SteveShannon

Welcome!

M&P Ultraflex or Hyperflex 10 is the same diameter as LMR400 or RG8 (not to be confused with RG8x), but has stranded center conductors for greater flexibility. They also make a 7 mm variant but with greater losses of course. What's nice is that they make a POTA coax that's brightly colored to help prevent accidents and make it harder to lose.

You won’t find an American made GMRS radio. The pagers and radios issued to Hezbollah didn’t explode merely because they were made in China. In fact if they were really Icom radios they would have been made in Japan. If they were counterfeit I don’t know where they were made. It appears that someone intercepted the pagers and radios at some point after they were made but before they were delivered to Hezbollah and inserted explosives. Unless you’ve come to the negative attention of the Israeli intelligence forces I doubt you’ll have explosives in your radio. Welcome to the forum!

Just set it to Tone mode instead of TSQL and the receive tone is disregarded.

I’m certainly not bothered by it. It’s impossible to know everything that has been posted.

There are two different logins for this site. One for the repeater pages and a separate one for the forum. I think that’s because of the forum software. But once your browser remembers both logins you shouldn’t have to re-login. If you decide a post goes too far, close ck on the three dots and report it. Rich has been very responsive when I have done that, but I don’t report something just because it is personally offensive to me. l have been the target of OffroaderX’s “humor” from time to time, but he does more good than harm. He does a lot of good stuff for GMRS without ever patting himself on the back. So, if he refers to me as “Some People” or a “Sad Ham” occasionally I guess I can live with it. And yes, the forum software does automatically try to replace ascii emojis with bad blobby emoticons. Wait until you see what happens to @Hoppyjr quotations!

Welcome to the forums. * I use Safari, Chrome, Edge, and even Internet Explorer and have never stumbled across anything that failed to work. * I haven’t had to re-login for years. As you say it might be browser related. * The repeater map only shows what repeater owners enter. If otherwise verifiable repeaters don’t appear on the map it’s most likely because the owners didn’t add them, or you have the map set to show only active repeaters. After a year of not being touched by the owner the status changes to outdated and they disappear from the map unless you click that characteristic. * I disagree about the need for moderation. The site is moderated; it just isn’t constantly monitored. If something is too reprehensible or violates the rules we report it and Rich moderates. Although there are occasional disputes, we know how to report them, ignore them, or walk away. Again, welcome!

I’m waiting for a pen communicator “Open channel D” And now we know how old we are!

You might see a change to SWR, but comm results are the only thing that matters.

Absolutely. Those are two different things. Hams who want to help when a disaster strikes should not expect to just jump into action without training with the folks who have trained to provide emergency services so they can help accomplish the larger plan.

Maybe, but keep in mind that the magnetic mount is designed to stick to the metal with a designed in separation for the rubber pad that’s part of the magnetic mount base. Adding an additional sixteenth of an inch might be enough to reduce the effectiveness of having a ground. Try it and see. Or you might be able to remove the rubber pad that’s part of the mag mount base to make up for the additional rubber pad.

I’m on Spectrum, which advertises wide availability because they use the Verizon network. When I learned of the Verizon outage yesterday I fully expected to not be able to make voice calls. My friends with Verizon had no service, but I was able to speak to my friends in town on Spectrum. I don’t know if local calls are handled fully within Spectrum before being transferred to Verizon for interstate calls. In any case I had no service interruptions on my cell phone. Later in the day however I had really bad service using Teams on the Internet (also Spectrum) with frequent reconnections. After about half an hour it settled down and worked reliably but during that half hour I was cursing.

Watching on Device Manager, when I plug in my cable (with the other end inserted into the radio and the radio powered up) I see that Windows adds a serial port using the CH340 driver. The radio doesn’t say clone. When I choose write or read from the radio I see that it’s working. But, both of my radios were purchased about two years ago and they could be using a different chip now. A friend bought a new db20g a couple weeks ago and tomorrow maybe I can see what his has.

Cables don’t install drivers. Operating systems do based on what they read from the chip on the cable. The problem is, the operating system doesn’t always have the best driver to work with the radio. Sometimes they simply have a stub that was provided to them by the chip manufacturer. That’s why almost every radio manufacturer explicitly instructs users to download and install the driver before ever plugging in the cable.

This is the cable that came with the radios when I bought them. For this cable the correct driver is the CH340:

Hi Doc, First, make sure that you don’t have a tone set for receive. Or make sure the Tone mode is Tone, not T-SQL. That way you’ll hear everything you receive on the frequency. Second, if you’re trying to transmit with one of the two radios and listen with the other right next to it, there's a possibility that the one you’re listening on is being desensitized by being so close to the transmitter. Third, I strongly suggest that you edit your post and remove your cell phone number. You can always send it to one of us in a private message, but posting it on a public forum might result in your phone number being harvested by bots and you becoming targeted by scammers. I have obliterated it from the quote box above. Finally, It is possible that people just are not monitoring the repeater and for that reason you might not get a response. See if the repeater has any kind of net scheduled. If it does that might be a way for you to connect with others. In my experience ham radio repeaters are more likely to have people monitoring for unscheduled contacts. Welcome to the forum. Your goal to help others during emergencies is admirable!

Make sure Tone squelch is turned off.

There are a lot of different threads with a lot of posts and for the past several months the whole linking subject has been discussed a lot. It’s just impossible to see them all.

That was discussed earlier beginning with this post:

See if you can choose squelch mode “Tone” instead of TSQL. Then it will disregard the RX tone.

1. An amplifier is still a transmitter (anything that transmits is), but there are additional rules regarding amplifiers. 2. Try finding an amplifier certified for part 95E.

That’s not the rule. The limit applies to the output power from the transmitter. § 95.1767 GMRS transmitting power limits. This section contains transmitting power limits for GMRS stations. The maximum transmitting power depends on which channels are being used and the type of station. (a) 462/467 MHz main channels. The limits in this paragraph apply to stations transmitting on any of the 462 MHz main channels or any of the 467 MHz main channels. Each GMRS transmitter type must be capable of operating within the allowable power range. GMRS licensees are responsible for ensuring that their GMRS stations operate in compliance with these limits. (1) The transmitter output power of mobile, repeater and base stations must not exceed 50 Watts. But more to the point that won’t make much of a practical difference anyway.

This is absolutely correct. In traditional DMR programming you end up with a channel for every combination of talkgroup and repeater. It’s not uncommon to have a hundred different channels for every repeater. Then, in order to use any channel it must be added to a zone. It’s much, much easier in OpenGD77/OpenUV380. You build talkgroup lists and then you simply associate each repeater to a talkgroup list. Fortunately, extracts or even the entire database of talkgroups are very easily downloaded. But as @BoxCar said you don’t need to know anything about how DMR works to take any of the ham exams. If it’s even mentioned on the Extra exam I don’t remember it. There might be a question about digital modes in general, but if you never learn anything about it you can still easily pass the test.

You say Chirp works fine with your other radios, but is that with this same cable?