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Hello all, So i have 2 Tidradio H8's programmed with chirp and Tidradio software. My issue is on Simplex transmitting works just fine but when i put tones in TX or RX or even both, it will not TX, i can RX just fine. I have several radios, Tidradio, Baofeng, Kenwwood, Yeasu, (several diff models of each) and ALL are programmed identical to each other. All work flawlessly except the Tidradios. I have a LONG list of troubleshooting i have done : Updated firmware. Reset to OEM. Checked and rechecked all freq's and tones. Mic gain up in settings. Hand input all freq's and tones. Changed batteries, antennas, un-locked, set back to GMRS, set to Ham, erased and re programmed. Changed channel locations in the radios several different times. Left the house and used in outdoor setting with zero obstructions. Repeaters are 1 mile to 20 miles away and ALL other radios hit every on fine. I have been emailing with Tidradio support and that's been a night mare. troubleshooting for weeks now with them. Ive probably missed listing what i have done but if you have any advice, I'd be greatful. P.S. they will both access Ham repeaters just fine. and again, simplex everything works fine. advice or questions email me (Dave): bigtime24fam@gmail.com

Hi all! For some reason my TD-H3 will not register on my SWR meter, all of my other radios do. I have confirmed the radio is transmitting. Any ideas? Thank you in advance!

