dosw

Nobody in Arches National Park is listening for a call sign so they can call back to a criminal they have on speed-dial in Atlanta to burglarize your home so they can split the ill-gotten gains. Nobody hearing your call-sign in Atlanta is going to assume that your entire family is out of the home just because you use the radio to talk to someone five miles away while driving home from work. These licenses are family-oriented. If you're concerned about the address being public, switch your record over to a PO box. But again, this is not a very useful attack vector. On any given day the FCC website probably doesn't even load. Anyway, your choice. But call signs being linked to mailing addresses has been the standard since the early days of ham licensing.

All properly configured ones do. (c) 467 MHz main channels. Only mobile, hand-held portable, control and fixed stations may transmit on these 8 channels. Mobile, hand-held portable and control stations may transmit on these channels only when communicating through a repeater station or making brief test transmissions in accordance with § 95.319(c). The channel center frequencies are: 467.5500, 467.5750, 467.6000, 467.6250, 467.6500, 467.6750, 467.7000, and 467.7250 MHz. Since these frequencies are explicitly reserved in the paragraph above for use transmission when communicating through a repeater, that designates these frequencies as the repeater inputs. And they are 5MHz above the 462.xxxx mains. The specification doesn't say that 467.5750 as an input must map to 462.5750 as an output, but any other mapping, such as 467.5750 input / 467.6000 output would be bizarre, incompatible with a lot of radios, and rather pointless.

I thought my post was pretty clear that I do not want 50 watts radiating a few inches from my face. But thanks for the links.

This is just a nitpicky question so I can arrive at a better understanding. Considering: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/section-95.1767 (47D/95E/Transmitting Power Limits) As I read it, the following device restrictions exist: All GMRS must be type approved. The 467 Interstitials (8-14) are handhelds only. The 462 Interstitials (1-7) are for mobile, handheld, portable, and base only (no fixed, and no repeaters) The 462 mains (15-22) are for mobile, hand-held portable, repeater, base and fixed stations The 467 mains (repeater inputs) are for mobile, hand-held portable, control and fixed stations. Additionally the transmit power on each: 467 interstitials: 0.5w 462 interstitials: 5w 462 mains: 15w for fixed, 50w for mobile, base, repeaters. (No mention under the "power" section of handhelds). 467 mains: same power restrictions as the 462 mains. The question is what is the limit for handhelds on the mains? They're omitted from mention under power requirements on the mains. We should intuitively understand that it's not desirable to have a 50w handheld with a rubber duck antenna adjacent to peoples' heads. In fact with the recent introduction of 8w GMRS handhelds (10w in amateur bands), it seems that manufacturers are (responsibly or not) exploring higher power limits than 5w for handhelds. There may be radiation exposure requirements that limit how much power a manufacturer can throw into a radio for the sake of selling "features" to people who don't know better. But within the FCC guidelines, what IS the limit for handhelds on the mains? (We should also know that it really doesn't matter. A theoretical 50w handheld is both unhealthy and more of a hand-warmer / battery-drainer than a radio).

If you are hearing crazy old guys talking on Sat night over ch 20, you're hearing a repeater. They won't hear you if you call out on simplex. You would need to figure out what repeater they're using, program your radio with the correct TX PL/CTCSS/DCS tone to access the repeater, and then retry. Step one: Find the repeater listed here in mygmrs, hopefully. Step two: Set your radio to repeater mode for that repeater's frequency/channel. Step three: Set the PL tone you learned from finding the repeater listed on this site. Step four: Call for a radio check.

