frs/gmrs base station, outside antenna

General Discussion
1

My little town is setting up an emergency communications network. We’re about 10 miles long and five miles wide with few trees, a farming community. We have chosen hand held units like cobra and Midland, I have three pair of different powered Cobras.

Our problem is this, while we can communicate throughout our town with the handhelds, we have to get up on a roof to get to the very edge if we live in the middle. Both ends of the town are on rises.

Our town leaders, who live in the middle of town, need a base station that has a outside rooftop antenna that will transmit the same channels as our Cobras and Midlands.

Is such a base station available? We looked at something Midland calls a base station, but were not at all satisfied with it.

Anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks

Bob

2

You cannot do this with FRS, but you can with GMRS.

You can use a commercial/business mobile UHF radio like those available from Icom or Kenwood. You would need a power supply and outside antenna (and mount) for the 460-470 mHz range.

Keep in mind, this is in the licensed part of the band. It is not like FRS where no license is needed.
http://www.buytwowayradios.com/Info/GMRS-FCC-Licensing.aspx

3

Had a good friend we called Petey, after he left us we figured God don’t make Petey’s any more, worlds getting to mean.

Petey, is it possible to program one of those business units to receive frs signals? And just transmit on gmrs channels?

And what unit/combination antenna, would you suggest? I’m applying for the license now. It wasn’t made clear to me my hand held units needed to be licensed, we just bought them and started using them.

Thanks again for your help

Bob

4

You can program any legal frequencies into them and yes you can program in “receive only” frequencies.

You can get radios a lot of places, but new they are extremely expensive.
See if there is a radio shop anywhere near you that sells used equipment. Then there is also Ebay.
You really should get a radio shop to program it for you if you are not familiar with this stuff.

The Kenwood TK-840 or TK-805 are hard to beat for GMRS use. The 805 can be had for very cheap on Ebay and IS programmable right from the front of the radio. Most radios like this require programming via computer.