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It’s good that you got the correct antenna. They sent me the wrong antenna. I ordered the same package as you and received the MA02 dual band ham antenna and not the MA09 Gmrs antenna. It had a SWR of 4.21 and my VNA showed it tuned perfectly for 430 MHz. I sent them pictures of this and they told me it was the right antenna and that 4.21 was good enough. Then they told me my test were invalid. I went back and forth with them but eventually just disassembled the antenna and tuned it for Gmrs but I shouldn’t have had to do that. They never admitted they did anything wrong. There’s more to the story you just wouldn’t believe but I’ll stop now. Still love the repeater though. Just sharing this so hopefully others won’t have the same experience.

Just for info, I had the watts increase on my RT97s from a little over 6 watts to 7.5 watts after having it powered up for a couple of weeks. so my experience is the same as yours. Also interesting to read about your embedded message experience. As far as Retevis support, I’m not too impressed for reasons that I won’t go into. My experience was you might get a answer to a simple question, but any real technical question or have a problem and it gets a pull a rabbit out of the hat answer. Good thing I didn’t ask anything important. That said, so far I love the repeater and it works well. The antenna, well that was another story.

Good topic you started Leo. I’m working on a similar setup as you. I tested mine with my base station antenna that’s up in the attic and get 4 to 6 miles with my mobile and 3 to 4 with a handheld. That will cover the little town I live in. I plan on a solar panel and a battery for power eventually. Im hoping to get my mast up next week if ups can ever get it here. I’m going the flag pole route (with an extension) since I live in a neighborhood. Should get me to 40 feet. That was some inspirational pictures posted here. I’m at about 250 ft. elevation and the town is below me about 60 ft so adding 40 more feet may help. We will see if it does. With my base station and attic antenna I can get 15 miles easy at 50 watts to my mobile but need something for when I’m not sitting at the radio desk and in the car. I figure the repeater will allow 2 HT’s to talk when they normally wouldn’t be able to due to obstacles. So far, so good.

Your cracking me up where I almost blew my coffee out of my nose! LOL

Just wanted to post something I found today. Just got a RT97s and the latest RT97s programming software from the Retevis website has some bugs. It won’t update things such as key lock and keeps asking for a password. Downloaded the older regular RT97 software and it worked very good. Recommend the older software if you have issues. Plus the new GUI doesn’t look anything like the older version and some settings are in places that dont make sense. Hope this helps someone out.

When I picked rock, it came back in Chinese. Canceled and picked paper and got English. Seems ok so far though but strange for sure.

Thanks gman. I’ll look into that NanoVNA.

Thanks Lscott. That’s exactly what I’m seeing after some more testing today. With the LMR-400 cable I was able to get the SWR to 1.58 with some tweaking and it’s still good (actually a little better on high power) with the RG-58 cable on the factory mag mount base. Sad note on the Midland MXTA26. As seen on multiple reviews they almost cut the whip antenna a bit short. I had to raise it to the highest level that the Allen screws would still hold it to get the 1.5 SWR.

Thanks. That’s info I was looking for. I’ll check that out. It’s the Midland MXTA26 and it didn’t come with any length instructions in the package but I’m sure I can find them online. I didn’t adjust anything initially for the antenna used on factory supplied mag mount that came with the radio that used RG-58 because the SWR was 1.01 and it functioned OK. Based on the factory cable specs it calculates to losing about 2.7 dB over the length of the cable. It was then I tried some better LMR-400 cable and that was when the SWR jumped to 2.3 for the midland antenna. I’ll be using it to transmit on GMRS frequencies only so it may indeed be too long and need some trimming so I’ll look into that. Thanks again.

Thanks. Yeah, I don’t have anything to measure impedance at the moment. I’ll have to try and come up with something. That’s something on my I need to get list. I figured higher loss cable may dissipate some of the reflected power but needed a second opinion. Thanks.

I’m relatively new to antenna tuning and am wondering about coax quality effects on SWR. Here is my situation. My setup: I picked up a Midland MXT 500 along with a Midland MXTA26 antenna. They are both good in the original configuration and I get good range to a HT. SWR is 1.01 on GMRS low channels and 1.38 on higher power channels? Next I picked up a base antenna for the house with 25 ft. of LMR-400 cable and get 1.03 on low and 1.48 on high channels. I’m good with that. Here is where I start chasing the rainbows: In the pursuit of more actual power actually being transmitted, and since the Midland magnet mount antenna uses 20 ft. of some “high loss” RG-58, I have the urge to use some better cable and ditch the magnet mount since my truck would permit using a 10 ft. run of LMR-400 with very minimal bending. My issue: I did some testing of the Midland MXTA26 antenna using the 25 ft. of LMR-400 that works well with the base antenna, but I’m getting a SWR of 2.8 with the Midland Antenna and a one piece UHF to NMO adapter used for a Jeep mount setup. I did use a 12 inch disk as a pseudo ground plane but it made no difference one way or the other. The question??? Would lower loss cable cause the SWR to increase from 1.01 to 2.8 requiring the antenna to be tuned a bit. The only thing I cannot test on something else is the UHF/NMO adapter but there is nothing to that and everything ohms out good. Id hate to do any antenna modification if it won’t work anyway.