Take power out of the equation for a moment and assume that the only thing that matters is like of sight (since that's actually 95% of what matters): The purpose of the repeater is to be located somewhere that has line of sight to two remote radios that do not have line of sight to each other. So if your repeater is up high, and the two radios that want to talk to each other can see the repeater, it doesn't matter that the radios can't see each other; the repeater relays the conversation. Now to further take power out of it, consider that with a 5w handheld radio a ham operator with a rather directional Yagi antenna can send a signal through the ISS (International Space Station) repeater, and someone else with a decent antenna can hear him a thousand or more miles away. The biggest requirement is that both parties have line of sight to the ISS, which is at an elevation of 1,243,200 feet above sea level (240 miles). So when there are no obstructions at all, 5w will travel hundreds of miles to the space station which may be passing hundreds of miles to the north, for example, but still within line of sight. That's not to say that power doesn't help. It does. If you have two people in a room ten feet apart, and one person whispers, the other person might hear it. Turn on a fan in the room, and now the person has to talk a little louder to be heard. Run a vacuum and the person has to shout, and may need to cup his hands in front of his mouth while the other person cups his hand behind his ear to improve the signal path of the voice. This is like both increasing power and increasing the antenna gain. Now put a 30 foot high brick wall between the two people. At this point the only way the two people will hear each other is if someone is standing on top of the wall to relay the message.

No, there WAS a travel channel 30 years ago. There is no travel channel today.

For GMRS: 64 miles from my home to the Promontory Point repeater. But I can easily drive another ten or twelve miles further out from it and still hit it, so 76 miles. But it is at least a couple thousand feet over the terrain around it. For 2m ham, the Snowbird repeater is an Intertie repeater. The repeater itself will reach Nevada and Wyoming (from the middle of northern Utah). But it's also tied into a linked network that extends into Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Montana, with multiple nodes along the I-15 corridor from Ogden to Provo. The Snowbird repeater is at 11k feet, with the valleys below at 4200-5200 feet. So propagation is pretty amazing.

Yeah, nobody's really watching GMRS that closely. Even amateur. But I'm guessing if you looked at the enforcement database for hits on marine VHF and aviation there would be some stories. Marine VHF has become less strict in the past decade; it used to be that you weren't allowed to talk ship-to-shore except to licensed shore stations. But a web search says that "In 2016 the FCC relaxed its rules and now allows portable VHF radios to be used “in areas adjacent to the water” when this use relates to the “needs of the associated vessel."

That radio is not made for transmitting on airbands, and it is, in fact, illegal to use it for transmitting within the airband. There are a lot of areas where you may get away with dumbassery, but transmitting on an aviation frequency with a UV5R is likely to be one of those areas where you won't get away with it very long. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/94091/what-licenses-do-i-need-to-transmit-on-airband-frequencies

This has been my experience, as well. There are better radios out there for a lot more. And there are worse radios for a lot more. There are not many better radios for less. I use mine with the stock antenna or a 771 depending on the situation. The UV5G Plus is the GMRS-correct, type approved version, of course.

There's this one from DX Engineering: COMPACtenna Model 2m/440 Dual-Band NMO Mobile https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/can-2m-440?seid=dxese1

Meter was connected backwards? The radio was on the antenna side of the meter, and antenna on the radio side?

For portability get a Uniden scanner. It will scan 25-50 channels per second. The Baofeng will scan 3 per second. And the Uniden will cover from 10m (maybe even 11m) to 33cm. For "as many frequencies as possible", an SDR. Even the lowly RTL-SDRV4 will pick up from 300kHz to 1.72GHz, with some antenna swapping necessary to get all that.

What are you trying to accomplish? Ham radio in the US, for the bands this radio is compatible with, is going to be 144-148MHz, 222-225MHz, and 420-450MHz. If you are transmitting because you have your amateur license, you would probably want a dual-band 2m/70cm antenna. If you are just listening, it's not as important to have a perfectly matched antenna. But typically an antenna like a discone antenna will cover a broad enough range to be useful from 108-509, for listening. If you are using the radio for GMRS the antenna should cover 462-468MHz. Again, a discone could be a pretty good antenna for 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and GMRS. Or the Comet CA2X4SR. Both a discone or the comet will be external antennas. For built-in antennas a Nagoya or even abbree would be fine so long as it's listed as working for the bands you intend to transmit on. There are a lot of other ham bands that are outside of this radio's capacity. But it covers the most common ones used with a Tech license.