catbrigade

My house is on a nice high spot terrain wise, but I can't get you 100 feet of antenna height as I don't have a tower. I do take care of a low power FM radio station that's on a city owned tower with reasonable rental cost.

Welcome fellow Dayton area resident! I'm in the Beavercreek area and have gotten back into GMRS after getting some radios as well as MURS units for Scout camp communications. I'm intending to take the technician level ham exam at some point soon since I have enough know how to pass it easily. I'll need to study more to get the higher classes. With a radio in scan mode I can hear the Tipp 625 repeater well in my area. I've heard very little out of Dayton 700 at all and have never caught the MIA-675. I was getting some digital mode on that freq a few weeks ago but have heard nothing since. At some point I will put in some requests for permission for the local repeaters.

My wife is a Scout den leader and we went as a family to a fall campout. The Scout camp has pretty spotty cell reception and in the past we've had trouble getting calls to each other when needing to coordinate the "divide and conquer" with the two kids being in two different groups traveling around different areas of the camp. I picked up a couple of the KG805M's thinking that MURS being VHF would cover better than GMRS due to the amount of woods and slightly rolling terrain at the camp. I was impressed with the audio quality and we had clear signals the whole time just using the stock antennas. I programmed them with a couple copies of the 5 channels using different CTCSS and DCS just in case there was other traffic on the channels but they were completely quiet. Being so far out of town we were nowhere near a Wal-Mart or anyplace else of the sort. I do have a GMRS license and have a pair of KG935's as well as a couple of Kenwood TK3180's programmed for GMRS, but never tried GMRS out there to get a comparison of how well it would work (wasn't going to try to talk the wife into carrying two different radios). I did run into two other families that had GMRS radios, one had some sort of bubble pack radio and I never got to talk to him to ask how well it was working, and the other group had Baofengs for the adults and something simpler for the kids, maybe a Retevis. The dad said they had encountered some dead spots there at the far corners of the camp. In any case, I thought using MURS for this particular application worked out very well and felt like the KG805M's were a cut above some of the cheaper stuff out there. I did buy a BTech MURS-V1 but wasn't thrilled with it and will probably just sell it off. The programming capability in it was very limited compared to the 805M's which I was able to program with some extra receive-only channels I figured might be useful, namely the local NOAA weather radio and Skywarn 2m repeaters in case the weather got dicey.