SteveC7010

Good points! I set my CDM1250 for all GMRS channels to default to 5 watts. If I need to, I can switch to high power, but that's not often. I realize that the update 95A isn't effective for a while longer, but I have the radio on the bench right now so I've changed all the GMRS channels to match the new specs. There's not a lot of traffic up here anyway so I won't be interfering with anyone.

I think that Motorola designed the radio to run at max or nearly max power. Now if you spend a lot of time rag chewing, it might be best to drop the power a bit. The hotter you run the PA and finals, the more chance of premature failure of a component. For a UHF mobile, in the CPS programming I'd set high power at 40 watts, and low power as low as possible, probably about 20 watts. I have a 25 watt CDM1250 for UHF. It will go to 30 watts, but I keep it at 25 for high power and 5 watts for low power. It gets out fine on a quarter wave antenna on the roof of the truck.

I run CDM's exclusively. My POV has a 50 watt VHF CDM1250. I leave Tx Power set to 45 watts for high power, and 20 watts for low power. If you enable one of the programmable buttons as High/Low Power, you can use the high power when needed and run low power the rest of the time.

You've got it backwards. To access a GMRS repeater, you transmit on the 467.xxx frequency and receive on the 462.xxx frequency. If you wish to operate simplex and just talk radio to radio among yourself and your friends/family, you transmit and receive on the 462.xxx frequency. Perhaps this graphic will help you understand the concepts better. (The frequencies are different, but the concept is identical.) http://i920.photobucket.com/albums/ad42/Steve_Collins/Misc%20radio%20stuff/Simplex-Repeater-300x273_zpsdwctou0p.jpg

Log in through the License Manager and you can update name, mailing address, and email address for a specific license. https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsEntry/licManager/login.jsp You use your FRN and Registration System password to log into the License Manager. This is where having all of your licenses both operator and station, associated with a single FRN gets real useful.

You can log into the Registration system and update your contact info any time. I am not sure if they'll accept a spelling change on the name online, but you can check while you are in there. https://apps.fcc.gov/coresWeb/publicHome.do As for the call sign, GMRS folks are not nearly so anal as hams about phonetic spelling of your call sign. I would never insist that a GMRS user use phonetics. If it was an obviously difficult situation like lots of background noise or other obstacle, I might ask that they use phonetics. And, on GMRS, if someone used Adam instead of Alpha, it's not a mortal sin.

Most VEC's won't submit testing results without an FRN these days. If they insist on an FRN and you don't have one, they'll have you get one on the fly before you take the test. It only takes a few seconds online to get an FRN. If I recall correctly, I had to provide my FRN number when filling out the paperwork just before or right after the test. When your license is processed and granted, you can view it through the ULS search and double check the FRN. If you did not apply for one at the testing site, that's a fair sign that the VEC correctly used the one from your GMRS license. If, by some remote chance, you end up with two FRN's, you can go to the FCC's Registration System and manage things. Typically, you'd combine all of your licenses on one FRN for ease of future maintenance. The empty FRN is then voided. I manage the radio station licenses for our town. They had two separate FRN's, one for each license. I combined them all one FRN. It makes things much simpler.

All the channels are very close together so it it highly unlikely that there will be much difference from channel to channel. Find a quiet channel and have at it. Just understand that your radios transmit at 0.5 watts for the FRS only frequencies and about 1.5 watts for the GMRS and GMRS/FRS frequencies. That means that you should be able to reach out further on any of the GMRS or GMRS/FRS channels. Just remember that terrain and buildings can be obstacles to radio signals. Elevation matters, too. Woodlands can impair them, but you'll have to experiment in your particular settings to be sure.

According to info on RR, the R&O was minimally discussed and passed as published. Now we just have to see when it goes into effect. I am going to fix the programming in my radios of .650 and .700 now since we'll be above Line A in the near future. Yippee!

I looked over the manual for that radio, and it doesn't appear that it can do repeater frequencies. Channels 15 to 22 are GMRS simplex channels. Feel free to use any one of them. Generally, pick one that no one else in your area is using to avoid interference. I would encourage you to read the manual and get familiar with all the features that radio has to offer.

Just a short comment that R&O will not go into effect until 90 days after it is accepted by the FCC. I live right on Line A so I've still got .650 and .700 flagged in my radios as a reminder not to use them if I go north. There's very little GMRS traffic to be heard up here anyway. I do wonder if the restrictions will be magically removed from our licenses after the R&O goes into effect.

As you are discovering, there's not a lot of attention paid to GMRS by most industry publications. That's probably because GMRS is a "set it up and use it" radio service. Some folks have tried to turn it into an experimental service, but that's not its intended use. The new Midland radios, and now the release of the draft Report and Order have certainly sparked some attention from the publications, but it will be brief. Presuming that the draft is pretty much the final shape of the R&O, there will be some new handhelds from the manufacturers, but they'll mostly be bubble-pack models for the unlicensed FRS crowd. You will find that mygmrs.com is a primo source of information and help on GMRS. There's also a lot of useful info over on radioreference.com. If you're looking to build a home brew repeater, repeater-builder.com is the place for info.

For your radios to talk to each other through the repeater, both radios should transmit on the 467.675 frequency and receive on 462.675. Transmit on both should be set for the PL of 141.3, but leave receive on carrier squelch or CSQ for now. That way you will hear all traffic on the channel and know if you are getting through the repeater. If there's interference from other users, etc., you can always enable the Rx PL later on. As Dahwg pointed out, you need some space between your two radios and for exactly the reasons stated. A block is probably a bit much, but start with 20 feet and see how it goes. With a little experimentation, you'll find the sweet spot. My Motorola gear doesn't have this problem, and I can have them both on in the truck with no desense. Edit to add: If I were in your place, I would disable the offset and just manually program both Tx and Rx to these frequencies. I hear more folks having problems with incorrect offsets. Better to just set each frequency and know it is right.

