MarkInTampa

I've got that site bookmarked, didn't even think about using it for some reason. Thanks for the reminder!

I figured I'd do a quick check on that for giggles. I looked up the last 10 GMRS licenses issued in my city and checked if the FRN also had a ham license. 4 were dual licensed and 6 were GMRS only. Your results may vary.

Two problems I see... 1st) If you are using a Y-cable/splitter I'd assume you are going to run into mic impedance issues. The radio is designed for a certain microphone impedance, adding another mic in parallel or trying to extend the cable by 30ft is probably gonna jack it up. 2nd) If you did run a 2nd hand mic somewhere - what about audio?

One of the local linked repeaters near me has been in almost constant chaos the last few days from somebody playing music on the repeater/network. Don't know what is worse - the person causing the interference or the folks wining about it but it's a fun battle to listen to.

I used to hang around a bit with Kevin Mitnick back in the day building 2600Hz boxes until he started doing really crazy stuff.

I just used Convert.Guru HLP to TXT converter (https://convert.guru/hlp-converter) to convert the 7 HLP files in 49D Version 6.30 and attached them to this post. Slightly different version but should be close enough... 49D Help Files.zip

Do a search on YouTube for VNASaver. There are a bunch of videos on how to use it and have you up and running in under 10 minutes.

Comet GP-6NC dual band GMRS/MURS. SWR is as close to perfect out of the box as you can get on GMRS, pretty dang good on 70cm, decent on 2m but sucks on MURS (151.8MHz and 154.6MHz) - what it advertised for but still usable. I'd rather have 2m than MURS anyway.

I usually do a sweep of 430MHz to 470MHz (70cm and GMRS) and 140MHz to 155MHz (2m and MURS), the bands I'm most interested in and document it with VNASaver. I've never actually used the interface on the VNA itself (small screen, bad eyes) when I can use the computer to do it all on a 27" monitor.

There kinda is, just GMRS instead of FRS... The TERA TR-505 GMRS/FRS radio claims to do optional MURS as well. You have to purchase a programming cable and get the free "MURS programming file". It's on their website so it has to be legit, right? https://powerwerx.com/tera-tr505-gmrs-recreational-handheld-radio

If you can see bars but no audio, you have the TX tone set right. Does your radio have a RX tone set and is it correct? Try disabling RX tone (if set) and check to see if you are getting a audible kerchunk.

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.