Has anyone used a Baofeng 5RX on the MURS ferquency’s?
It is not legal to transmit outside ham bands. If you are in the U.S., it will likely be shipped locked to ham bands only anyway. If you are in Canada, MURS is not allowed as the frequencies are already assigned to other users.
Perfectly legal to receive outside ham bands of course, which is what I assume you are asking.
I set the Baofeng on 151.8200 and my Retevis RB38V MURS was able to receive and transmit perfectly with it. I am in the US and many of my friends have MURS for camping.
I understand that, and I am not the frequency police. But this forum is hosted by buytwowayradios and it is not the place to discuss transmitting outside legal bands. I am sure no one will notice or care much at two watts on MURS versus five watts on your Baofeng, but this is still not the forum to discuss radios not certified for those bands.
I apologize for asking the question. I didnt know I was doing anything wrong other than a few extra watts on MURS band out in the boonies. Sorry if I upset anyone? I
however am very interested in better antenna’s if that’s okay to inquire about?
MURS is limited to 2 watts, and there are apparently practical reasons why the FCC has that limit. A few extra watts won’t do much to improve range out in the woods. What it will do is drain your battery faster. The most effective solution is to use a combination of location, elevation and a high quality antenna that is tuned specifically for MURS frequencies. If you optimize those three elements, you will likely have much greater range than adding an additional 3 watts or so to a 2 watt radio. We do carry a selection of antennas, including MURS.
The snag with portable radios of any type is that it needs a bit of operator skill and knowledge to get greater distances. If you watch two way radio users, you see crazy things. Weird ways of holding them, jammed into pockets with extension mics, but the most obvious thing is antennas that are not vertical. Vertical antennas give you even coverage in 360 degrees around you. Radios with horizontally held antennas are quite common, but the users don’t realise how awful this makes the radios perform, anywhere other than close to the other users or base station. The antennas supplied with radios tend to work pretty well up to about 45 degrees from vertical, but the after market ‘better’ antennas are not magic, but are just able to not waste so much signal going up into the sky at high angles. The meagre few Watts get concentrated in a more horizontal angle. If these better antennas are held at weird angles, they can be worse. They’re also longer and more awkward. This is why the ones supplied with radios often appear much better than they are. They’re better when used badly! I used to sell quite a few after market better antennas but often people would return them as faulty and useless, I’d stick them on some test gear and discover there was gain and decent VSWR, but sometimes customers revealed they were on a Baofeng and were expected to work on every frequency the radio was capable of, and they aren’t! 2m or 70cm fine, but not very good on air and, or the free channels or marine.