SteveShannon

Now that takes me back to my younger days!

And don’t be surprised to receive a stupid answer; I do it all the time.

50th

Some people like to follow regulations. Using a certified radio makes it easy to select a channel and be sure it’s programmed to the right frequency, with the right offset (if any), at the right output power, and using the right bandwidth to avoid interfering with other channels and services.

CCR is Credence Clearwater Revival if you’re my age, but around here it is shorthand for cheap Chinese radio. As @OffRoaderX said it’s intended to denigrate. There are a few other abbreviations that you’ll run into: PL is short for Private Line, which is what Motorola marketed as their implementation of CTCSS. There are other abbreviations for this as well. CTCSS keeps your squelch closed (radio audio output silent) unless it detects a specific audio tone included in a transmission. DPL means digital private line and is the same thing except with a digital code instead of an audio tone. It also has several other names such as DCS and DTCSS. Neither DTCSS nor CTCSS provides any security but they do serve to reduce interruptions.

You can use an SWR meter, but the dummy load won’t do anything to hep you determine the SWR of the antenna. WRYZ926 is correct when he says that an analyzer (or a NanoVNA) is much easier. An analyzer will show you the SWR over a range of frequencies. To get similar results with an SWR meter you would have to transmit on a range of different frequencies and record the SWR for each frequency. You’ll have to do that at a power level that is high enough to register on the SWR meter, not only for forward power but for reflected power. At lower power’s some SWR meters simply don’t register the reflected power and show an artificially low SWR. The dummy load is useful if you need to test transmit on your radio, but because it replaces the antenna you can no longer see the reflected power coming from the antenna. With most decent dummy loads you simply see an SWR of 1.0:1 full range. If you do choose to use an SWR meter to analyze SWR across the entire GMRS range, be aware of the fact that power output changes for different channels on a certified GMRS radio and that the frequencies are not spread evenly or ordered according to channel number.

The data looks right. Do you hear anything at all when you just listen on 462.650 with no CTCSS or DTCSS? If not, maybe the repeater is down. Tune your other radio to 462.650, no tones or codes, and give it to a friend or family member. Have them go to the other end of the block while you transmit. All they need to do is listen. If they can’t hear you on the repeater, maybe it is down or you’re out of range.

I doubt that it’s broken. I reported your post to the owner. He should be able to help you. Good luck!

Shit happens.

Thank you! That shows me how I was wrong. Damnit. Edited to add: wrkc935 was right!

Welcome!

Ahhh, Team “Drill It!” Yeah, I missed that also.

That seems like a good solution. Would it also take advantage of the “Unit Number“ field you have now?

I’ve heard of it happening with ham radios but usually higher power than MURS. You might check to see if your GFI is truly grounded. Sometimes GFIs are installed in lieu of a ground wire in older homes.

What do you mean by “team drill”? What mount do you like?

But really I’m just building up the nerve to install permanent NMO mounts in the roofs of my pickup and my 4Runner. I saw a comment on a YouTube video yesterday where a person attempted to denigrate the YouTuber for punching a hole in the roof of his new truck. It made me wonder again why we own vehicles. Aren’t these vehicles supposed to improve our lives? I would argue that in at least an incremental way, having an antenna permanently mounted, with neatly hidden coax and a nice mount for the radio makes our lives better than having to worry about the coax whipping around in the wind at highway speeds.

A GMRS repeater is no different than a ham UHF repeater. Any ham familiar with setting up a ham repeater would be able to set up a GMRS repeater. Here’s what you need: GMRS license. Knowledge of regulations (read https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-95/subpart-E?toc=1) GMRS repeater configured to the channel you intend to use and configured to auto ID. Duplexer tuned to the same channel. Antenna tuned to appropriate frequency. Appropriate transmission line, probably hardline. Power supply (consider backup batteries.) Tower. Assorted hardware to mount antenna, support transmission line, etc. Lightning protection and ground system. See https://reeve.com/Documents/Articles Papers/Reeve_AntennaSystemGroundingRequirements.pdf (or more complete Motorola R56 document) A place to put it all.

That’s it. Every vote sends a message. Collectively the message can be heard.

I’ve had decent results with the Midland mag mount. My friend down the street picked up a Comet mag mount and it seems to work very well also. Both of us use the Comet SBB5 for 2 meter and 70 cm and I use the Midland MXTA26 for GMRS.

I also haven’t given up hope and I’ve been voting for nearly fifty years. During that time I’ve seen both good and bad candidates from both parties, but I’ve always felt like my vote counts. And I’ve seen the difference in results, especially at the local and state level.

Look, I didn’t tell you that to start an argument. I did actual work on the generator syncing and transmission protection systems for generators in four different utility power plants and visited several others. Every one turned the generators at 3600 rpm when generating. The prime movers varied from hydroelectric turbines (the Nisqually project in the nineties), to coal fired steam turbines (Colstrip power plant from 2005-2008, largest thermal plant west of the Mississippi at the time), to dual fuel gas/diesel turbines at the David G. Gates plant until I retired in 2015. All of these plants spun their generators at exactly 3600 rpm. They would trip offline if they sped up or slowed down. All were three phase system with the Colstrip 3 and 4 units generating 740 megawatts each. That’s how utility generation works. Each winding adds a North and South Pole and gets you another phase. If you insert a second winding in a generator you get another lobe of generated power that is offset by some number of degrees. If you add a winding that’s perpendicular to the first winding, you end up with a full AC wave in each winding and each wave is separated from the other by 90°, but you don’t double the frequency of a single AC system, regardless of what your article says. Each winding is its own AC system. I don’t understand what kind of generator they’re talking about when they say they can add a set of poles to generate AC at 120 Hertz. Four poles would result in two sets of North pulses followed by two South pulses. Because the poles must be diametrically opposing you can’t arrange the windings to get a north pulse followed by a south pulse followed by another north pulse followed by a final south pulse, and if combined they won’t look like the clean 120 Hertz sinusoidal AC power that electric machines require. I think they would only be useful for generating DC and then fed to an inverter. So, as I said, I just don’t understand how the generators cited in the article you pasted work as described. That’s not to say it’s not possible because there are clever engineers out there, it’s just not the way it could work in any AC generator whose controls I ever worked on. Now in a car alternator they do keep adding poles, but the goal isn’t to generate higher frequency AC. They’re rectifying the power produced by each pole before combining it for DC.

You can scan for the output tone and try it for the TX tone. Many repeaters use the same tone on input and output. Or you can get closer to the repeater and listen on the input frequency and scan for the input tone.

Give it a week.

By the way, your third row has the right setting for DPL. D065N

That’s okay that it’s not certified. Lots of people use non-certified radios. I’m not gonna point fingers. There are two ways to program the right transmit frequency. One is to simply insert the two different frequencies into the RX frequency and TX frequency columns if the software accepts that. The other is to insert the RX frequency into that column and then insert an offset frequency of 5.000 MHz into the offset column and hopefully the software will add the offset to the RX frequency and put the right frequency in the TX frequency column.