SteveShannon

Why don’t you get your ham license. The technician test is relatively easy. HamStudy.org offers free study material at their website. Although I am not in Louisiana all the hams I’ve met have been very friendly. We need to encourage more young people to become involved in amateur radio and your enthusiasm is great! As far as GMRS goes, there’s nothing in the regulations that makes it less suitable for urban areas. In fact if you were to examine the database of GMRS repeaters I think you would find that the vast majority of them have been established to serve populous areas, not sparsely populated countryside property. Yes, the ability to share radios with a family benefits family businesses like many farms, but GMRS is just as useful for families who are living and working in a city. Unfortunately, there’s probably nothing that we can offer you that will change your father’s mind.

That’s what I get for posting while half asleep. I’ll delete my post. But in that case if you want to have a radio that enforces the band limits simply buy a Yaesu, Icom, Kenwood, Wouxun, and don’t unlock it. They’re all programmed to adhere to the band limits. Stay away from the cheap Baofeng, tid radios, etc.

Actually that sounds like a pretty cool activity, to try something like POTA and SOTA using GMRS. You could start small by just trying to contact other GMRS users from your local parks and summits and see where it leads. Welcome to the forum!

Eight 2 meter repeaters are listed in Repeaterbook for Orlando, twelve in total for Orange County. Two are Fusion or FM, one is DStar. All are Open If you click on the repeater you can see how recently it was reviewed. WD4WDW (Walt Disney World) was reviewed last October, for example. AC0Y was reviewed in December. AG4BV was reviewed in November. It has a 65 mile radius and a website. I could continue but surely there must be a repeater you can use.

Welcome!!

Also, lock the radio after programming.

I preferred HamStudy simply because of the great depth of information that is available to follow up on missed or even interesting questions, but I completely understand wanting to escape to a quiet place to study. For less than the price of a paperback study booklet, a stand-alone app HamStudy can be purchased for your phone or tablet, which allows you to take it with you and make use of its interactive nature even when off the grid.

In order to use a repeater, you must transmit on the repeater input frequency. In this instance it will be 467.650 MHz. That should be automatically done by your radio when you push the PTT, as long as you have selected a repeater channel. When you release the PTT your radio will revert to listening on 462.650 MHz. The difference between 462.650 MHz and 467.650 MHz is 5.000 MHz. That’s called the offset. The TX tone (menu 13 TX CTCSS ) is necessary. The repeater will ignore you if it doesn’t receive it. However, the RX CTCSS is under your control. If you have it set, whoever transmits to you, must have it set to match what you have set in menu 11 (RX CTCSS ). But, If you leave RX CTCSS unassigned, your radio will pass all traffic. If the radio you bought is not designed to be a GMRS radio, it will probably not transmit on GMRS frequencies. In that case it might give you the “please don’t touch me” beep when you push the PTT. There may be a way to unlock your radio so it works on GMRS frequencies, but I don’t know what it is. Unfortunately, I don’t have that model of radio. The information about frequencies and offsets and CTCSS tones above is true of all radios intended to talk through a GMRS repeater.

You did nothing wrong. As others have said, wait until there’s no traffic to avoid interruptions, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to see how far away you can reach the repeater. Extending your range is literally what the repeater is for!

And, in a truly SHTF situation, you can twist together a small number of components to make a 5 watt CW transmitter.

That’s really the key. Trying to count the dots and dashes and match them to a memorized character is not the way experienced CW users work. They recognize each sound combination as a whole. Modern means of studying emphasize that, rather than memorizing the written pattern of dots and dashes. That’s how language learning works. We learn to hear and speak our native tongue long before we get involved in spelling.

Great!!! You’ll do well.

We’ll learn together.

If you want to start a new thread and describe where your feed point is I would build the same antennas, hook the analyzer to it, and provide you with the results.

A hammer takes the lag out of a lag screw!

I think this is key. When GMRS is used like ham radio, where talking on the radio is the primary activity, such as social networking organized around a repeater, it will be attractive only to people who are primarily looking to talk on the radio. When it’s used as a communication tool while involved in an activity, everyone involved in that activity will use GMRS. If it’s a family activity, the entire family will be involved. So I think the way to get more people involved in GMRS cannot be centered primarily around talking on the radio, but rather around activities that are attractive to more people. However, I also interested in finding ways to get more people interested in talking on the radio because that’s key to growing ham radio as well as GMRS.

Every tool in the toolbox is a hammer except your screwdriver; it’s a chisel.

What does your wife say when you ask her what would get her more involved?

at’s ri<beep>

I wonder if this is linked to the issue you’re experiencing with a sudden SWR reading: https://youtu.be/MQacBNH0eXg?si=LmHEx9cnN7cfeI8i

Here you go:

The G90 (my understanding without owning it) has the ability to sweep (do an SWR scan between one frequency and another) and display the results on-screen similar to an antenna analyzer. I’ll look for a YouTube video that demonstrates the process.

I think you answered in the wrong thread. . I’ve done it before too. when you use the poster tube as a target I hope you remove the radio first. cheers!

Welcome to the forum!

Either sweep it with your G90 or get an antenna analyzer so you can really see where the dip is between 12 and 9 meters and what the effect is on the antenna of changing the length.