UncleYoda

You'll learn not to take many of his posts seriously.

If being like everyone else is the definition of sane, I'm content to be crazy. Using a post card instead would be more friendly.

What Steve said, plus Baofeng the company is actually Pofung. Not that anyone in America cares as long as it still has Baofeng on the front label.

By "two lined version" are y'all both referring to plain UV-5G? Holding down "8" while turning on does nothing on my plain UV-5G. Holding 3 still works though to give the firmware number (and it isn't what Chirp shows).

The actual ground (i.e., dirt) can be a conductor of lightning that hits nearby, especially wet ground in a thunderstorm. By installing grounding wires, you may be increasing potential of that getting to your electronic devices inside. For ordinary folks, disconnecting the devices from the AC and antenna lines is the best option.

I have experienced what Marc described, but I learned to avoid them so it has no impact on me. If they are becoming less common it's mostly because the old farts are dying out. Adding to what Marc described, a lot of HAMs want to only have meaningless social chat, which is not what I got radios for. I deleted all the nearby repeaters from my channels because I'm fed up with these people. I asked about joining a club in my hometown and was told no, to start my own. After I moved I went to the nearest club meeting and was mocked for only doing 2m (and 440). I've asked about starting nets twice and was turned down. Gave up on ARES when they made training and deployment as criteria. Skywarn was moved to a repeater I won't use because of policy. Really nothing left for me on HAM. GMRS turned out to be disappointing as well, but I monitor it more now than HAM. Back on topic, there is a new GMRS repeater only up 30ft but the owner wants to link to a node (did he miss all the brouhaha?). Same frequency used by other repeaters that likely overlap his area. From what I recall the linked system owner shut down so I don't know why this is even still available.

@Raybestos It's never stopped working for me. I did create a new password when prompted. The only update in SC in the past week is a short range repeater near Carowinds. If you need something in particular, I'll check on it for you.

All linking is a violation of GMRS regs. That shouldn't be really hard for people to grasp.

Unless your UV-5G is different from mine, it can't be changed from the radio. It requires editing in Chirp. The Shift-D set to "Off" is the same as blank in Chirp, which is the setting for simplex transmit.

One of Chirp's quirks is that for DTCS, you only enter the code in the "DTCS" column and leave the "RX DTCS" blank and it sets both TX and RX to the same tone.

There's no advantage; you could just get a UV5R.

No

Some cigarette light adapters work OK with some radios; some cause problems, typically noise like whining. I haven't heard of any radios being damaged. For me they mostly work at low power. One issue I know of is power may drop relatively quickly when the car isn't running, so for a base station multiple batteries are a good idea. p.s. any kin to Samuel F.? my GG-grandfather apprenticed under him

Isn't it chaos already when people's posts are being downvoted just because of who they are? IMO, that violates the rules anyway.

Only in your mind. I was commenting on the setting being available in the software. It's there, that's it. I will test it when I feel confident again in Chirp not messing the radio up. You still don't understand that this is different than fully open. Fully opening makes it a non-compliant radio. Just putting in other GMRS frequencies at the appropriate power level does not. But you can't seem to grasp the difference so I'm done with this.