Modified MURS Alert external mic

[rixdafix]

Hardwired an old Midland mic to the Dakota Alert MURS base and made a shelf mount. Added an external speaker jack too. Drives the old Motorola speaker great. 10 miles to another base both on home-made quarter wave GPs at 20 feet no problem. Fun and cheap way to get into VHF but also makes me want to get my ham ticket for something hotter than 2 watts.

 

[Shadetree Mechanic]

I have never seen the Dakota alert base, looks like an intercom unit. With a GMRS license, you can do up to 50 watts.

 

[rixdafix]

It's totally an intercom style setup. Got it mainly for the sensors that work with it. Obsolete now and I just watch for deals on the components. We do have our GMRS license as well, just experimenting with another band.

 

[N8YX]

I did something slightly different:

Found several R/S 19-1210 MURS mobiles and a bunch of Motorola Spirits. Put one of my scanners (Pro-2035 w/ OptoScan board, running Probe v7) to work looking at all the MURS frequencies and aggregating hits per channel, PL tones in use, etc.

Based on that I programmed each radio with the most popular area channel - and the least. (These are two-channel units.) The popular frequency got the most used PL tone while the converse is true of the least utilized.

One of the R/S mobiles is in my ham shack. The others go in vehicles and the handies are passed out to anyone who we need comms with for, say, coordinating field activities, going to swap meets or other activities where we need to keep in touch.

Ch1 is the popular channel and 2, our "private" setup. Private being that the squelches aren't broken by anyone except those with the aforementioned PL configuration. The radios have a PL Defeat function so we can make sure the channel is clear prior to using it.

One more neat tool in the toolbox. it's nice to see people using the service.

 

[rixdafix]

Right on, sounds like a great setup. I always keep an eye out for a steal on one of those RS rigs. We're rural and all we ever hear on MURS is dog tracking collars and irrigation controls but using PL tones keeps our squelch quiet. My friend and I are the only humans on the service out here. We stick to 4 and 5 since we tuned our antennas to 154ish. I'm using a moxon I built at about 15 feet and it's full quiet to and from his homemade 3 element yagi 10 miles out. I want to exploit some of the other allowed uses like remote control/telemetry when I actually have a good use for it like gate or camera control, motion sensing, etc. Good stuff.