gmrs equiment

[hotrod]

weres a good place to get equiment at?ive seen the frs/gmrs radios at wal-mart
but wanted to look elsewere.as im very new to this.also is it possible to a a
2 way conversation at a distance of 10 miles i know they advertise some with that
distance and higher.i dont know wheather to believe or not

 

[Chop]

all the gmrs/frs handheld transmitters i've used had a range of about 1 mile, with line of sight. without line of sight, that range dwindled to less than 1 mile, maybe 3/4 mile?

 

[Wire Weasel]

Hi Hotrod, yeah see other threads on this forum discussing the same thing. The little handhelds are only going to see a short distance.....unless both people are up on top of hills, mountains ect....

"Other" equipment is going to mean commercial mobile radios or modified UHF ham radios. Lots of people do it. Stand by for the crowd that will scream that it is illegal. It is....but there is also no enforcement. The FCC is understaffed and they have bigger fish to fry than to go around looking for low power, short distance VHF and UHF rule breakers. It's kind of like all the illegal activity going on with CB, the extra channels and the amplifiers all over....the FCC just looks the other way 99.9999999999% of the time.

 

[Chop]

Stand by for the crowd that will scream that it is illegal.

lol, i'm just glad you were the one to say that and not me.

 

[doctor]

gmrs

I have 3 units for murs and 1 for gmrs...Your better off to use MURS..longer range..gmrs uhf and short range..
I buy my units at REDDOG Radios....for MURS or GMRS, under $135, and get out good 40-50 miles on MURS.

DOCTOR/795

 

[Wire Weasel]

Well sometimes Doc

Range on VHF and UHF is both pretty much going to be line-of-sight and distance will be dependent on how much wattage one is running along with what antenna and the elevation/terrain of the two communicating stations.

If 50 watts and a 5/8 vertical antenna is provided for either VHF or UHF....they'll both make it the same distance :

 

[Moleculo]

One good thing about doing the MURS route is that you can legally use gain antennas...which will help a lot with distance.

 

[Highlander_821]

I'm pretty sure you can use gain antennas for GMRS, too. Also, GMRS licensees can run up to 50 watts on the non-shared GMRS channels. MURS is limited to 2 watts on all channels.

A lot of Part 90 equipment is used on GMRS. Some radios are even certificated for both part 90 and part 95. Pretty much any part 90 land mobile set is going to meet or exceed the part 95 technical standards.

Finding part 95 certificated radios for MURS is tricky. If I didn't already have the Radio Shack MURS mobiles that they closed out a few years ago (20 bucks apiece, IIRC) I'd probably go with the Icom 8 channel VHF mobiles and run reduced power. The only other compliant MURS gear out there is basically toys.