WRQC527

You may want to find a scanner like a Uniden or Whistler, or even a used Radio Shack scanner that will range into the UHF and higher frequencies. CCrane appears to focus on the lower shortwave frequencies up to VHF. Could be a marketing decision, could be because of the expense or technical challenges. Or both. Either way, a scanner may be your answer.

Some folks say military radar can interfere with frequencies around the 400 to 500 Mhz frequency range, and has been known to play havoc with amateur radio repeaters in that range, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's the issue. Just a thought. There's a linked amateur repeater network called the Winsystem that periodically has to shut down or disconnect 440 repeaters because of this.

True, true. Lytle Creek has one that might work, but it appears restricted to just Lytle Creek Canyon, Keller Peak is about 30 miles, Big Bear has one on Sugarloaf, both of which I've been able to reach from the bowels of Wrightwood. But I'm always surprised at how a 2-meter signal can get out under the right conditions. Ya, ol' Jack Torrance... If he only had a smart phone... But then it would have been a much shorter movie.

Which is why I also mentioned ham repeaters. The idea is not to rely on a cell phone and have multiple options if you're going to do something stupid like this.

Perfect example. Thank you for posting this. There was a guy over the weekend who got his SUV stuck in Lytle Creek. He couldn't get a cell signal. They finally found him after he barely got one text out to his girlfriend, but if he had a radio (GMRS or Ham), he could have given his exact coordinates from his phone even without cell service, to any of a number of repeaters within reach of Lytle Creek.

Thanks Steve, I set up an account just in case. I wouldn't mind getting another Pi for experimenting, and back in the day when I had a functional Model 3 set up as a desktop, I had CHIRP loaded on it. My understanding is that CHIRP was originally designed to run on Linux.

This could be fun though. Sometimes people just wake up on the wrong side of the bed, but this guy seems a lot more firmly-rooted in his beliefs.

"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.