MarkInTampa

Hit up Tim at BCI communications in Tampa (I-75 and MLK). He's not to far from you and has a bunch of Rohn tower sections and stuff for sale at a fair price in decent condition. His eBay name is twowaytech if you want to look him up.

Hi Greg, long time no hear! When I first setup my base station a few years ago there was a really decent band opening here in the Tampa Bay area. Me and another somewhat local on the other side of the bay (that would have been YOU!) were hopping all around the state on GMRS. I was feeling pretty pumped about how the new base was doing until I found out you were using a HT outside your car port. It deflated my ego just a bit. I learned a lesson, when the band is open it doesn't matter your equipment you can get may miles. My personal best is Tampa to both the Valdosta Ga repeaters - around 210 miles, but its only happened one night in three years.

You could try to use ARTEMIS Offline Signal Identification to identify it. Download at ARTEMIS Download . Set a filter to 462MHz to listen to signal samples known (76 at the moment) to be available in the band, click through them and listen to the audio sample and hopefully you will find a match. Listen in particular to the samples of the obvious choices first - NXDN, DMR, P25, Motorola. Ignore obvious ones that are not relevant in the US like NMT, PAL, RTS-9TS, etc. Here's a Techminds video of how to use ARTEMIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_8Y_4FvoHI

Saw those the other day. Pretty dang cool. About the only DMR/Analog HT I've seen that does cool analog stuff I've been missing in HT's like my MD-380. Things like tone scan, add/remove channels on the radio without a PC, etc. It's almost like a standard analog radio with all the analog features one would want that does DMR instead of a DMR radio that can do basic pre-programmed analog but with no real analog features.

I was not able to hit the Bushnell repeater from the Beef's parking lot Friday night for what it's worth.

PMR (Professional Mobile Radio) is basically the European version of LMR

Not for real. On map view it shows he has 15 repeaters at one location. Most of them do exist but are not his, are 85+ miles (Okeechobee 550 and Fort Drum 650 at least that I've been known to use) away from the location he lists and already exist on the MyGMRS map with proper locations and the real owner names.

Try disabling tone on the repeater input. At least it will rule out incompatibility of the tone settings between the radio and repeater.

It is, or at least the backlight timer is! Menu setting 8 (labeled ABR - don't know why) is the Display Backlight Timer. If set to 0 backlight is off. Setting are 0-50 seconds, make sure this setting is not at 0.

You are around 4 miles from one of the strongest repeaters in the area on 462.675Mhz with a 50 mile radius. I used to be able to hit it from Pensacola on occasion. Channel 6 is only 12.5kHz away (462.6875Mhz). If the repeater is running wide band, running slightly off frequency, your receive is off or sensitivity/selectivity sucks, etc.. it could sneak through. Is the id the same as the repeater on 462.675?

I did a server upgrade for a Dentist years ago. After installing the server, software and transferring data everything worked fine EXCEPT the way the teeth are counted/labeled was all wrong. I called customer support and found out that Dentists in England label teeth differently than those in the USA. The fix was to change the default installed language option from "English" to "American".

I know Goldstone very well. My dad was worked there for 35 years and was the head of R&D for the DSN (Deep Space Network). I loved going to work with the old man as a kid!

Fort Irwin is kinda limited on what they can do radio wise. Lot's of restrictions because of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex being adjacent to the base.

Why not? I was wanting to do the same thing on the base station. If I'm sitting at my PC with speakers on ether side of my monitor for the computer, it would be nice to route/mix the radio output to those same speakers. Back to the OP: The -V2 should have came with a RJ-45 accessory/breakout cable. You can change the speaker output settings in the menu to "EAR" (earphones) or "EAR+SP" and run a 2.5mm patch cable to the audio input/mic jack of the PC and you should be fine.

I'm running a 30ft flag pole from Home Depot for a mast with a GP-6NC. For a bit more stability it's also anchored to the house. I ordered a telescoping flag pole but they sent me a sleeved sectional (6 5ft 2-1/4" sections) by mistake. Didn't send it back, figured it would be more solid than the telescoping version and by loosening the clamps on the house I can remove or add sections by myself so it wasn't a big deal. I thought I could get away with no guy wires but it seemed to sway a bit more than I would like at 30ft so added some. Dropped it to 10ft or so with the antenna attached and it made it through a direct hit from hurricane Milton.

Not field complaints to the FCC but the individual that was issued a license they didn't like, called the FCC and had the call terminated and reissued. I looked at two of the recent "terminated" license's by FRN and they have a new and current GMRS licenses.

I figured they were terminated because of licensee complaints to the FCC about their callsign so the old callsign was cancelled and a new one issued. Like I said, the only licenses (other than 1) terminated in the state had WSEX as a prefix or 666 as a suffix in the last 10 years. "Expired" is a different field and has over 7,200 results in my state alone!

The other day I did a statewide search on the FCC GMRS license search site for "Terminated" licenses ("Cancelled" is a different field). There were 10 of them but it doesn't say why they were terminated. 5 of them appeared to be legacy business licenses and were cancelled 10-15 years ago. The 5 relatively recent were kinda obvious - ended in "666" or had "WSEX" as a prefix. Somebody does have WSEX666 though!

I worked at Radio Shack when I was in high school back in the TRS-80 Model 1/3 and CoCo days. I wrote a spreadsheet with VisiCalc (long before Excel or even Lotus) to track golf handicaps for a local golf course and we must have sold at least 50 Model III's to almost every golf course in So Cal just for that spreadsheet. About the coolest thing I can remember was the radio tech that tuned my 148GTL-DX when they first came out (early-mid 80's). He had a Commodore Vic 20 with a Kantronics interface connected to a HF rig decoding RTTY and CW on the fly. I just thought that was so cool - to hear/see radio Cuba (and it's propaganda) RTTY news on a CRT/TV without a teletype in real time made a impression in my early years that last until today.

Good for you - Want a cookie?

If I bring up one of the repeaters in list view with stale/offline enabled and click on the repeater name, it will bring up the repeater info and a map view of the repeater location for what it's worth.

They do - but they don't show up on the MyGMRS map view and you have to know to select stale and/or offline repeaters in the list view.

The two largest and OPEN repeaters in my area are not listed on MyGMRS anymore. After one year of the repeater owner not logging into MyGMRS they get delisted from the map. I've talked to both repeater owners and they told me the same thing - they simply got tired of repeater requests, problems or questions. New users are welcome, both changed the MyGMRS listing to open repeater and listed the tone and don't log into the site anymore so the listings are gone.

I've been a fan of the Stanceworks YouTube channel for awhile. His latest video shows him installing his new Motorola communications system in his race car. While watching it I remembered this thread. Nice system, but don't know if it's $3000+ (uncle Sam get his cut) nice. Also wonder how it's licensed.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUMMaMSrLBQ

I'd suggest leaving the factory channels as they are. It's pretty much plug and play out of the box. Just change the tone required (in your case 159.8) for what channel (frequency) you want to use. Then go to "edit" on top of the screen and "option features" and change the default channel if you are using something other than .550 (channel 1) if you have a power outage but don't know if this step is actually required. That should be about all you need to get up and running.