SteveShannon

Look on the repeater page for repeaters near you, then request access to those. 
There isn’t one single repeater for the forum, just a whole bunch of individual repeaters owned by people. 
Welcome to the forum. 

"can it?" - Depends on the repeater "may it?" - yes, it is allowed by the GMRS rules.   AFAIK, there are no rules/guidelines on what tones you can or cannot use, but there are standard ones, which inverted tones are.
Further, there is no advantage (none that matters in the real world, for most people) to using inverted versus normal vs DTC vs CTC ..

You answered your own question. An amplifier is a transmitter which requires FCC certification.

I care because I don't want GMRS to turn into 27 Mhz. There are too.many CBers already on GMRS trying to ruin it.



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I am impressed!  You’ve certainly gotten the most out of that combination and in a heavily wooded, high humidity area with an antenna lower than the canopy.
The use of the amplifier is something I haven’t seen others do; good job!
 
The 200 mile range mentioned by wrxp381 is  highly unusual except between high elevations and across deserts, which bear no resemblance to your swamp at sea level. 
As long as you’re epoxying the radome, you might consider drilling and epoxying (or screwing) in some pins to prevent the halves from separating. 
I would not worry about tuning that antenna. You’ll truly never notice the difference between a VSWR of 1.5:1 and 1.3:1. 
As you know, your feedline is attenuating quite a bit of signal though and in both directions.  That’s your most easily identifiable avenue to getting more power, but it could also be expensive. 
Again, I’m impressed!
 

That is true, but doesn’t matter.  The “effective” radiated power (ERP) is the product of the power input to the antenna, times the gain relative to a half-wave dipole.

An amplifier is a transmitter and transmitters sold for the GMRS service are required to be certified for part 95e. 

I play solar all the time.  I have a system in my truck I use to power tools and if needed I can power my house.  Depending on what you can keep the temperature of the battery at when you put it into a hole you might consider a LiFePO4 battery.  They also have self heating batteries that will make sure the battery will stay warm enough to allow charging.
  Not sure if you are limited by size of funds but if I were to do this I would use a 50 or 100Ah battery with a Victron 10 or 15 Amp controller and a 100 watt solar panel.  Or possible a pair of 50s in parallel to try to avoid shadows from killing power output.  One of the main issues with a LiFePO4 battery is it's low temperature charging.  Usually 32ºF is the low limit, which is why I suggested a self heating.  It will deliver power until the temp gets to -4ºF but won't charge until 32ºF.  Or you could stick with the AGM battery, but make it much larger so it can hold more power so it doesn't get to a low enough discharge that it stops producing power for the repeater.

I know a few members do emergency volunteer work. Anyone have a legit portable repeater setup?
It's been about a year since I setup my portable "shack". Since the weather was nice today and I have a new repeater to field test, I figured I would do a dry-run at home before I setup in an actual emergency.
It takes about 3 hours to deploy the portable setup with HF, VHF, and UHF amateur radio and GMRS. So, needless to say, unless it's a multi-day drill or real emergency, I'm not going all out, but it was time for that dry-run.
I have a dedicated mast for the homemade 80m/40m/20m/10m OCF dipole, and then an additional mast for the VHF/UHF antenna(s).  In these pictures, there is a Yaesu DR-1X and a Icom IC-7300.
 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

Every station is required to ID once every 15 minutes and at the end of the conversation whether you’re on a repeater or simplex.  You are not required to identify as different units when the call sign is shared amongst family members, but you might want to.  
In reality very few people follow the identification rules and nobody has died as a result.

Every station is required to ID once every 15 minutes and at the end of the conversation whether you’re on a repeater or simplex.  You are not required to identify as different units when the call sign is shared amongst family members, but you might want to.  
In reality very few people follow the identification rules and nobody has died as a result.

Every station is required to ID once every 15 minutes and at the end of the conversation whether you’re on a repeater or simplex.  You are not required to identify as different units when the call sign is shared amongst family members, but you might want to.  
In reality very few people follow the identification rules and nobody has died as a result.

Welcome!  
Look for YouTube videos on the Notarubicon channel.  His channel has presented more GMRS information than any other that I know of.  
Hopefully, some members from your area will comment also.

Every station is required to ID once every 15 minutes and at the end of the conversation whether you’re on a repeater or simplex.  You are not required to identify as different units when the call sign is shared amongst family members, but you might want to.  
In reality very few people follow the identification rules and nobody has died as a result.

Love how they say "Yes, people still use these"

Every station is required to ID once every 15 minutes and at the end of the conversation whether you’re on a repeater or simplex.  You are not required to identify as different units when the call sign is shared amongst family members, but you might want to.  
In reality very few people follow the identification rules and nobody has died as a result.

I disagree. In any serious military action, satellite communications would probably be targeted very early like most infrastructure. They’re one of the most vulnerable assets because they can be taken out either physically (an orbital EMP, directed energy weapon, or simply a missile) or virtually by hacking.  I suspect the routines to do the latter are loaded and ready to be used. 
Military satellites would be more protected of course.

Antenna spacing is critical when the frequencies are within the same band or one (or both) are using high power. CB is essentially HF (below 30 MHz) while GMRS is UHF (462 - 467 MHz) or 20 times higher in frequency. Your spacing should be at least a quarter-wave length of the UHF channels or 15 CM.

I had on my truck dual firesticks on each bed rail and then had my mxta26 on the roof about 2.5ft away from each firestick with no issues.

General rule of thumb is to space antennas apart by 1/2 to 1 full wave length. A full wave length for CB is 11 meters/36 feet. A half wave length is 5.5 meters/18 feet. So you would want your GMRS antenna at least 18 feet away from your CB antenna horizontally. You can put antennas closer together vertically if you have the space to go up and down.

Yes.

Here’s a link to the video:
 

I have a similar sense of being lost whenever I work on my wife’s Mac. 

There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy is when people don’t know what you’re doing.
Privacy is often used to mean that, but can also mean that you reduce the chances of being disturbed or interrupted. The way the question was answered in the “test” makes it obvious that’s the meaning the OP intended. 
That’s why there’s a classification level of “Top Secret“ but not “Top Private.” ☺️

The only reason for me not to play with the internals is the warranty.  If it was out of warranty I'd be in there like nothing.  And I do agree that it's unlikely that the duplexer has slipped.  And what I mean by that is one of the adjusting screws got loose during shipping and has been slowly moving taking the duplexer out of tune and bringing the receive/transmit ratio out of whack. 
This repeater shouldn't be able to output 8.5 watts from the duplexer.  And the wattage shouldn't have increased since I tested it at the beginning.  I've double checked with a couple of HT which I marked their output wattage on the inside of the battery compartment when I got them, and they are the same as before.  Tells me the power meter is still working right.

No worries!