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Hey all, I obtained a GMRS license so that my entire family can operate without everyone having to be independently licensed while out of town camping and four-wheeling where there's no cell service. I've had an amateur radio technician license for over 20 years but only operated from time to time, and frankly never for much more than talking to licensed friends on 2m on outings much the way GMRS is used these days. It seemed to follow that going GMRS with the family license and where friends could obtain inexpensive licenses without tests would make the most sense for casual use. To be honest once we tried operating I wasn't particularly impressed. I bought a pair of Tidradio TD-H5 radios (chosen because they were advertised as 5W and came with handmics) and I also bought a pair of mag-mount antennas that claimed 400-470MHz operation. We did some testing and found that the limit on range was shorter than expected, around 3200' in a suburban area generally lacking tall foliage, and was actually worse with the mag-mount antennas, working to only around 2000'. I had even tried working on the connectors on the antennas, the SMA connector on the factory rubber-ducky has a very long pin and looked like the internal barrel interfaced to the barrel on the radio more effectively than the mag-mounts, but even taking the connectors apart and trimming a little to make the pin-stickout and fitment better didn't help. The range with the rubber-ducky antennas was disappointing since I had experience talking several miles on 2m with 5W on simplex, and even had an experience talking the better part of 40 miles with a mag-mount on the roof of a cargo van once. I had expected to get a few miles even with the higher frequency being less useful for distance. And before anyone asks, I don't have an SWR meter. Digging through all my old radio/ham gear I have a watt-meter and a dummy load but I don't yet have the right connectors or plug-in modules for the sorts of power levels that a GMRS HT will transmit at. Will need to obtain some stuff. Back when I was operating ham almost everything was BNC or UHF connectors, and the switch to SMA was a bit of a surprise. The mag-mounts I had bought are admittedly predominately for VHF/UHF ham radio 2m and 70cm, which could explain why they made things worse and that the manufacturer was simply full of it when listing them. Anyone have suggestions for GRMS-tuned mag-mounts or NMO-mounts that perform well and are reasonably priced? I'd like to avoid further spending money on equipment that works worse than what came with the radios.

Hey all, I had purchased a pair of Bingfu mag-mount antennas with the typically long name in the Amazon listing for use with my GMRS radios. Amazon currently lists this as "Bingfu Dual Band VHF UHF 136-174MHz 400-470MHz Ham Radio Magnetic Base Antenna Handheld Two Way Radio SMA Male Antenna for Ham Radio Walkie Talkie Icom Yaesu Vertex Standard Horizon Marine VHF Radio", on that package as-delivered it was listed as "Bingfu Dual Band VHF UHF 136-174MHz 400-470" and it has a barcode X002PKBG57. The Amazon listing is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N9W5GPV Anyway, When I first got the radios and these antennas I did some testing, we managed 3200' in suburbia with the antennas that came with the HTs while sitting inside of the vehicles, but we only managed around 2000' with these mag-mounts. Subsequent to that test I've acquired an SWR meter and some miscellaneous connectors so I was finally able to hook a radio, meter, and antenna with as few adapters as possible. SWR on one antenna was 2.66, and on the other was 2.83. Suffice it to say, no good for GMRS, despite the frequencies advertised in the listing. Since I have a 2m HT I may test SWR with that, just to see if they're any good at all on 144MHz, but I do not have high hopes.