Official Colorado HAM and cheese thread

This is a loaded question because FM is still effected by terrain so LoS is still in the calculation.

 

*approx/average.

I'm not looking for an exact distance I guess, just looking to see how much better the TM281 is vs UV5R.

 

on flat land, simplex about 10 or so miles.
add a repeater, and it could be more than 100 miles.

 

Simplex = My truck transmits, your truck receives. no infrastructure in between (just air.)
Repeater = a transmitter/receiver pair that receives my truck, and re-transmits the signal. If this is 800 feet in the air, it has a roughly 45 mile radius line of sight. (assuming flat land.) So vehicles up to 90 miles apart from one another could communicate.

Line of sight is king though, and mountains cast long shadows. They also generate a significant LOS improvement when you're at high elevations.

 

FWIW... from my neighborhood in firestone, I hit the repeater south of Green Mountain no problem with the baofeng in the truck and a tram mag mount antenna on the roof.
Had cell phone quality conversations with @odomandr (over that repeater) who's somewhere in the metro Denver area

 

This is the info I was looking for, thank you!

@teamhypoxia are you simply running your Baofeng with a speaker mic attached and leaving it in the rig at all times?

 

Yes. Speaker mic, power adapter, and antenna.

 

I found it in your build thread

 

The increased wattage on high power vs low running simplex is significant. I can hit the green mtn repeater when i am east of DIA on high power but not with a baofeng

 

Box showed up today, radio is a lot smaller than I thought. Looks pretty cool though.

 

You figure out how to tune in and listen yet?

 

Yes. I figured out how to scan in the 3 modes, found the list of weather stations too, that's pretty cool all by itself. Pretty active out there.

 

Cool. Thursday nights you might enjoy listening in on this. Topic changes weekly but usually something relevant to outdoors
http://forums.oausa.net/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=4022

 

Some more links and such I found ramblin' around today:

General Test: video tutorial by Dave Casler KE0OG on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/user/davecasler

Technician (I still prefer the free test pool websites Q&A): http://kb6nu.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/2006techstudyguide.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/user/davecasler

Denver Freq Reference:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?ctid=256#cid-852

Chirp Squelch Fix (UV5R / UV82 / F8HP / 82HP series):
http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Squelch.php

 

Messed around with the UV-82HP this morning which was provided by @WillT and tuned into a club in Loveland that was scanning the area and talking to people down in Lakewood. The

$21 NA-771 15.6" Whip VHF/UHF (144/430Mhz) Antenna SMA-Female for BTECH and BaoFeng Radios

NA-771 antenna makes quite a bit of difference compared to the standard antenna baofeng provides.

 

Ham peeps... is there a special way to get the baofeng to talk to a FRS 2-way?

I could hear the 2way but they couldn't hear me. offset was 0, step was 2.5k, tried it on uhf and vhf.. nothing changed.

 

Use the csv I posted. Works great.

 

I was finally going to try and remember to bring the radio in the house to do that... Thats for the chirp correct? I have a cord.. next step is finding it. I'm sure I put it in a safe place.

 

I've been listening to the repeater on Horsetooth, there are a group of guys always shootin the breeze. There was a guy on there from Wales today, apparently he's somewhat regular on there.

 

Yes You can import the csv into chirp.
If you have trouble with chirp or you can't find your cable or something, you can also look at the settings in the csv or one of the other files and try to duplicate them.