I discovered the company TIDRADIO when I purchased their H8 model which, as many of you know, had some very real problems but, to the surprise of many, TIDRADIO not only did not deny the problems but, instead, they tried really hard to listen to their customers and they fixed the problems which were reported. It took them two attempts, but they eventually succeeded. Not only that, but they replaced the early production models with fixed ones, at no cost to the client. Many, including myself, were very impressed with how TIDRADIO turned what could have been a major problem into a major success. Clearly, TIDRADIO listened and swiftly acted to correct the issues identified. I was so impressed by not only the company, but also by the H8 model which came packed with superb capabilities, especially for an extremely competitive price, that I contacted TIDRADIO and offered to beta-test their pre-production models. TIDRADIO quickly and kindly agreed and sent me their latest H3 which I shall review below. The TIDRADIO H3 and H8 As you can tell from the photo above, the H3 very much looks like the “smaller brother of the H8”. But that would not at all be fair to the H3 which, while being amazingly small, packs a lot of awesome features. But let’s begin with one of the features which made TIDRADIO HTs so popular: both the H8 and the H3 offer three different boot-up modes: GMRS, HAM and “unlocked”. Just to clarify, each time you change the boot-up mode, you are doing a factory reset, so if you program your radio in one mode and then boot up in a different mode, all your changes will be lost. There is, of course, an easy workaround here. Two in fact: if you use the CHIRP free and open source software or the ODMASTER app and website, you can quite easily copy your frequencies/channels into the memory banks of the H3 (which has 199 memory slots, more than enough, at least for me). Both the H8 and the H3 can also be programmed by Bluetooth using the ODMASTER app. Both CHIRP and ODMASTER offer access to repeater databases, but for me the best results were achieved by using the “query→repeaterbook” option in CHIRP. [Note: I have found it helpful to, after I am done with CHIRP, to also connect to the radio with the ODMASTER app just to double-check some buggy aspects of CHIRP which, for examples, messed up my TX power settings when cloned back to the radio. One simple “read” in ODMASTER followed by a single “write” fixed that issue for me] I should mention here that the H8 and H3 have different RX/TX capabilities: H8: 144-148 & 420-450MHz (TX) and 76-108 MHz (FM Broadcast Radio); 136-174 & 400-520MHz (RX) H3: 8 Band Receiving: ( FM )50-76MHz; ( AM )76-108MHz; 108-136MHz; ( VHF ) 136-174MHz; 174-350MHz; 350-400MHz; ( UHF ) 400-470MHz; 470-600MHz and 2 Band Transmitting: ( VHF )144-148MHz; ( UHF )420-450MHz The fact is that while both the H8 and the H3 have the same transmitting capabilities, the H3 comes with a galore of extra frequencies, including Airband! So, as you can tell already, the H3 is hardly a “little” brother to the H8 but a very capable radio in its own right. While the radio is small, which is a big advantage and very convenient, it also feels very solid and well built. All the buttons function smoothly and having them backlit keyboard is a very good choice. The only suggestion I have would be to change the color of the characters on the buttons from white on blue to bright yellow over blue as that would make it easier to read the characters. The battery has a very long life time and fits very snugly into the radio. The stock antenna seems to be of a very decent quality and it is well built. The sound of the speaker is very good. No problems here. The choice of a single top rotating power switch/volume control, a flashlight and two indicators is a very good layout, I just wish the knob was a little stiffer to rotate. The flashlight itself seems decent, but the light is too widely dispersed and should be better focused by a better lens. The H3 does not have any IP rating, but it seems very well built. Don’t go swimming with it, but it should fare just fine in light rain, dust or sand (especially if you cover the two USB-C port with a small plastic plug). I was unable to test the USB-C programming slot. While CHIRP could “see” the H3 when I used a regular programming cable, I could not get my computer to “see” the radio when connected to the internal USB-C programming slot. This might be a GNU/Linux specific issue, I don’t know. The USB-C charging, however, works very well. As I mentioned, the ability to boot into different modes is a true “killer feature” which I hope all future TIDRADIO radios will retain. I did most of my testing in the “normal” (unlocked) mode but I tested booting up in GMRS and that works very well. I tested the Odmaster and CHIRP programming with the H3 (using Android and GNU/Linux) and I have had zero problems. Both applications work really well (though in my case, only when using a regular programming cable). The ability to copy and paste between various modes (HAM to GMRS or GMRS to HAM) allows the user to configure the radio to exactly his needs. The user manual is well written and the radio’s menu system works well, but there are 3 menu items which are missing from the user manual: #52 (200 TX) #53 (350TX) AND #54 (500TX).I also suggest that option #34 (frequency hopping) should be given an explanation on how to use it and what to use it for. I find the implementation of the AM mode clumsy. Why not have it immediately activated when on the airband? The “selective scan frequency” is still very “raw”. For example, the frequency scanner seems to start on the last frequency it detected. This is not good. I also hope that future software updates will add an option to give the scanner a starting frequency. The FM radio is adequate, but it has zero ability to scan. When scanning in the FM mode, I could not get it to detect a single FM radio station. So the current firmware still could use some fixing, and I am confident that TIDRADIO will fix these issues in future updates. I admit being very impressed by the H3 which is among my top favorite radios which, considering its price, is a huge achievements. The H3 currently sells for $39.99 on Amazon. For comparison, my Wouxun KG-935G Plus now costs $149.99, my Btech GMRS Pro cost $154.89, my Wouxun KG-UV9GX $187 and my Wouxun KG-Q10G now sells for a whopping $219.99 (and it has at least as many bugs as the H3 including a basically useless GPS receiver). FYI, the 2nd Gen TIDRADIO TD-H8 now sells for $69. So for 110 bucks, you can get both the TIDRADIO H8 and the TIDRADIO H3! Then I want to return to the form factor: the H3 is really very small, fits in a pocket, yet it is very strong, it has this solid quality feel, and the color screen is superb and very well designed. And while the H3 is both smaller and cheaper than any of my other radios, it is the one I mostly carry around. Could the H3 be improved upon? I think so. First, it would need to be made “outdoors” compatible, which means a decent IP rating and a GNSS chip: the Wouxun KG-Q10G only have a GPS chip, the Btech Pro has a chip which can receive both GPS and Beidou signals, which is better, but still not the full GNSS (which combines GPS+GLONASS+Beidou+Galileo). Nowadays GNSS chips are cheap and small, and the first HAM/GMRS radio featuring a real GNSS chip would have an immense advantage over all its competitors (much faster acquisition and much superior precision). All in all, the H3 is an absolutely fantastic radio with a huge potential and TIDRADIO/ODMASTER are a company which tries really hard to offer very capable radios at unbeatable prices. I can definitely recommend both the H8 and, especially, the H3.

After upgrading handhelds from Baofeng and Quanshengs to a TD-H3, I'm running into some limitations. I'm aware of being able to reset the radio into either Ham/GMRS modes. And it's nice that the GMRS reset populates the radio with default channels. Would it be typical to program a separate GMRS channel, including a tone to a radio? For example, GMRS3 is in slot 3. But I want to add GMRS3 (Tone 1) in a separate slot. Between using Tidradio's software, Chirp, and Odmaster(Bluetooth) it looks like the default 1-22 channels and 8 repeater channels are what they are. The remaining slots up to 54 are repeater only (you can only select repeater frequencies and the Tx is offset automatically) And slot 55-199 are any Rx frequency, but no Tx is permitted. My question is, if I want a tone on a channel, I need to edit the existing channel? This is my first "almost real" GMRS radio, so I'm learning what can and can't be done. Thanks!

Newbie here with first post: My nearest GMRS repeater operates on 462.600 with a DPL of 464. I need help programming the DPL code since after reading the manual and looking at several YouTube shorts I am now totally confused with all the acronyms and their meaning. I do not have a DPL setting on the H3, just CTCSS, Offset +/-, and DCS. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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.