n4gix

"Private" most often means that permission must be obtained. You are right that a truly "private" system shouldn't even be listed.

Now this is a phased array! It is the infamous "Duga Woodpecker" in Russia.

I get tickled at those who list as a "Network" who only have one repeater.

When I had my repeater here at the house on a dedicated UFH antenna at 32' I was getting about 10 miles HT, 15 miles mobile.

For UHF frequencies, a + would be 5 MHz up and - is 5 MHz down. So 462.xxx + = 467.xxx

I posed this as a "Trivia Challenge" at last evening's club meeting (Lake County Amateur Radio Club). I asked, "Which of the following is correct?" HAM ham HamThe majority (29 of 32) chose #2 as being correct. Some wag pointed out that #3 would be correct only if used as the first word in a sentence, which is nothing but proper grammar of course.

At my club's board meeting last evening, I made a motion that we as a club make it known that GMRS licensees are welcome to become auxiliary members. Discussions will be ongoing for the next few monthly BoD meetings. Hopefully my motion will be passed and then we can present the proposal to the general membership.

Which is precisely what has been written above. I just used fewer words...

Some areas of the country are a hot bed of GMRS, many other areas not so much unfortunately. I went to a "breakfast get-together" with 16 men and 2 women who represent a few of the owners and users of three GMRS repeaters, two of which are in northwest Indiana and the third in lower southwest Michigan. These three repeaters are among those who're Zello-linked with several other repeaters: see: http://NWIGMRS.com

The voice message is often used to make periodic announcements of upcoming events, such as club meetings, special events, and so forth. Alternatively, it can be used to replace a morse id such as "This is the W9LJ VHF repeater" or "You are listening to the N9IAA repeater" both of which are real announcements currently being used.

I had the same wisdom from one of my teachers six decades ago. I took it to heart wholly and it has served me well, especially when I was a work-study in the university library during my graduate days...

Merry Christmas, Festivus or whatever holiday you celebrate, along with my best wishes for a terrific New Year!

Odd then that nothing but GMRS UHF channels are listed... Even more odd is that the wrong emissions designator is listed: 14K5F3E That should be 14K4F3E

Although a "dual band" radio, I don't think it supports VHF frequencies...

Here is a link to the manual: https://apps.fcc.gov/eas/GetApplicationAttachment.html?id=4088274

That is a very nice looking radio!

Given your stated use case, then you should be able to accomplish it well within your budget. I've been out of the LMR business for thirty odd years. When I was in business in deep southeast Texas we had a gentleman's agreement to make tower space available at no cost to other LMR owners all along the Rio Grande Valley on an even exchange basis. Rarely did we charge tower rental except to ranchers, oil drillers and other businesses who owned their own repeater system. Even then monthly rent was relatively inexpensive if they also bought the heliax and antenna(s). Even so, I should have anticipated that finding space for what is essentially nothing more than a "hobby" would be very difficult and/or expensive due to the proximity to Chicago. I tried for over a year to get the Hammond, IN city council to let me use one of the many unused antennas on their two 250' towers at the City Hall. They haven't used any of them since the city abandoned their analog systems and switched to P25.

There are also several rather large systems using Zello to link repeaters, as well as providing access to licensed GMRS operators from their smart phone or a hardware Zello device.

While Bridgecom repeaters aren't FPP, they are very easy to program via a laptop and the programming software. Another neat feature is that provided you are going to use separate antennas (avoiding a duplexer entirely), you can program up to 16 separate channels, which each channel allowing for multiple access tones (so each subscriber can have their own tone). Each frequency has a remote operators tone and password to allow for enabling/disabling subscriber's tones, and even changing frequency channels remotely. The control operator can also shut down the repeater remotely, then bring it back online when wishing to resume service.

You are most welcome. I didn't want to be a "Debbie Downer," but I do want to share the benefits of my own experience. Even though I really did know better, I should have made a search for a suitable tower location my very first task! I did find what would have been an ideal site in Crete, Illinois. The tower owner had a DB-408 antenna at 325' on his tower with fairly recently installed 1 1/4" heliax... ...but at $1/foot rental/month was totally out of my means!

I can vouch for the quality of the Kenwood TK-880 radios. They are rugged, reliable and very professional radios! I have had two of them in constant use for the past three years.

CDM1250 will program just fine on either 32bit Win95 or Win XP "DOS Box" using the USB cable. I programmed two of them for a portable repeater I built and sold several years ago.

It's irrelevant anyway, since that is only the radio deck, no mic, control head or any cables come with this unit

Well yes, if you happen to live on a tall hill or better still a mountain top, your effective footprint will be quite a bit longer. Alas, few if any of us have such at our disposal. My part of northwest Indiana isn't noted for its mountain ranges. For about 16 years, we had a wonderful pair of GMRS repeaters at the top of the John Hancock building. When the repeater owner left WGN he had to remove the repeaters and antennas as he no longer had access to the room where they were installed.

There are currently 3 TK-805 available on fleaBay for $75. Programming cable for $12.24 and the KPG-9D software (floppy disk!) for $19.99 (OBO).