SteveShannon

Hear hear! A person always needs a handheld radio to throw in the pocket of a coat. You can use a handheld radio with a mobile antenna or a base station antenna for many basic purposes. Beginning with just a base station or just a mobile station doesn’t allow the same flexibility.

I have a TYT UV-380 that I replaced the firmware with the firmware from the Open UV380 project. It works well as both an analog and DMR radio. Fit and finish seem to be good and one of my friends tells me it has the best sound reproduction of any of my handheld radios. I like it. I haven’t tried the TH-UV88, but the review that @WRUU653 provided will give you an idea.

Handheld plus a spare battery at first, preferably inexpensive and simple. The Baofeng UV5R is a good one to learn the basics. Then, as you learn what appeals to you you can always get something else.

Usually we hear reports of it going the other way or swapping low and high power.

Last time I checked it still wasn’t available in Chirp. That has been a month probably.

Go back to the original antenna.

I have two db20g radios. To answer your question, no I have not heard of problems receiving like you described. Desense is a real possibility, but I would not expect it if you are 60 yards away from the db20g while transmitting. I understand you’re 100% sure of your tones, but it would be an easy thing to test. Turn off the receive tone on the db20g and see if that helps. I have seen radios that transmit everything except the voice sounds. That can happen when the microphone hole is plugged or when the microphone signal wire is separated somehow.

You wuz took! Actually, if you bought it as a GMRS radio (single band) there’s probably no need for a coil and capacitor. They’re there on my antenna because it was a dual band antenna.

Really they’re a GPS with a sunlight visible screen, a full set of topo maps and a GMRS radio . Several members of my rocketry club got them because Garmin pioneered sending locations between GMRS radios. In our hilly terrain it means we can find someone who might have gotten hurt. Also, I think my Midland and Motorola GMRS radios were from Malaysia rather than China. They were not $20 radios, but they weren’t $400 either, maybe $100 for 2? I guess the moral is this: if you want a $20 radio, it will almost certainly come from China. If you want a quality radio from somewhere other than China, be prepared to pay more money. They are available though.

Garmin radios are still made in Taiwan I believe. Mine was anyway.

Mine didn’t until the radio it was on fell and landed on the antenna and the white core the wire is coiled around broke. It gave its life so we could study it.

Mine was a TidRadio 771, but it has a coil and a capacitor from partway up on the coil to the shield. Here’s my picture. Notice how thin the coil wire is? I bet yours has a coil under a layer of insulation and it’s just not visible.

2.15 dbi is exactly the same gain as a half-wave dipole. Yes, it’s low gain. What makes you think that you need to upgrade the antenna that your radio came with?

Different radios require different spacing. I’ve heard of desensing out to 50 feet. I’ve seen it at eight feet or so with Baofeng radios. My Yaesu radios work fine even though they’re next to each other. I suspect Motorola commercial radios can handle it fine.

It’s not unusual at all to transmit from radio A to a repeater but be unable to hear your own transmission on a nearby second radio, radio B. B is desensitized by its proximity to the relatively powerful signal from A. As long as others can hear you don’t worry about radios in the same room as you.

Mobile units could be designed to have lower output power, but the regulations specifically limit transmission on the 467 MHz interstitials to handheld portable radios, so there's no reason for the manufacturers to do so: 467 MHz interstitial channels. Only hand-held portable units may transmit on these 7 channels. The channel center frequencies are: 467.5625, 467.5875, 467.6125, 467.6375, 467.6625, 467.6875, and 467.7125 MHz.

I assume your Aubree and Smiley antennas have SMA connectors. You might be able to find a right angle adapter with pl259 on one side and the appropriate SMA connector on the other side. MaxGain has a good selection of adapters. https://mgs4u.com/rf-connectors-and-adapters-list/

The 0.5 watt ERP limit on interstitial channels applies to GMRS radios as well. FCC documents show that the reason for the 0.5 watt ERP limit was to avoid interference with the surrounding repeater channels.

I think @kidphc was thinking you meant the oem rubber duck. He’s right about poor quality elbows causing problems, but there shouldn’t really be an issue with a higher quality one. The thing is they just weren’t originally designed for true UHF. the PL259, even though referred to as a UHF connector, was designed for much lower frequencies. It’s too bad the GMRS manufacturers don’t install N connectors on their radios instead of SO239s.

When you ask about using an HT antenna, do you mean the oem rubber duck or are you asking about using an Aubree or Smiley as mentioned in your second paragraph? As long as it’s rated to handle the power (which you already alluded to), and if you’re using a high quality 90° connector (I like Amphenol) you should be just fine. Try it. See if the antenna gets warm. Just be aware of the fact that your RF exposure will increase proportionally.

I live in a very low traffic (GMRS traffic) area. I might leave the RX tone out so I could avoid doubling with someone on simplex.

That’s very true. Doubling the power of the radio shortens the battery life by 50% without significantly increasing the range. I would run it at the lowest possible power level anyway. It has three different levels and the lowest at 3-4 watts will usually get you as far as a UHF signal will travel anyway due to topography.

I have no idea. I don’t have one. The big battery is nice. It has a big battery, larger buttons, and a nice size screen and nearly 10 watts output for some testers. The price today at Amazon is down to $48. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, but besides those features it’s nothing extraordinary. The most negative review of it that I’ve seen didn’t like the $120 price tag and had a sample unit that put out 7.5 watts. I suspect he would feel differently about $48 and 9.5 watts.

If you’re going through a repeater you must have an offset, but sometimes the offset doesn’t appear in the offset column. As long as you’re transmitting on 467.xxx and receiving on 462.xxx where xxx is the same for both you’re fine.

HRO, Gigaparts, and DX Engineering all sell them. Just add it to the order. N connectors are generally considered sealed as well.