73blazer

Radios are rather subjective but you won't go wrong with the Wouxun's. Very rugged, the put out what they say they do and the 905 is especially easy to use. I'll differ from the group a bit on the range thing. From my personal testing of many radios, the 5w radios (or in the 935G's case 5.7w) does help slightly in range and especially clarity on the edge of the range in very heavy woods/foliage , but in most use cases yes it won't add range. In my woods I can get about 1-1.25mi radio to radio with a 2-3w radio and a 771g antenna, but the 5w radios get 1.4-1.7mi with a 771g antenna. But out in the open, or talking to repeater towers, there won't be a difference. The 905 is a good solid radio, but there are many others that work too, all depends on what you want. I do not believe there is any true GMRS radio that is not made in China, they're all Chinese. There are some business radios from the US and Japanese companies that can transmit on GMRS and many people have these, but those radios are generally alot more expensive ($300-1500) and some can be problematic to program as they usually require licensed software to do it.

I spent some time looking through threads there back in the late 2010's, i'm convinced it's a place people go to practice their debating skills. Because they can't possibly believe half of what they say, the disc earth, the perimeter ice ridge protected by the worlds govt's ...and the list goes on. Hilarious reading if you get bored in a meeting.

You'd never reach Hawaii from the west coast because there is no line of sight, the ocean itself gets in the way due to curvature of the earth. Unless your a flat earther, then you'd have no problems! There really isn't a hard limit, it's all on what gets in your way, aka line of sight. With the earth aligned right, you could hit a repeater on Pluto as long as the sun or other planets don't get in your way. Radio to radio I can't get more than 2miles in the heavy woods, but from the same woods I can hit repeaters 30-40mi away. Once the signal gets out of the canopy, it will travel unimpeded to those towers. If you really want an answer, you can read this paper. But generally speaking curvature of the earth is going to wreck any UHF (what GMRS is) signal if nothing else gets in your way first. So mabey 70-ish mi on flat open ground...if one side is higher, like on a mountain, mabey more!

Yeah somethings up likely something is misprogrammed. . How did you program the radios with the native software? Chirp? On the radio itself? I would start with, as @OffRoaderX mentioned, removing all receive tones. It sounds almost like there is competing receive tones like there is a DCS and CTCSS receive tone both programmed and the radio doesn't know which one to use, I've seen this on a Retivus radio before, they came with pre-programmed DCS receive tones (no idea why) I didn't notice, and allowed you to add a CTCSS tone and then you hear nothing. But the radiooddity may be switching back and forth between them. @WRXC445 Please pay no attention to the town drunk @Socalgmrs. Consider it the random mumbling of a drunk while defecating in front of your building. It's just another example of negative Nancy dissing radios he knows nothing about, I think he's dissed every brand on the market. Because he never says which Chinese GMRS radio he does prefer so we can all run out and get it so we no longer have to subject ourselves to these what he says are these worthless Midland,Radioddity, Baofang,Tidradio,Wouxun,Retivus,Btech,Rocky radios he hates so much. Oh wait, that pretty much just leaves illegal to use on GMRS Motorola or Icom or Kenwood .

People still live in cities?

If you mean a counterpoise , I tried this on a few different HT's, no discernible difference in any department, noise/quieting, distances nothing. I could measure on a meter the receiving end was a bit better from the HT transmitting with the counterpoise, but for real world humans, there was no difference. I was glad it didn't work, because who really wants to walk around with a giant piece of wire hanging off their HT?

Which "retivus" did you buy from, retivus.com or retivussolutions.com? Two different stores both listed as "official" sites. Amazon sucks where I live, they use unvetted "independent" no teeth meth head drivers who show up in 1991 rusted out white Ford vans wearing flips flops and shorts and torn t-shirts with a prime arrow magnet on the drivers door and a freezer in the back where they try to sell you a monthly steak plan. No thanks.

Another way to do this is use the many free virtual technologies, vmware has a bunch and now even wmware workstation pro is free for personal use. Download workstation pro on your mac, spin up a windows guest in it....move on with life.

I didn't have any issues. I did a lookup, and even logged in, no problem. Those errors are pretty frequent however. That website either needs more backend horsepower or more bandwidth or something as frequently over the years I get timeouts and the error shown in the 1st post. It's very random as to whose request go thru and who gets an error.

Well, then I don't think the 905 does that announce on channel change. I can check one of mine when I get home, but that won't be for another week. I almost always turn all beeping and noises off so I don't remember off-hand what it's supposed to do or not do in the voice announce mode.

I don't think it's a nationwide network of repeaters he's proposing, my read on his proposal is only to access one repeater from anywhere in the country...or world. perhaps.

Correct wording, "their interpretation" ! . Someone got it right for once! They're likely response is not to give a direct yes or no answer, they're likely to respond, after many months, with quotes of the part 95 section rules, leaving him right back in the same boat he's in now, interpreting it himself.

If it were clear, there wouldn't be 1000's of pages of discussion on this topic. The Communications Act of 1934 gives no authority for the FCC to create or enforce laws. They make and enforce rules, among some other duties like study and report and advise on laws that would affect access and usage of radio services. All they can do is propose a fine, if you don't pay it, they can use a court of law to get you to pay, but they themselves can't make you even pay, why do you think half the people just don't pay the fines. If they don't pay the fine, it can be referred to the Dept of justice for actual legal enforcement. Taken from their process page

It is far far from clear. Mabey in your head. But the language as written is certainly, not clear. All it says is telephone network is prohibited. That's it. That phrase has been challenged in other services and has settled to mean telephone networks, public switched exchanges and the internet. Which leaves many other types of "networks" as not prohibited. BTW, they are not laws. Just rules.