MarkInTampa

Mixed feelings on this. Used to hold a tech license but let it lapse years ago. I might have upgraded to other classes but at the time code was required for any advancement and I sure as hell didn't want to learn morse code. I didn't mind code, listened to it all the time through a Cantronics interface on a Vic-20 and could send through the computer just as well if I was licensed to do so. Just figured why learn what a computer can do for me with a keystroke. It also decoded RTTY and other modes as well, and this was back in the late 80's. At least the FCC did away with code requirements. I got into GMRS 5 months ago after a 20+ year absence of any kind of radio. Also got into SDR radio and really enjoy listening to some of the very active 70cm repeaters running DMR repeaters that are connected across the country and world through SDR# and DMR and Fusion plugins. There is by far more activity on my local 70cm DMR and Fusion repeaters than GMRS but it is still only 3 or so DMR/Fusion repeaters out of dozens around here that carry 95% of 70cm traffic but I want to get on them. Last week I took the sample test and passed without a problem but to be fair it was because a lot of the questions were what I remembered from 25 years ago, using ohm's law at least weekly in my work life and common knowledge of radio operation. I'll still order up a flash card kit or something similar just to make sure it wasn't a fluke when I took the sample test before actually taking it. I have no idea what questions have really changed in the 25 years since last taking the tech test. What does bother me about allowing a user on the 70cm/2m bands without knowledge of operation is just that. 2m and 70cm bands allow for all sorts of modes- DStar, Fusion, DMR, APRS, SSB and more not allowed on GMRS. More things like the ability to do cross band repeat, where the simplex/SSB/repeater preferred frequency are, etc. And again this is coming from a former ham that just got back into radio with GMRS. Passing a test doesn't mean I know more, less or am a moron for taking the test over somebody that doesn't want to or think its stupid, it just broadens what I'm allowed to do. I do believe there does need to be some type of test - simplify it to just what is needed for 2m/70cm but folks do need to know some of the basics of how these bands operate. A legal GMRS radio locks everything down for you, things like legal power limits on FRS channels and FM only. User knowledge isn't really required on GMRS but it gets a bit more complicated on 2m/70cm.

If you have deep pockets, a Icom IC-F6330D would work but it's way overkill. The control head/mic runs POE to the base unit, the diagrams show the head as being able to go though a network switch. Pop a wireless bridge on the base unit setup to your existing WiFi and a POE adapter on the head with another wireless bridge or cat cable to your internal network. It will probably cost ya $2k though. https://www.icomjapan.com/lineup/products/IC-F5330D/

I was a licensed ham 25-30 years ago and it was fun at first, then a lot of drama between two clubs. If I got caught talking to one person from one of the clubs the other would disown you. Reminded me of a bunch of high school girls. When I moved out of state I sold it all off and let my license expire. Fast forward to a few months ago and decided to get my GMRS license and give radio another shot. GMRS has been fun, no drama yet. Also got into SDR (software defined radio) and have really been enjoying listening to a couple of very active nationally linked 70cm DMR repeaters in the area. Now thinking of getting my ham license back just to play around with DMR. 2 meter is pretty much dead and 90% of non DMR traffic on 70cm are the weekly net's in my area. I took the sample test a few days ago and passed with a 85% score on a whim without looking at any kind of study guide since I took my last test 28 years ago. I'll probably go ahead and get my amateur license back one of these days but I'll still have a GMRS radio running next to it.

Had to lock out GMRS channel 3 from scan because a Nursery & Landscaping company less than a block from me has a bunch of users (traffic) on it. Channel 14 is very active with the road crews around here and you can bank on channel 5 being really active from 3:30 to 4:30 during school hours, a local school uses it for student pickup. Right now (for the past week or two) the most used repeater frequency is being used by some a-hole's that are running DMR simplex on 462.700 that happens to be where my favorite repeater is. Don't have a way to transmit DMR but can receive it using a RTL dongle using SDR-Sharp with a DMR plugin. They appear to be speaking Portuguese and I'd guess they are a foreign ship sitting in the Port of Tampa and hopefully will be gone soon, it's ticking me off. We have had issues with foreign ships causing interference on our local repeaters before but this is the first time DMR has been blasting through.

There really isn't anything local on the 462.725 frequency or it's uplink of 467.725 (the alt input of our 462.575 repeater) so it usually works out. When the conditions are really good I can hit the repeater in Perry Fl on 462.725, a 168 mile trip but it's rare.

Sorry dude, didn't see the date of your post.

