Program only the transmit tone in your radio. Leave the receive tone blank or set it to TONE rather than TSQL. That will allow you to hear the repeater and anything else that’s on that frequency.
Second, make sure you are close enough to the repeater to hear it. Many repeaters simply don’t have much traffic so you might not hear anything, but if you are close enough eventually you’ll hear something.
@WSCL528 You said you receive from the repeater on 462.700 MHz. What frequency do you transmit to the repeater? The traditional input frequency for the repeater would be 467.7000 MHz, but some repeater owners have chosen other frequencies from the eight available.
On my phone:
click on the hamburger
click on browse
click on clubs
That will show you the club directory.
Scroll to the bottom and click on “start a club “
It looks like you’re planning to put one repeater in each home. If that’s so, how do the homes communicate with each other? You can’t go repeater to repeater.
Or are you planning one repeater, centrally located, with all of the family members bouncing off it with the handheld radios?
I have the same trait. Almost all engineers do. Usually it’s fun. Sometimes it’s frustrating. If you decide you want to try to make the pieces into a GMRS antenna I’ll do more research.
I wouldn’t discard the pieces. Some ham would enjoy playing with them.
I don’t know how it will affect the gain. The saying with antennas is “Everything affects everything.”
Do you have an antenna analyzer?
I wouldn’t start hacking away based on my suspicions. But if you can take things apart in a way that allows you to put them back together easily, then feel free to play around.
Not badly. You’ve only cut off some metal. You can always replace it.
Is the center coil (which I think is a trap) easy to remove from the lower element?
Do you want this antenna to be usable on two different bands or just GMRS?
If the answers are yes and just GMRS, then take the upper element and trap coil off and see what the bottom element measures for SWR on 433 MHz. If it’s good, then you can start tuning it for 462-467. You shouldn’t have to remove much and maybe you can test it with the pieces left over from the top.
Are you trimming above the center coil or below? I suspect the lower element was the UHF element, the center coil is a trap, and both elements combine to form the VHF element.
1. So you are asking about transmitting on one of the channels not set aside for transmitting to repeaters and receiving on another. Like 462.550 and 462.675?
There’s no prohibition against that but it needlessly ties up two channels.
The new question pool is already available to download for free.
But honestly if you learn and understand the concepts in the old test you should be able to pass the new test. The concepts haven’t changed.
Are you on a repeater channel? You will hear the repeater on the 15-22 channels but you won’t be able to transmit to the repeater. Those channels are setup for simplex and don’t allow an offset. Channels 23-30 (or whatever they’re called on the uv5g) will have the offset.