SteveShannon

I worked with a bunch of utility drafters for a few years. Every one of them had their caps lock turned on 24/7 be. I had to adjust my thinking. They were one of the best bunch of people I’ve ever worked with.

Welcome and happy new year!

Aww shucks… So what’s next? Are you able to hear any traffic from the repeater? If you’re in range and you don’t have a receive tone set you should be able to hear the repeater when others talk.

Sometimes it’s difficult. No problem.

You might be going through the repeater or you’re really close to a high powered transmitter with a very inexpensive receiver that doesn’t have great filtering or selectivity. Your Baofeng might just be breaking squelch because it is so close, similar to desensing. Give the Baofeng to someone to take it a couple houses away and see if it still happens. Bottom line I think that’s just because it’s so close, not that your Wouxun is transmitting on the same frequency. But I could easily be mistaken. As a second test, try talking into the Wouxun while a friend listens on the Baofeng. Try listening with the Baofeng set to receive 467.xxx.

Do this: And then this: Or select a repeater to look at its information and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the map (on a phone).

Uncheck the proximity search. Go into advanced and select your state.

What problems are you having in programming? Are you unable to write to the radio? Does what you have written not work for the repeater? We need detailed information. I see you’ve tried every possible software. As Randy said, post your configuration file so we can look at it. I recommend posting either the factory software or chirp software file because more of us can examine them compared to the RT Systems file, but you could post all three. Happy New Year!

Hi Matt, Before you give up, there are a couple things you can do so we can see what’s happening and possibly understand why. 1. Post a copy of your configuration file so we can look at it. 2. Video record and post the display of your radio while it’s behaving like you say. That will show us whether the radio is transmitting with an offset or possibly other unexpected behavior. I was transmitting on A and receiving on the B channel once without knowing it and I didn’t immediately understand what I was doing. People here really do want to help but as you have explained it the logic is puzzling. That doesn’t make you an idiot. I help a blind-deaf friend who lives in California. I help him program his ham radios. (He’s not totally deaf; he has hearing aids that work with his ham radios.) Sometimes we have to use FaceTime to figure out what the screen is showing him. Touchscreens are a real special level of hell when they’re on a different screen than he expects. In any event, happy new year! Steve

He’s just not using LMR 600 to connect to it.

No tuning required for either the CA-GMRS or the CA-712EFC. The CA-GMRS has an SO-239 (UHF female connector), but you can use a UHF female to N male adapter. Get a good one, not one of the inexpensive ones on Amazon.

It’s easy to happen. I’m not sure what would happen if you set something in menus 12 and 13 which are both for TX.

No, menu 13 is for the CTCSS TX tone. @WSGF380 should do as @OffRoaderX suggested and leave the RX CTCSS blank. If he insists on setting RX CTCSS, that’s menu #11.

You can’t really tilt a vertical antenna to manipulate the lobes. You get an antenna with a different propagation pattern. However, raising an antenna above the ground can change the lobes. You have only two ways to visualize the propagation pattern. One is by viewing the charts some of the better manufacturers provide. The other is to “build” the antenna in one of the simulation programs. Nor do you necessarily need LMR600 or hardline. But you must figure out how long your feedline will be and then select the type of feedline that has the losses that you can afford. And loss in a feedline is important, but it’s also unavoidable. You can go broke chasing perfect or you can live comfortably while settling for good enough. Most of us find that for base station runs of up to 50 feet, LMR 400 is just fine. For 100 feet and 465 MHz, the difference in loss between LMR400 and LMR600 is 1 db. (2.735 for LMR400, 1.75 for LMR600). https://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/ The Comet CA-GMRS might be a “good enough” choice for you. Because it has less gain it’s less directional and may be able to flood a hilly annd wooded area better. The Comet CA-712efc is a great higher gain antenna if you have wide open spaces and wish to have a strong signal within 10° above or below horizontal, but with less concern about higher or lower elevations. I live in a very mountainous area in Montana. I use the ham radio equivalent of the CA-GMRS and I use 36 feet of LMR400 for 70 cm. It works fine for my purposes.

Windows 11 drivers are much more aggressive at blocking the counterfeit chips used in some programming cables.

The simple fact that the radio thinks it’s a kt7900 afterwards indicates that something in the firmware has been changed. Perhaps it’s just parameters that get written by the kt7900 CPS, but obviously it has been hacked. And I see where you told Al Pachito about the low power after you applied the mod. He has no idea whether his power was reduced (he said). Is there a db25g CPS that would overwrite the kt7900 parameters?

TX DCS, menu 12

I don’t think it’s bad hardware. I think it’s just the way it’s designed. About three different places in the instructions say to leave it powered off while charging because otherwise it can’t tell the state of the charge.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you as well. Here’s a link to the regulations: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E

The regulations say nothing about being in the same household. They simply say: Any individual who holds an individual license may allow his or her immediate family members to operate his or her GMRS station or stations. Immediate family members are the licensee's spouse, children, grandchildren, stepchildren, parents, grandparents, stepparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and in-laws. But they do require that the licensed individual retain control of his/her stations while being used by someone they have authorized.

I can see how that would be a lousy antenna close in but different elevations. That’s the problem with high gain antennas at any angle other than the main lobe. Going back to what has worked in the past makes perfect sense.

Well, the good news is that 9-10 watts rather than 25 will not really affect your range too much. That’s only half of an S-unit on the signal strength. If you could get ahold of the service manual for the KT7900 and if you have the necessary equipment you might be able to do an alignment on it to restore full power. I’ve never done one; perhaps some of the others here (@nokones, @Radioguy7268, @gortex2, @tweiss3, @Lscott) could comment. But I don’t know if it’s worth it to you. Good luck! If you do get it figured out, please let us know what you did. Edit: some of the worst radio videos on YouTube surround this particular radio and I found no service manual, but there were some sketchy broken links that promised service manuals. I guess I don’t quite follow your description of what happened. You said your friend applied the kt7900d mod and then gave the radio to you, but you also implied that you had the original .dat file and said you lost it in a hard drive crash. In any case, if I ever get a db25g I guess I’ll know one thing to avoid.

And a factory reset doesn’t restore it to full power?

Unless you can be certain that someone else’s virgin dat files came from the same revision of firmware you’re better off not using a file from another radio. If you do need to go back to the original just do a full factory reset.