GMRS repeater are NOT always 5 MHz UP. The primary repeater in my area (462.575) has two input frequencies. The standard 467.575 input with a CTCSS tone input sometimes gets a bunch of interference from foreign ship traffic when they are in port and has to be shut down for sometimes days at a time. The other input is on 467.725 with a DCS instead of CTCSS. It's also the only repeater around that uses DCS (at least on one input). Both run at the same time.

I should have clarified that point. But they are digital modes. Sorry about that. We have 3 or 4 active but seldom used D-Star repeaters and 10 or so pretty active C4FM repeaters in my area. I probably should have got a Yaesu as it's more popular in my area but too late now.

Guess it depends on what you want to do. If 20 watts gets what and where you want that's great. The Yaesu and Icom both have DMR modes, great since your a HAM. I've got a KG-1000G+ as well as a Icom ID-5100a and do a LOT of scanning both in the GMRS and HAM bands. The Icom scans memory channels AT LEAST 5 times and entire band scans at least 10 times faster than the KG-1000 does. I also like the large screen (don't need reading glasses to see it). Pop a SD memory card in it and record everything if you want. It also costs $100+ (or $200+ than the OP has his listed for) more than the KG-1000.

After MARS/CAP mods on the three listed above: The FTM-400XDR does 136-174Mhz RX/TX and 400-480Mhz RX/TX The ID-5100A does 137-174Mhz TX and 400-470Mhz on RX/TX The TM-V71A does 136-174Mhz RX/TX and 400-470Mhz RX/TX It's not hard to find how to modify them, YouTube is your friend.

Yaesu FTM-400XDR, Icom ID-5100A, Kenwood TM-V71A (all current production 50watt UHF) or almost any ham radio dual band mobile made in the last 25 years are capable of being extended to GMRS frequencies via MARS/CAP mods. Usually it's a matter of a clipping a diode or wire in the radio. Heck, even some of the dealers (Ham Radio Outlet for example) will modify it when purchased for $50 and claim that since the dealer did the mod it doesn't void the warranty. Heck, once modified most of them will even transmit on MURS as well.

You quoted the Africa part of the system. The Australian portion, SKA-Low, will revolve around 131,072 antenna "trees" in the country's western Wajarri country. As the name implies, the array will focus on low-frequency signals. The Guardian notes it's expected to be eight times more sensitive than existing telescopes, and map the cosmos about 135 times faster. My dad was head of R&D for the DSN (Deep Space Network). I spent a lot of time as a kid as a willing slave loading, labeling and swapping computer tapes recording VLBI experiments at the Goldstone and Owens Valley radio telescopes. I then helped load them into the mainframe in the basement of Cal Tech. Fun times as a kid. I moved out of state when I was 18 and every 5 years or so when visiting the old man over the next 20 years I would still go with him to work for a day at Goldstone to satisfy the nerd in me. I was amazing to see the development of the DSN for the 32 years he spent at NASA/JPL.

The Windows driver for the USB programming cable/cables is probably not loaded or incorrect. See https://www.buytwowayradios.com/blog/2021/06/how-to-install-the-wouxun-programming-cable-and-driver.html

Do you have any experience with the Airspy HF+? I know the Realtek based dongle I have currently is ok for VHF and UHF but sucks at HF. Right now if I try and listen to HF off my dongle (DX-Patrol) off a 35ft long wire for the most part all I get are harmonics from a AM broadcast station playing Glen Beck shows on all bands. I'm getting ready to put up a 35ft mast for my GMRS antenna and something like a EndFedz SWL end fed half wave while I'm at it and want a decent HF SDR receiver to go along with it. Use would be 50/50 between shortwave listening and ham band listening. If you have any advice on another dilemma... My new mast is 35ft and want to run the HF end fed dipole from my mast to my shed, a distance available of 85ft. The EndFedz antenna is 45ft so it would be no problem. Also thinking of a EndFedz 40 meter that is 74ft would work as well. If I run it this way I'll be paralleling power lines that are 30ft away (see picture). I'm in central Florida and the house and antenna would be positioned from north to south. My biggest concern is if I'll be picking up a ton of noise because of the proximity to the power lines. I can run the antenna east/west but that would probably rule out a 74ft antenna. Any thoughts?

Comet GP-6NC Much better than my other two antennas tested...

I picked up a NanoVNA a few weeks ago to test my antennas. With a quick 10-15 minute YouTube tutorial on using NanoVNA with NanoVNA Saver (free software) I had my antenna tested in minutes. I find it much easier to use the computer interface than a 2 or 4 inch touch screen. It's also nice to be able to save or screenshot the results.