Doesn't it just figure? My license expires at the end of May '17, and it's highly likely that they'll adopt the 10 year license period sometime in the fall. I'm wondering if I should just let the license expire and re-apply when the new rule goes into effect, or take a chance that they'll include recent renewals.

James, I just looked up your license, and it contains the same restrictions that Robinson pointed out: Licensees who operate North of Line A and East of Line C may not operate on channels 462.650 MHZ,467.650 MHZ, 462.700 MHZ and 467.700 MHZ unless your previous license authorized such operations. That seems pretty clear to me. If you'll read Part 95a, you will find that there's no limitation on power beyond the standard 50 watts mobile or base, and 5 watts handheld. In the proposal that the FCC just released, they clearly admit that the "small base station" and "small control station" rules are antiquated and no longer apply to today's equipment and operations so any lower power restrictions in that section are meaningless. Those rules were applicable back when you had to list control locations on your 605 application. Since we are no longer required to list specific transmitter locations on GMRS license applications, the low power restrictions can not be applied to us.

Mounting a UHF antenna on the bumper of any vehicle will yield very poor performance. The body of the vehicle will block the signal for 180 degrees and there will be almost no ground plane for the other 180 degrees. This is not a good idea. UHF behaves much differently than the lower frequency bands. It is a proven fact that drilling a hole and mounting an antenna will not detract from the resale value of the vehicle. There are caps available for the NMO mounts or you can remove the mount and seal the hole with a rubber plug. Both are specifically marketed for this purpose. You will get drastically improved performance by simply mounting the NMO in the middle of the roof and using a 1/4 wave antenna which is only about 6" long. Moving to a gain antenna can further improve performance, but at the cost of a much longer antenna. I'd recommend trying the 1/4 wave spike first.

Let's remember that the OP wants to build a Part 95 compliant repeater. I think that rules out some of the really good used gear that is out there.

I think that any of the new Midlands would be a poor choice for this. You'll want to verify this, but I would be surprised if they're rated for any more than 5% talk if that. In repeater use, they will overheat rapidly and probably fail early on. They just don't have the heat sinking that commercial or professional grade radios have. For $150 or less, you can find a good used Motorola M1225 that will hold up much better than the Midlands, especially if you lower the power out a bit. There are other Part 95 mobiles that would work comparably well. You'll still want to provide extra cooling. A muffin fan works well. I think your HamTronics receiver is overly expensive for what you get. It doesn't even come in case, and you have to purchase the coax separately. You can pick up any number of different commercial grade mobiles for around $100 that will perform equally well. Remember that the receiver does not have to be Part 95 certified. Regardless of your choices, you still need to add in the cost of a decent power supply plus the transmission line and antenna. The ID-O-matic is OK I guess. If it was my project, I'd use a pair of Motorola M1225's and a repeater interface from Ebay seller mre1032. I'd program up the radios identically so that they could be swapped if there's a problem. The two radios would cost barely a half to 2/3 of what you're suggesting, and will perform much better and longer.

If I lived in a populous area with lots of traffic, I'd probably log some contacts just to keep track of everyone. But I don't live where there is lots of activity so no need to log anything. However, if I were to run an event with lots of radio traffic, I'd definitely keep an log but that would not be for contacts but rather for requests, etc.

The license question has already been answered for you several times. No need to keep posting the same question in different threads. For the rules: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2009-title47-vol5-part95.pdf Read back through some of the threads here. Part 95 has been extensively discussed on this forum. and those threads should answer most any question you might have about iterpreting the rules.

Repeater operation on the 8 GMRS repeater pairs is covered by the standard GMRS license. There is no special license for GMRS repeater operation. Licenses?

Besides being illegal for use in GMRS, I think you'd find the simplex repeater (store and forward) really annoying in very, very short time. By "BF" I am guessing you mean Baofeng? Your abbreviations are not necessarily anyone else's. Better to use the full word. Yes, you can use a Baofeng for the receive part of a repeater, but you won't be happy. It will be desensed by the transmit side, and isn't a particularly sensitive radio for this purpose. If you're serious about building a repeater, get a pair of decent mobile radios. Interconnect them properly and use a decent duplexer and antenna. If it was me, I'd use Motorola CDM's, but I already have the software, cables, and experience with them.

You have GMRS and FRS confused. FRS has the limitations on non-removeable antenna, etc. GMRS has no such limitations except those listed in 95a and 95e. 95b and the applicable sections of 95e contain the FRS info. Nowhere in 95 is a GMRS type accepted radio radio prohibited from transmitting on 97 frequencies. In fact, radios used in 97 have no required type acceptance except for those sold commercially have to be Part 15. If you reverse GMRS and FRS in your last sentence, you would then be correct.

The Motorola CP200XLS can be programmed for high (4 watts) or low (1 watt) power on a per channel basis. I'm pretty sure that the 1 watt setting on an FRS channel would cause adjacent channel interference unless you were sitting right next to the repeater antenna. It pretty much meets all of your requirements. While the radio was recently discontinued from production, depot service is available for several more years plus many repair shops can work on them. They're widely available on the used market at very reasonable prices. I manage an inventory of 20 of these radios for our ambulance squad. We're quite pleased with them.

Be patient. It may take a few days for the board's database to catch up with the FCC.