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WRUH396

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Everything posted by WRUH396

  1. This is the kind of stuff we see. This one is actually on HF but we have seen this noise much higher into VHF/UHF as well but this type of unnatural spikes across the band or covering multiple channel slots is what you want to find. Look at the visible jagged spikes below. The other thing to keep in mind, though not as likely as you mentioned you tried a few different radios, but as 935 was pointing out on my post that a lot of this SOC/SDR style, cheap Chinese radios have the front-ends as wide as a barn door and are susceptible to desensing, mixing and intermod. There is an area near where I live by the airport and county dispatch that any Baufeng, BTECH or other cheap SDR gets slammed and sometimes it is so clear it sounds like they are dispatching right on GMRS or our UHF frequency but we don't get that at all on Yaesu, Kenwood or Icoms.
  2. People are covering some a lot of good info above. As one that spends a lot of time on VHF/UFH I can tell you there are some really pesky interference sources lately. The extra wide or drifting carrier is kind of a telltale sign it is not likely a radio. The most common we have tracked down recently are: Switching Power Supplies Cell and USB chargers Home and Auto (They switching powers supplies) - this is very common in cars and comes and goes as the device charges Solar Chargers and Grid-Tie Inverters - people are adding more and more solar arrays by the day. (Worse during daylight hours) LED lighting systems If it really gets annoying buy or borrow a cheap SDR donglem go mobile and use that with a portable laptop to track it down. Also check your own house as well. I will see if I can find a spectrum pic of some of the madness we have seen.
  3. Not sure if you are asking me. I lived in SoCal in the early 90s and used to go to the TRW swap-meet and breakfast with the 435ers... It was cheap entertainment... lol
  4. Very cool pics Gortex2! Thanks. 935, yeah the reasons or issues you brought up are the exact reasons I believe the 'test-runs' I have seen on YouTube seem to fail miserably. However 5 MHz of separation seems ample to allow for a two antenna system. I have had success on two antenna systems even down on 2-meters which only has 600KHz separation instead of 5. I am just banging ideas around. I do have a quite successful homebrew repeater up but love messin' around and like to see what others have done or where their experiments failed. The radios are so cheap I think I will give it a try. I should have no problems providing 30'+ of physical separation and since the location I am looking at is located at the South end of a long valley I am thinking I will try with Yagis since two you can pick up two decent Yagi antennas for nearly the same price as a single 1486s and with the majority of the gain aimed to the valley it seems like it may work even without the duplexer. I do wonder though, if I will need to put the cheap radios in separate metal boxes and maybe even separate those with the choked cross-connect audio cables.
  5. Quick Question Not looking for tech advice necessarily, just experience if anyone has seen or done this. Has anyone made or seen a successful deployment of a Duplex Repeater (not simplex store and repeat) built with inexpensive Handytalkies? I have seen quite a few Youtube videos of people attempting to do this with UV5Rs but I have have never seen one that I would consider successful. My thought is, that if you used two separated antennas instead of messing with a power eating Duplexer this should work. Most the videos I have seen, it looked like the close proximity created so much de-sensing that the range was total garbage. HOWEVER, in my mind with the proper shielding, maybe some RF-Chokes on the Audio Cross Connect and this absolutely should work... Right? I may try it on my own to see what I can do but I figure somebody else must be familiar and have experience with such a set up. While I have a fairly strong repeater at home, I also have access to a location 1000 feet over the valley floor and I am considering running a small test repeater to see if it would be worth moving my main repeater over there. I won't preemptively move my main repeater because I do not have line of site to that location and I can bet cheap Handytalkies will not make it from home like it does on my repeater in the garage but it would be nice as a secondary repeater when I am out mobile.
