WRQC527

"A joke. A story with a humorous climax." ~Spock

We have a jammer who jams several ham repeaters in SoCal, and when he gets bored with those he hits a GMRS repeater or two. He's very recognizable because he uses the same script on all of them.

Are you expecting a lot of pedestrian traffic IN the attic?

Is this for AMSAT?

On my ham repeater, zero. We have a hard and fast rule not to respond to or even acknowledge jammers. A response is what they are looking for. It is the reason they do what they do. If no one responds, and if we continue to talk over them as though they don't exist, generally they move on. It may take a few minutes, but they eventually go away.

Ladder line is wierd stuff. It's 300 ohm or higher, and requires baluns, transformers, tuners, etc to work on a radio that needs 50 ohms. But Mostly used on HF. There are military NVIS antennas out there that use a specially designed support pole as coax. All very specialized and probably not worth experimenting with for anything but HF. Coax is cheap, easy and reliable. DIYing feedline to save money is probably an uphill battle.

Tones are not exactly secret. They're often unpublished, though. Repeaterbook lists thousands of amateur radio repeaters across numerous bands, and even a few GMRS repeaters. Some are open, some are private, some are closed. In probably the vast majority of cases, the tones are listed. Not so with mygmrs. Even if you have an account, the tones may not be listed. That said, you don't need to scan for tones while someone is transmitting. You can simply painstakingly go through all of them until you stumble on the right one. However, this is cheating and will likely cause the repeater owner, who has a financial stake in the repeater, to harbor negative feelings toward you, because you are now mooching off his repeater without asking. I do not recommend this approach.

Courage has nothing to do with it. I had no idea hammy ham was slang for what you said it's slang for. I just think it sounds stupid and condescending. This thread has gone so far off the rails that I've made it my New Week's resolution to give up responding to it. We'll see how long that lasts.

1.) Think before you xmit, if you can't think of anything to say avoid the PTT button. This applies to every radio service ever created, and is universally ignored by at least some folks on every radio service ever created. No one has a monopoly. 2.) Q codes (thanks to group poster for that reminder) Q codes were invented to cut down on the character count when communicating with CW. They have almost no place in voice communications of any kind. This is one that many ham radio operators are guilty of, and if it's migrated to GMRS, only hams can be blamed. It must be stopped. Sooner rather than later. Today if possible. 3.) Weather, Arthritis, Space fillers (see #1). This situation is caused by user boredom, and can be cured by primary productive activities. If it were not for health problems and weather, many hams would not have anything to talk about. But, and this is a big but, there are plenty of hams who do not fall into this trap. GMRS users who are not hams sometimes fall into the weather / space filler trap. Not as many, because they're often too busy winching their Jeeps out of the mud after trying to impress their girlfriends, who are predictably not amused. 4.) Keep it short... Think "utility". (probably get hollered at for putting it in quotes) This is the first time I've seen you use quotes properly. Hams who use GMRS for ragchewing need to go back in their own yard. However, I've heard plenty of ragchews on GMRS repeaters between non-hams. Some people just like to talk, and the radio enables them. Just like CB.

What tone? Connected how? I haven't had a Raspberry Pi since the Raspberry Pi 3 came out years ago, but back then I did need to add an external USB sound card to mine. Things may have changed since then. What exactly are you trying to do with it that is causing it to emit a tone at all? Like SShannon said, you've given us just enough information so we have no idea what the heck you're doing.

So is MURS, but no one says MURSY. Or MURSY MURS. Let's hear a sample of those grievances, by the way. A teaser, if you will. Come on. Just one. Please?

Do you hear anyone else saying "GMRS-y" or GMRS-y GMRS" or "GMRS-type license"?

Being an extra-class amateur while using words like "hammy" and phrases like "ham-type license" tends to throw shade on your credibility. It's not that we don't want to see your extensive list of grievances with the amateur radio community, it's more that I don't want you to feel pressure to waste an entire weekend doing it.

Don't trouble yourself. Seriously. Don't.

I'm going to make a suggestion. Keep GMRS for the reasons you cited. Car to car, simplex kind of stuff. You can't beat the audio quality and antenna compactness of GMRS, especially when you compare it to CB. Get a ham license so you have access to more repeaters and a wider array of bands and frequencies.

I think this guy is simply parroting the same anti-ham rhetoric that he reads here. So far he hasn't offered any concrete examples of bad habits, only vague references and disjointed posts.

Just curious, how far apart, and what kind of obstructions are in the way?(Houses, terrain, foliage, structures, etc.)

Absolutely, as well as bandwidth. GMRS has a very limited number of set frequencies, so proper etiquette often dictates short transmissions and like you said, short-distance communications, whereas ham radio has an incredibly wide range of available frequencies and modes across numerous bands, and covers everything from short distance simplex to global communication. Where the OP is going off the rails is by driving that overused wedge farther between ham and GMRS, as so often happens here. Truth be told, I'm sitting here listening to a couple of guys on a GMRS repeater here in SoCal who have been ragchewing for the better part of an hour.

I would hazard a guess here that the "awful habits" brush you paint the general ham radio community with is that hams tend to talk more, and that "awful habit" doesn't fit with the GMRS service. Ragchewing on a GMRS repeater is probably not part of the use case for GMRS, but the reality is that it happens. Remember that they are two different services, with at times completely different use cases. As a GMRS user, I keep my transmissions short and sweet, usually on a repeater that I am a paid user of. As a ham, my ham friends and I carry on discussions on my repeater that last quite a while. I have no intention of unlearning anything. What I do is treat each radio service with common sense, and use each one for what it's pretty much intended for, paying special attention to the rules and guidelines of the repeater owner. There are GMRS people here who cannot stand hams, and there are hams here who have a hard time with GMRS folks. Then there are those of us in the middle with dual citizenship who can't quite figure out why either side is sniping at the other side, and who would much rather see everyone play nice.

I just ordered a new UV5R from Amazon on 2/17/23, got it on 2/18/23, and right away programmed it with ham and GMRS to see if it would transmit out of band. As expected, it wouldn't. After performing the standard unlock sequence, GMRS works. The firmware version is HN5RV01.

?

That makes sense, up to a point. The reason being that your base station with 50 watts can transmit farther than a handheld. Meaning that your handheld may be able to hear the base, but the base might not be able to hear your handheld. The trick would be to not travel farther from the base than your handheld can transmit. You can also transmit to someone closer to the base and they can relay for you, but that's assuming there is someone between you and the base. There's lots of variables to this, like how high the camper is, the terrain, etc. The way your circles are configured in your diagram would mean that your handhelds would not be able to reach the base. Just because the circles overlap a little doesn't help you. The base needs to be in the circle your handheld covers. Hope that makes sense.

And now, Templeton, we've come full-circle back to your original post "Better understanding how GMRS repeaters work". This is a real-world situation. Repeaters are "Operator 3".

This is already the single most extensive thread on this site. If you're communicating with someone else who is covered by your license, they need to ID with that license. That's it. They can add their name, a number, a letter, a location, whatever they want, as long as they ID with that license. Simple.

Oh yes. I picked up my license last year so I could contact my wife when I'm out of cell coverage in the local mountains. I'm a ham, she's not really interested, so the no-test-one-license-for-the-whole-fam-damily-for-a-penny-a-day works for us. Also, a lot of off-roaders, overlanders, etc, are using it. Maybe there's someone like that who frequents this site who can elaborate.