If you haven't played around with it yet, I've been kinda addicted to the websdr.org website. Listen to all sorts of HF, VHF and UHF in real time from receivers all around the world over the web. It's a bit of a learning curve but it's fun. So I picked up a USB SDR dongle for around $50 a few days ago and hooked it up to my spare GMRS antenna. The antenna doesn't do HF at all but does seem to work ok on the VHF and UHF bands for the most part. It has also been a bit of a learning curve but getting I'm getting there, it's only been a few days. It takes a bit to figure out what kind of signals you are looking at on the waterfall. At the moment I'm just looking for normal FM repeaters but with software plugins you can decode DMR, Packet and all sorts of other signal types. I can also have it set to record audio only when the squelch is broke. Cool for recording your local GMRS repeater 24hrs a day if you want. Anybody else play with SDR?

I met Bill Gates around 1980 or so. There was a TRS-80 user group that met up once a month in a chem lab at University of La Verne and he was there. I had a chance to talk to him about a few peek and poke commands for the machine shop project. The funny part was the group meeting had no agenda, no speakers or anything. It was basically around 50 of us lugging in our Model-1's to the lab with our software collection. We just walked around the lab trading copies of software. That was the whole purpose if the meet. Can't say I saw him actually saw him trading copies of software or not, but that was the basically what the meets were about.

1980-81 or so. The Model-III just hit the store when I left. I then worked part time (still in high school) installing and setting up Model-III's with Radio Shacks other "killer app", Scripsit, for a year or so in the field for small print shops. The print shops were amazed that they could get a computer, a word processor, and a modified IBM Selectric typewriter or a daisy wheel printer with proportional spacing that operated at a whopping 10-20 characters per second! It made justifying margin alignment a simple task, something we take for granted these days. My girlfriend's family at the time owned a machine shop. At the time the CNC endmills that they owned you programmed through a Telex machine on paper tape. I built a serial interface from plans for the Telex machine to use the paper tape part of it as a printer and wrote an emulation program in Basic to make it work on a Model-III. I was proud of what I did for a 16-17 year old kid at the time.

I had a job in high school at the local Radio Shack demoing Model-1's. Wrote a spreadsheet in VisiCalc for a local golf course to keep track of handicaps. We ended up selling over 50 Model-1's with that spreadsheet to golf courses all around the So Cal area. I've still got a kinda rare Model-4P and a few others including a Osborne, Kaypro and a ultra rare Fujitsu Micro 16S in the closet.

Buy Two Way Radios Black Friday sale list is up.... https://www.buytwowayradios.com/blog/2022/11/2022-cyber-holiday-sale.html

Actually I have CTCSS and DCS on receive disabled for repeater channels and only use tones on transmit. That way I can tell if somebody is running simplex on a repeater channel, if I have two repeaters on the same frequency, find new repeaters, etc. I've got a decent antenna and radio (KG1000+ feeding a Comet GP-6 GMRS) and don't really get much if any interference from out of band to really need tone on receive. I also keep the repeater input channels in my repeater scan group as well to see I can can receive the input and how strong it is (make a simplex buddy!) or if there is somebody talking simplex on them causing interference to the input of a repeater. This actually happens a lot, we have a shipping port near two of our repeaters and some foreign ships use 467.5500 and 467.7000 simplex causing havoc on the repeater inputs for a day or so until they depart the port.

Same here. We do have a pretty strong local repeater that has close to no if any squelch tail or ID. It's a great repeater but nobody thinks it works half the time because of the lack of of a tail or ID. It's hard to tell you even keyed it.

I'm currently shopping around for a PC based SDR transceiver that can do GMRS. I'm hoping to find a deal on one on Black Friday or we have the Tampa Hamfest coming up in a few weeks and see what kinda fun stuff they may have. I've been addicted to playing with SDR receivers at websdr.org. Do you know of something I should be looking for? Looking at a Pluto+ at the moment.

When I ordered up the Comet GP6 antenna from DX Engineering I knew I needed at least a Type-N to UHF/SO-239 adapter for the KG1000+ (antenna is Type-N) and had plans to buy the NanoVNA once the antenna came in. DX Engineering had "all gender" Type-N to UHF/SO-239 kit (4 piece adapter package) for $20 that allows me to have any gender (Type-N male or female and SO-239 male or female) at the end of the cable. Another $20 got me the same kit but for Type-N to SMA. I'm covered on hooking up any of my antennas to a radio, HT, or the NanoVNA.