  6. That is the exact synthesized voice that has been in use on '435' over the years. If they are indeed "crazies" it may be the same crew.. lol
  7. SUPER long-time CBer. VERY long -time ham and yes, now repeater owning GMRSer. Besides just trying to be as cool as Randy, I wanted a way to be able to talk to my family without the internet or being at the mercy of some technocrat app like Facebook. After all, The Zuck shut even my messenger down that I use with my children that drive to school nearly 30 miles from home. Plus we live rural and cell coverage is just getting up to speed out here anyway. Only one of my sons got his hammy-ham license and my wife and daughter have no interest at all. They (The Facebook Police) would even look at or use AI to look at our private texts and shut My messenger down during elections, inauguration, J6, again as we (The US) began to support the proxy war in Ukraine and any time I mentioned the global warming coincidence AKA 'Died Suddenly'. Now, most the time they would reinstate me after a week or so but this time they permanently suspended my account. Long story short I needed or wanted a backup way I could communicate with non ham licensed family members that can't easily be shut down during your average TEOTWAWKI--SHTF event so now we use the encrypted Signal App and our family's GMRS repeater as a back up. Well of course when I am doing serious testing or just want to let down what's left of my hair, it's GMRS and also of course most my friends are experienced licensed ham radio operators and yes, we do indeed talk 'Radio' and about everything including ham radio and ham frequencies. IMO the best range tests should include and ongoing conversation to identify holes or lack of coverage. And yes, I am sure some of the jargon bleeds into our GMRS conversations but those are the guys that will recognize problems with the signal or give me the best reports and ideas on how to make improvements. The only real difference though that I think might stick out to GMRSers is our group tends to me a bit more anal about IDing to stay in compliance than most the other GMRS only users I know, not that we care though, it's just what we are used to. Like other hams, I don't feel I must give anyone an explanation per se but if this helps pure GMRS guys understand when and why I personally use GMRS then I will share. Now to find that Affiliate Link for the Mossberg Parts mat...
  8. Thanks for the responses guys. Yeah, I saw the sale someone had posted for black Friday. I may go that route. That would probably be the quickest to get that car on the air and maybe buys tome time to figure out the programming on a Motorola SM50 or SM120. Sometimes even 2 channels might be too much. lol
  9. I would like to get some input from some of you long-time GMRSers. I am a long time Ham (sometimes Happy and sometimes Sad) ? but this radio would not be for me. Anyway I recently got my repeater up and running and am looking for a "simple" mobile preferably 15W to 20W+ range for my wife's car. She has nearly no understanding of radio so I need something that is not easily dropped out of Channel mode into VFO and something she cannot easily turn off the repeater offset and tone. Am I better to stick to something like the MXT-115 or MXT-275 or are the Chinese SOC radios to the point where they are reliable and cannot be easily "unset"? For the record, I am a little skittish about the cheap Chinese radios as I rarely get more than about a year out of the ones I have used on the ham bands and I know the midland CBs while not fancy, were nearly bullet proof.
  10. If you can't find the Midland in stock, I have found the Browning BR-182 spot on for the GMRS frequencies and frequently find them under 30 bucks. It even works fairly well as a base antenna with the ground-plane kit, no it's not a 1486 or something but not too shabby for the money.
  11. The most popular Ham 2M repeater in my area (Utah County 146.76) has almost no tail to where slower radios like Baufeng UV5R may no indication or tail which seems to actually encourage "Kerchunking" since people do not know whether they have hit the machine or not. The family repeater I put together had a decent squelch tail but I know what you mean about not being able to tell when you have keyed it up. I was not sure what kind of tail if any I would get from my RICK style repeater but it surprisingly has a decent tail on it. If not that would have been one of my first priorities. My thought is you may see some hams that look down on courtesy tones since the it feels too CBish, yet in my mind they do serve a purpose beyond cycling the transmitter relays. Without even thinking about it, it lets me know if the other operator unkeyed or otherwise dropped out of the machine versus the possibility that it is my receive that has changed, especially when mobile. Certainly there are plenty of ham repeaters out there with courtesy tones and not once have I ever thought to myself, "oh this tone is so annoying". I really have come to the conclusion that there are many people that just want to bellyache and complain. While, I would not add some CB 5-tone "roger beep" I think a modest courtesy tone is a great addition. Even NASA uses tones for the astronauts. ?
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