WRQC527

Just curious... How is your radio wired? Directly to the battery, through the cigarette lighter, to the fuse box, etc?

In my humble opinion, hams calling other hams on GMRS defeats the entire purpose of being a ham in the first place. There may be situations where everyone in a group has a GMRS license but not everyone has a ham license, so hams would be calling other hams on GMRS by necessity, but for me, if everyone in my group is a ham, we stay in our own yard.

Wow. 616 words. I think this is a new mygmrs record.

This gentleman's agreement is so universally known and adhered to that it's actually built in to a lot of transceivers. If you select a certain frequency on a 2-meter tranceiver, for example, it will automatically know if it's a repeater frequency that needs a positive or negative offset, or if it's a simplex frequency. Same with HF radios. Traditionally, different bands operate on either upper or lower sideband. Radios will automatically transmit on these upper or lower sidebands depending on the band.

Count me in that group. A perfect example is the WinSystem. They have repeaters and nodes linked in all over the world. Jam one of them and you're jamming all of them. One idiot starts transmitting a siren from his Baofeng or going on a 30-minute political rant and it gets transmitted out of every repeater and node on the system. Plus, it takes away a local repeater pair and instead we're linked in to drivel from some insomniac in the UK during our drive time. I don't even think it's a potential problem, I think it's an ongoing problem. Not only that, it's populated with self-appointed audiophiles who pride themselves in providing nothing but unsolicited signal reports. Sorry, linked ham repeaters are a hot-button for me.

Absolutely. It's a tough sell to get people to understand that for as many similarities there are between GMRS and ham radio, (push the button and talk, your voice comes out of someone else's radio), GMRS and ham are completely different in a lot of ways in terms of their intended uses and user base. It's more likely you'll hear someone on GMRS say real quick their Jeep is stuck again, but on ham you'll hear a 75 year old giving you 15 minutes about how his gout is flaring up for the fourth time this week.

All I know is that in Southern California, between Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, Santa Barbara and San Diego counties, there's well over 400 70cm repeaters. Some have the same frequency pairs.

My wife isn't interested in getting a ham license, but I wanted to have some way to contact her through a repeater from someplace like Mt. Baldy here in Southern California where cell service is pretty spotty at best, and occasionally on my commute home from work. Still, 99% of my time is spent on ham radio.

Personally, I don't see a reason to add new repeaters here. There are so many underused ones here already. But my repeater club wants to add a 440 repeater to our site that we lost when the guy who had the pair we were using got mad and quit letting us use it. Basically we need to wait until an existing pair is available, like if another club or individual wants to give it up.

Yep, and the problem with that is, for example here in Southern California, ham repeater pairs are hard to get. TASMA and SCRRBA coordinate repeaters, and there are already so many that adding new ones is darn near impossible.

$370, probably closer to $400 including coax and antenna, for a 2-watt five-channel transceiver, hard-wired into a vehicle that's parked 90% of the time, no repeaters, and arguably the smallest user base of all the radio services. Hard no. I'll stay with my GMRS and ham gear.

Don't forget, arguments between hams and GMRS users are always fun too! Although a lot of us fully embrace both.

Dang it looks like he had to close down due to poor health.

There's a company called Ventenna that makes such a thing for evading the HOA secret police. I imagine your solution was much cheaper and just as effective.

In my experience, these stubby antennas are a major compromise if they work at all. The one I tried, a Browning GMRS unit, was so far off resonance that it was unusable for GMRS. Some folks have good luck with them. I stick with 1/4 wave VHF and 1/2 or 5/8 wave UHF antennas. Even with them on top of my van I can still fit in the garage and I can easily hit repeaters.

Yep, and what's worse is that the original post was a simple question about the effect a rubber cover had on the performance of a magnetic base antenna, and that question was satisfactorily addressed early on.

Some folks say putting a "no ground plane" 1/2 wave over a ground plane works better. In my case, my Rugged Radios 1/2 wave doesn't work any different on my van than a quarter wave or 5/8 wave.

Repeater courtesy tones, like roger beeps on simplex, are a good thing. They let everyone know when someone unkeys so there are fewer "doubles". The disdain comes from folks using roger beeps on repeaters. Once you use a repeater with a courtesy tone, you miss it when it doesn't work, like on my club's repeater.

That's true, that's true. Baofengs are notoriously slow scanners, but if you kind of know where to scan, you can save a few hryvnias and spend them on some Khortysta Platinum for an after-action bunker celebration.

Especially since being an FM analog HT, a cheap Uniden handheld scanner can listen in.

Here's a video from a few months ago discussing the sinking of the Moskva by Ukraine. From the 57 second mark, check out the Baofeng UV-5R. In other news, I've seen images and video over the years of various combatants on Middle East battlefields with mag-mount CB antennas on their Toyota battle trucks. Russian warship 'Moskva' sinks in Black Sea: What does it mean? | DW News - YouTube

Because people respond to him instead of putting him on their "Ignore User" list like I did the first time he tried to sucker me in to an argument. Believe me, the forums are much more enjoyable that way.

Yes, the sensors are hard-wired but they are triggered by electrical pulses generated by a Hall-effect slotted ring on the wheel hubs. My guess is that these electrical pulses break the squelch on the radios, which is very annoying. It doesn't happen on all my radios, and not in all my vehicles.

My van doesn't have tire pressure monitors. It uses the ABS wheel sensors to monitor the rotating speed of each tire. If a wheel is rotating faster than the rest, as it would be when the tire has lower pressure and therefore a smaller diameter than the others, it triggers the low tire pressure warning light. Very effective system. And it only works when the van is moving. Another possibility is the vehicle speed sensor or its associated electronics.

As an unashamed ham/GMRS user, one thing I hear a lot that clearly differentiates ham radio from GMRS is the idea that old hams will make it a point of updating everyone, whether it's on HF or VHF/UHF repeaters, about their health status and that of their spouses. Strokes, heart attacks, oozing wounds, various surgeries, the entire spectrum of medical issues, are covered ad nauseum. GMRS doesn't normally include that kind of conversation. It can get depressing.