KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

gmrs

Another crazy idea for the ARRL

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On Mastodon, Victoria (K8VSY) (she/her) @k8vsy posted:

Looks like GMRS license holders can also send letters about the HOA bill: https://send-a-letter.org/gmrs.

For more info about the HOA bill working its way through Congress: https://www.arrl.org/current-legislation.

This got me thinking. What if the ARRL morphed itself into the “national association for personal radio” and included advocacy for services like GRMS, FRS, MURS, and other “personal” radio services? I suppose that I should have done more research before posting this, but off the top, it seems like this might be a good thing for the ARRL to do.  I just did a quick internet search for “GMRS national association,” but while there were links to repeater directories and associations, I didn’t find an actual organization like the ARRL.

There are hundreds of thousands of GMRS licensees in the U.S., and many radio amateurs also have GMRS licenses. I have one myself. And, GMRS licensees face many of the same issues—both technical and regulatory—as radio amateurs. Doesn’t it make sense for the two groups to unite? Together, we could be a stronger advocacy group than going it alone. The fight over the HOA bill might just be the impetus for this.

ICQ Podcast Episode 397: Spy station, solar cycle 25, 100-year-old club, GMRS

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For ICQ Podcast Episode 397, I joined Martin Butler M1MRB, Edmund Spicer M0MNG, Ed Durrant DD5LP and Chris Howard M0TCH to discuss the following topics:

A reader asks: Should I be worried about losing my license?

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The infamous BF-888

Yesterday, I got the following email from a reader:

Hi Dan,

I recently joined the Neighborhood Watch here. They use rebranded Baofeng BF888s radios on channel 5 to communicate. This radio is pre-programmed by the factory, and as far as I can see, using channel 5 is not really legal. Channels 6 and 7 are FRS/GMRS frequencies, so they should be OK, but the rest are not according to web searches I made while trying to find out about these radios. Here are the channels and frequencies that I’m talking about:

  • CH5: 462.525 CTCSS 114.8
  • CH6: 462.625 CTCSS 127.3
  • CH7: 462.725 CTCSS 136.5

This presents a dilemma for me, as I am the only licensed ham in this Neighborhood Watch group, and I was not in on the decision to use channel 5. Can I lose my amateur radio license if I program my own Baofeng UV5-RV2+ radio to 462.525 MHz?

Should I tell the Neighborhood Watch folks that they need to use a different channel, or should I leave well enough alone? These folks are not tech savvy and will not likely understand what the frequencies are, or what CTCSS means, much less what is legal versus illegal for their radios.  I don’t want to lose my license over this, though, so I am asking What Would Dan Do?

Signed,
Nervous in Neighborhood Watch

I replied:

If I were you, I’d strongly suggest to them that they use channels 6 and 7, rather than Channel 5. The reason for this is that I think interference is more likely to be reported by users on Channel 5, which is used by the Industrial/Business Radio Service and the Public Safety Radio Service. (See https://fccid.io/frequency-explorer.php?lower=450&upper=462.575).

Also, be aware that operations on those frequencies may not be strictly legal. Power output for FRS radios is restricted to 2 W.

Could you have your amateur radio license revoked for using those frequencies? Possibly, but your group would certainly be given a warning first before such a drastic action was taken.

Was that good advice? How would you have replied?