Now that I as well as three original gmrs guys are hams we still talk on gmrs daily and monitor it as much as possible to keep it alive and well. Just because it indeed is our families last line of coms. It helps to have a good quality repeater in a thoughtful spot that has good coverage to benefit more people. I never think about the cost to get equipment. I think about value if the grid was indeed down. Every day it looks more and more that it could happen.
If you can't afford the $70 license fee you likely can't afford to buy a radio either. That solves both problems.
At $70 that's just $7 a year or $0.134615 per week. You likely have spent more than that buying something at the local Golden Arches food emporium.
So ive been running a wouxun mobile as a base station for over a year now. It has earned its spot in my ham shack having no issues in over a year. I am getting a couple other brand radios to cover some ham frequencies. Several times in this past year Ive tried to find a reason to dislike this radio that many of the super powers in this forum call junk.
i havent run across any to date. We set up and use repeaters which are in very close proximity to very important repeaters. The radio equipment that are being used for the actual repeaters and link radios are a different brand and that is mainly a duty cycle performance of known components. But I have used the repeater with my wouxun radio with no interference in either direction,
Some of my ham buddies have switched to the 1000g to run gmrs. One in particular has ove 50 years in the radio world and he describes the 1000g as being solid. So much so that he ordered some more wouxun to run as mobiles. He runs radios for hours every day and continues to say they are solid. I agree completely.
So if you are on the fence about this brand, I would say with malice that the 1000g is a great selection for gmrs.
WRMK691, KI5UCM
GMRS and Ham are different services. GMRS is about 50 cents a day. Just pay for the license like everyone else. GMRS is cheap compared to a LMR license.
