catbrigade

Camp Birch here in Ohio has pretty poor cell reception, at least on Verizon. My family and I have done simplex comms on MURS radios when we needed to split up with the kids and go to different activities. I did see a few others using FRS bubble pack type radios and ran into at least one family in the past using GMRS (they had a call sign decal on the radios). The camp has a Part 90 license with a UHF repeater that's centrally located. I thought about setting up a temporary GMRS repeater but since this camp is smaller simplex seems to work fine for everyone.

I got the license to use with family for emergency communications or if we go camping somewhere with bad cell coverage. It ended up being a gateway drug as now I have an extra class ham license to go with it.

I'd rather just run Call Alert via MDC, although training my wife to use the MDC features might be a challenge.

Things that I have heard scanning FRS/GMRS channels: Plenty of kids mashing the call button or yelling. Occasionally there must be older ones who don't have a phone yet coordinating where they will meet up and such (since the conversations make sense), or a parent rounding up the kids that are out roaming the neighborhood to come home for dinner. A Mexican restaurant (rapid-fire Spanish talking about food orders and such when I'm near their building) Either a hotel or a nursing home, most likely the latter since there was something about a call light on. Road flaggers. Heard some event coordination at a festival, parking cars and such. During the COVID shutdowns I heard some kids talking to each other on a street a few blocks away. I handed a radio to my kids and they joined in while I supervised.

It might be Dayton 700...there is a listing on here for it with a number to call the owner to request access, but due to the age of the listing it doesn't always show up. You may have to use the advanced search and allow stale listings. There is a 725 repeater in Lebanon as well, same owner.

You'll be lucky if it arrives in one piece. They beat the crap out of anything I have had shipped through them.

Hmm, I'll have to try and see if I can hit it from my mobile. HT from my place would be pushing it. It used to have a voice ID'er on it, come to think of it I haven't heard that in a while.

Question is, is that an open repeater or "members only" like the rest of their system?

I would guess you may be hearing people using FRS radios that are required to be narrowband. If your receiver is set to wideband the audio from someone transmitting narrowband will sound low.

Good info. I didn't know there was a repeater in Wilmington. I don't know if Gordon checks requests here, but he's got his phone number in the listing. I gave him a call late last year to request permission.

The Dayton 700 repeater https://mygmrs.com/repeater/2093 has wide area coverage. Its listing sometimes doesn't show up here for whatever reason, but it is on the air. Just call the owner at the phone number in the listing to request to use it. The owner of the Tipp repeater says he's been able to hit it from a HT in the Nick's restaurant parking lot near the fairgrounds, so it may work for you as well. There's an unlisted repeater near Xenia that I have heard occasionally but it's been off recently. If you have DMR radios in your group and need a repeater to use here is the website for the DMR repeater nearest to Xenia. http://tim-yvonne.com/ham/dmr/index.htm

I heard that chip issues played into Kenwood discontinuing or at least stopping production on some of their ham gear.

I currently have a DMR radio and will be getting a P25 radio shortly. I'm in the Dayton area and got connected to the P25 group here so I'm going to work through their programming guide and see if I can get up and running on that system.

Like anything, it's a mixed bag. The folks I've talked to on the local GMRS repeaters have all been pleasant. I got my ham license not long ago and discovered a good community there too locally. Many of the local GMRS users and the repeater owners also have ham licenses and I found out I work with quite a few hams as well. As for MURS, I don't think there is as much a community around it, but I found that it is useful for outdoor simplex comms in the woods away from town where you won't find the band busy with business users. However, in the next town over there's a group running a bunch of linked repeaters on GMRS requiring paid membership and the impression I get from the outside is that they would put the sad hams to shame.

Back in the fall I got some MURS radios for my wife and I to use at a Scout camp because I thought they might work better than GMRS due to the wooded and slightly rolling terrain. The place has lots of trees and the leaves were still on at that point. I didn't get a chance to do an A/B test vs. GMRS radios but did get some anecdotal evidence from another family who had some GMRS radios and said they had found some dead spots. We didn't find any dead spots with our radios.

Yeah, I meant the low power (<=0.5w) channels 8-14.

My kids aren't old enough to have the maturity for proper handling of "real" GMRS radios, so I keep my good ones locked up. They have a couple of little blue radios that run about a quarter watt at most, and I keep them on the FRS channels only.

I'm not too worried about that. I've picked up a different Kenwood radio for the ham bands that can be "opened up" but it will be some time before I have time to get it installed in the car. Have to run power for it, the Wouxun has a smaller draw and can be run from the lighter plug.

I recently picked up one as well and have been very happy with it so far.

Around here when I'm in town there is activity near the Walmart stores and something that is transmitting an electronic chiming doorbell like noise on one of the channels. I'm guessing that's either a wireless doorbell or driveway alarm. When I was out away from town all of the channels were completely quiet.

I seem to recall one of the manufacturer reps saying somewhere (can't remember where) that they couldn't do much more than 5 watts and meet SAR limits.

Thanks, that's good info. I'm planning to go to an exam session Saturday morning to get my Technician license. I've worked as an EE for 15+ years now and the practice exams online that pull from the current question pool were easy for me. The 400-470 MHz range radios are hard to find. I'm kicking myself for not snapping up the one I saw at auction that had the full DTMF keypad as well. I didn't think to put an all narrowband zone in for FRS but that makes sense. If we go somewhere where the kids have radios I'm giving them the cheap FRS only ones which are narrowband only anyway. I have a couple GMRS zones set up, one with just the plain channels, another with some tones, and a third with tones and Fleetsync turned on to show the radio ID's I assigned. I did set up a zone that has some local freqs of interest (police dispatch, fire dispatch, and channels used by my kids' grade school and their transportation department for bus dispatch. For all of those I left the TX side blank so they can't be transmitted on inadvertently.

I've been happy with the Wouxuns that I have. I got some of the KG-805M MURS radios and used them for family comms during a Scout camping event back in the fall. I figured the VHF might cover better with all the trees around. We had no coverage issues and the audio was very good on those radios. I did also catch the KG-935G's on sale around the same time frame and picked up a pair. I've been using them for scanning mostly. I did get a couple Kenwood TK-3180 radios recently and like those as well. I might use them at the next Scout event since the limited keypad ones are simple and the LCD's are easier to read in the sun than the 935G screen. Also the wife might get lost with all those buttons on the 935G. I've gotten pretty familiar with the Kenwood programming software but need to work out configuring scan groups on those radios.

That makes sense, I was monitoring it driving from Beavercreek to Xenia and I could definitely tell when there was terrain in the way. I got permission to use it but I haven't tried to hit it yet while out and about. He also suggested I should request the Dayton 700 repeater which I have heard very little traffic on at all.

Scanning the GMRS/FRS and MURS frequencies, I've heard traffic flaggers on a couple of the GMRS/FRS channels. My area has a bunch of fiber deployment work going on and I think I have heard those crews too, talking about other utilities in the area they were doing directional boring. On the nearby restaurant and shopping strip I have heard rapid-fire Spanish near the Mexican restaurant and heard hotel housekeeping comms. I've also picked up kids playing around outside and in the neighborhood across from my place there's at least one family that uses GMRS/FRS to check in on the kids riding around on their bikes. Over on MURS I have not picked up anything at all except near one of the local Wal-Mart stores. I've not heard a peep anywhere else. The school district here has a Part 90 license with several frequencies. I've found the bus driver dispatch frequency to be pretty useful for finding out if there's some issue on the local surface streets off the highway.