SteveShannon

When you say you hope to network with others, do you mean people or network linked repeaters? I took your statement “network with others“ to mean you would like to meet other people who have an interest in GMRS.

Welcome to GMRS. Billings is one of the few places in Montana with multiple GMRS repeaters.

Who said anything about networking repeaters?

If it’s a solder type connector then it must be heated until the solder flows where needed. The flux alone won’t do anything. I use a Weller temperature controlled solder station, but any good soldering iron will work if you have enough heat to flow the solder quickly without damaging the insulation. If you’re not sure you might want to use preterminated cables. I wouldn’t use anything less than LMR400 for UHF except for very short runs. I don’t know what kind of connector you have. This video shows the most common solder connector:

Well, I’ve got a few cans of that too for plumbing, but it’s bad flux for electronics. For electronics you want to use rosin core solder and rosin flux. Acid core solder will eventually destroy your electronics. But it might take a while so in the meantime you might repeat the same mistake over and over, creating even more problems for yourself down the line. It’s really not unmanly to read the instructions first. What did you use to heat the connector while soldering it? I like to use M&P evolution connectors. The shield doesn’t require soldering and the center connector takes less solder and less heat than some others. M&P has some good videos on YouTube also.

UHF will happily bounce off rocks.

Yeah, soldering connectors can be tricky. What kind of flux did you use?

I would agree that it’s probably a bad connection, possibly a solder joint or possibly as simple as a loose set screw that clamps the radiator to the antenna base.

The antenna is probably a fiberglass tube surrounding a metal element. Without knowing what you have it’s difficult to say how to tune it or even if it can be tuned. But it’s much more difficult to tune an antenna without an antenna analyzer anyway.

Have you rebooted?

I suspect his bumper sticker says “Born to be ignored”

You’re right; it’s absolutely wrong and probably written by someone who has never visited one of the more rural states. One of the civic duties our ham radio club volunteers to do each year is provide communications for a 127 mile bicycle race. We can hit our repeater fine for almost all of the course, but cell service is only available for a small portion. The cell companies have little or no motivation to build cell towers where the density of humans is single digits per square mile, even though roads pass through.

Works for me:

Same here.

Elevation relative to sea level is irrelevant. AGL is relevant. Just express things relative to each other.

It’s one choice. There are others and without a basic familiarity with your situation I would not make a recommendation. What exactly are you trying to do?

Any tunable GMRS antennas will work as long as you have enough distance between them. Vertical separation requires less distance. A duplexer is easier, but has its own disadvantages. Tune the transmit antenna to 462.xxx and the receive antenna to 467.xxx where both frequencies are from the appropriate Main frequencies.

Are these for GMRS? Do you have an experimental license that allows you to do DMR on GMRS? What channels do you want to use? What is it that you’re having problems with? What have you tried, what do you hope to achieve, and what experience do you have? More questions will almost certainly arise; you gave us very little information to start with.

The radio plus repeater setup in the pictures is not GMRS and will not support GMRS radios.

There are steel disks that are peel and stick on one side to attach to your roof. Then you just stick the magnet to it.

This^^^ I’m an admin on three Facebook groups, including one with 10,000 members. It’s a thankless job except for the really nice people, which fortunately is most of them. This forum is remarkably well behaved. Sometimes a person gets impatient or drunk posts and makes an idiot of themselves, but for the most part we all get along even though we may disagree.

Relax, forums are meant for conversations and sometimes conversations meander, especially when the original subject has been exhausted. Calling people idiots almost never works. Of course, neither does telling someone to relax.

I agree, but it’s a different situation. HK went from being a British colony to being basically given to the PRC by the British. Taiwan has considered itself the rightful government of China (Republic of China) since 1947, and thus part of China. The PRC considers Taiwan as being part of China also, but obviously disagrees about whether they’re the rightful government. The United States has implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) stated that they would protect Taiwan from PRC aggression. Nobody except Taiwan is in a position to negotiate away Taiwan’s independence, but a change in philosophy by an incoming U.S. president could signal less commitment to protecting them which would result in a takeover by the PRC. I worked in Taiwan and grew to love the people there. I would hate to see them betrayed by our government.

Garmin is made in Taiwan. At least the one I have is. China might think it has a claim to Taiwan, but at least right now they’re separate politically and philosophically.

I used to use Tapatalk for the too many forums I belong to, gun forums, rocket forums, programming forums, and radio forums, but one of the forums discontinued Tapatalk support and I changed to using Safari. It seemed to work better and allowed me to access everything on all the other forums so when I replaced my phone and iPad I just never loaded Tapatalk. I’ve never missed it. There were a few things I just couldn’t see in Tapatalk, maybe related to sigs. But Tapatalk was fast and a fairly thin client that worked well when the phone I had had less memory. I have nothing against it; I just moved away from it.