WRQC527

Also remember that just because your handheld can hear the repeater, the repeater may not be able to hear your handheld. Repeaters put out a lot more wattage than a handheld, and do it through a much better antenna system. The repeater I maintain puts out well over 50 watts and is located at almost 6,000 feet, giving it coverage from Santa Barbara to San Diego. My Handheld at sea level cannot always reach it even if I can hear it, normally due to terrain or obstacles like buildings.

You should hear me at genetic research symposiums though. I have them rolling in the aisles.

That's because I'm a wannabe comedian, not a wannabe genetic researcher. Lighten up a little.

I've had two radios that act in a similar manner. The first one was a Wouxun KG-UV9T handheld, the other is a Juentai JT-6188 mobile. Both of them are virtually unuseable as mobile radios in my 1998 Sienna because some signal generated by the vehicle is breaking the squelch randomly. My guess is since it only happens when the van is moving, it has something to do with the ABS or vehicle speed sensor circuits. In any case, the squelch circuits in those two radios are unable to deal with the signal, whereas with my Yaesu mobiles and handhelds, I have no such problems. Another thing is that squelch settings on the Baofeng radios are not as effective as they are on, say, Yaesu radios. I have 2 UV-82s, and in order to set up decent useable squelch settings, I used Chirp and went into the service settings and adjusted them there. I don't know if the same settings option exists for the GMRS-V2 or the UV-5R. With the JT-6188, the squelch settings are useless. Zero is wide open, 1-9 are all the same. I'd bet $100 in Monopoly money that you're having the same issue I had.

Seriously though, I'm able to get in to both the main mygmrs.com and the forums. Whatever it is may be local to your device, internet provider, network, etc. Maybe clear out cookies, restart your device, etc. I'm no IT professional, I just know that with the right amount of tampering and profanity, I can usually get my computer to work. In fact, I coined a phrase at my house... "Don't underestimate the power of profanity."

Works for me. Maybe one of those balloons we keep shooting at got through to your internet provider. I mean, we got three of them just this week, not counting the big one that toured the U.S. on a sightseeing trip for the better part of a week.

There are not many reviews for this specific tuner yet, but if you can believe the 11 reviews on EHam and 52 on Amazon (at the time of this writing), they're mostly favorable. Although there are some folks who have problems with them. Remember that there are numerous manufacturers and importers and for this type of tuner. Some good, some not so good. You're always rolling the dice when you buy something for really really cheap that's advertised to do the same thing just as well as something much more expensive. Hazard Fraught Tools, for example, operates on this business model. https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=14860 https://www.amazon.com/SDRGEEK-1-8-55MHz-Automatic-Shortwave-Assembled/dp/B08QDFQ465#customerReviews

You must be a riot at parties.

I use the repeater name or an abbreviation of the repeater name on all my mobiles and handhelds.

Lol you just watched a bunch of folks who probably have no idea what all that RF wattage is doing to the gene pool. They're running multiple alternators and megawatt amps. Basically two guys line up, aim their mobile beam antennas downrange, rev up to several thousand RPM, key up, and each yells a different word. Someone five miles away reports back which word they heard better, that guy wins. Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.

This is one direction CB radio has gone. I think this is what is missing from the GMRS world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PjjL9WmFsc

I'm actually glad you posted this because I had forgotten I have an account with Goodwill and now I found a handheld scanner I might buy if it doesn't get overbid.

Yep, it takes an FNB-80Li battery, which fits something like 10 different Yaesu, Vertex and Standard Horizon radios, including the VX6/VX7. I saw one at a thrift shop once without a charger and it looked like it spent most of its life submerged in saltwater, but it still powered on.

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.