Why not just get into ham radio? There are DMR repeaters all over the world. You can even target an individual user. Nothing is private of course, but the Brandmeister network allows you to connect to a talkgroup or an individual radio. All it takes is a technician class ham radio license and a DMR radio. The TYT MD-UV380 is under a hundred dollars. I recommend loading it with Open UV380 firmware.

Yeah, apparently I missed the original post too. Such hubris.

Good for you! I think home brewing antennas is one of the happiest aspects of ham radio and I am interested in your results for GMRS. It’s so much easier for 462 and 467 MHz than for anything in HF.

Welcome!

Yeah, no matter what you do some people will complain.

I have the ft5d. It works great for me, but a blind friend has the ft3d and a touchscreen is extremely difficult for a blind user. He’s great about learning to use keyboards. A sighted vendor tried to talk him out of getting a vx-6. He thought it would be too difficult, but I sent him mine to try for a few weeks. He loved it and bought one for himself. He still has the ft3. Sometimes he’ll FaceTime me so I can steer his fingers to use the touchscreen. Lately I’ve been wondering if the ft70 would work better for him for fusion rather than the ft3.

Fortunately the FTM-500 can easily be used as a basic analog radio. Dual receive and the dual display could be temporarily disabled to reduce a little confusion and then re-enabled as the user’s skills grow.

And unfortunately that’s sometimes the issue. People buy an expensive high end digital radio that’s so difficult to use for regular analog communications that they get frustrated and give up (and as a bit of a confession I realize my statements don’t make him feel any better about it). I almost think he might be better served by boxing up the FTM-500 temporarily, picking up a basic dual band radio such as one I mentioned, and learning all he can about basic analog communications.

I agree there’s nothing wrong with wanting, or even buying a really good radio. One thing I see though is people buying something that is way over their heads when they’re just starting out instead of getting something simple at first. I absolutely understand wanting to buy something that’s quality made; nobody want the bitter taste that accompanies a poor quality piece of crap that other people deride and which fails prematurely. But as your VEC pointed out and you and @WRXP381 are correctly passing along, there are some inexpensive basic radios that are great starter radios and which will do a great job of allowing a person to learn the basics without getting lost in the extra features. A radio that uses DMR, YSF, or D-Star is just about the worst way to advise someone. If a person wants a mobile ham radio to use as a stepping stone, there are some really decent ones that can always be converted into go-boxes as they grow into more expensive radios with more features. And if a person wants to buy one radio that will be the only radio they ever need, they should prepare themselves for either a steep learning curve up front or being frustrated later on because when you first get into ham radios you have no idea what will interest you later and you don’t know what you don’t know. For a new ham wanting a name brand dual band radio that will be a workhorse for many years, the Yaesu FTM-6000, the Icom IC-2930A, or the Alinco DR-735 would all be very reasonable as starter radios that will continue to give great value over the years. The FTM-6000 is only $210 right now! If a person doesn’t feel the need to buy name brand, things like the Radioddity db20g can easily be a great starter radio for either GMRS or ham radio.

We are in a sense. We hang out at the same forum. Stop in for a coffee, pop, or even a beer!

Better yet, watch this video:

DTMF frequencies are in the range of voice frequencies. I wouldn't expect something to appear in the specifications. As all ham radio folks say: Try it!

A configuration that receives and retransmits is a repeater, even if you call it two base stations. But if you’re asking about using two duplex Fixed Stations to extend communication (rather than any kind of “network“) between two repeaters that might be acceptable to the FCC. At this point since the FCC’s interpretation has flipped in the past seven years (see the post by @WRKC935 where he included a communication from the FCC saying it was fine) I would make sure to get an interpretation before going down that path.

Are you saying that the Retevis RT-97, RT-97s, and the equivalent equivalent Midland repeater will not pass through DTMF audio?

Welcome!

@WSDW477 Let’s get back to basics. If radio A transmits with a tone of 67.0 Hertz (not MHz!) radio A will have T-CTCSS set to 67.0 Hz. Radio B will only reproduce transmissions from radio A if all of the following conditions are met: It’s on the correct channel, It’s in range (but not too close because of desensitization, which is when a receiving radio is swamped by the transmission and becomes deaf.), AND Either It is set to break squelch when a matching CTCSS tone 67.0 is continuously embedded in the transmitted audio (Tone Mode = TSQL and R-CTCSS = 67.0 Hz) OR it is set to disregard transmitted CTCSS tones (Tone Mode = TONE, doesn’t matter how the R-CTCSS is set), in which case the radio will break squelch (audibly reproduce) for everything it receives on the channel. If you want fewer interruptions (which is one definition of privacy) from other people on the same GMRS channel, you must set the receive tone (R-CTCSS) to match the transmit tone (T-CTCSS) (condition 3 above) of the radio or radios you want to hear and you must set Tone Mode to TSQL. But keep in mind that’s only one aspect of privacy. Others can still hear you and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

This is one of the best posts I’ve seen on this subject and should be pinned.