This surely must be a joke. Consulting services for a product so cheap? I could happily do this for you but one hour of my times would be more than the radio.
Sometime AI fails spectacularly.
If you are human of course, there are plenty of people local to you who will be happy to take your money? Wow!
I honestly don’t see why this is such a hard thing to believe. I run a large company and have multiple development projects going on, but I need to learn quickly how to use these radios, particularly as we are starting to develop a large piece of rural property into a homestead retreat for a client. I am sorry if I offended anyone…
I didn’t mean to offend, but you’ve bought a radio more usually purchased by people who love programming, fiddling and talking to either small groups in a pretty tiny area, or if they are in an area where there are more advanced facilities, doing other things. GMRS radios are short range simple devices that just well, work! If you wish to use radios for business use, then range could be really limited. business users often have more sophisticated system with repeaters to increase range that get licenced and planned. In real terms, most GMRS radios have a number of channels. You charge them up, pick a channel and they work. There is no real training, and the price point of yours is not that high, so it rings alarm bells when somebody wants training on such a simple product. GMRS is designed for people who know nothing about radio. It is also a shared service so if you have multiple development projects, then you hand them to your staff, tell them to use channel 1 and that is about it. If somebody else in the area is using channel 1, try 2, and so on. Your chatting of course can be heard by anyone with GMRS radios. This might not worry you, but it could. I can’t remember what radio you said you had in the original post, but it wasn’t a common one used for GMRS - and is unlikely to get very far, radio to radio. Hence why your post seemed just wrong? I apologise if I thought it was AI, but if you run a large company - what do you want radios to do? What is nice to have and what is vital? If you just randomly bought some radios, which you said originally, you are not going to get very much in terms of range. OK for a building site where everyone is almost in shouting distance. That said, most builders buy tough, dropable radios with as few buttons as possible because when there are buttons to press, your staff will press them and probably change the modes, channels and other gadgets they have. Business radios are for untrained users - press the button to speak, release it to listen - that is it! If you turn your radios on, and cannot talk between two in two minutes, you have bought the wrong ones. I don’t mean to offend - but there really is nothing much to learn. I gave a pile of radios to the girls in a theatre wardrobe department. That’s on-off and volume. Press that to speak, let go to listen. Switch them off before you go home and stick them on the charger overnight. Seriously, that was it.
If you want longer range, clever facilities and the gadgets - give the forum hosts a ring on their contact number and they will advise. Paul
Thanks for the response, Paul, and all of the information and no harm no foul. I almost took it as a compliment that I was compared to something as highly intelligent as what AI can do! I just assumed that like most any other difficult piece of equipment to operate that there would be people out there who we could pay to teach us how to skip all of the jargon and training and just get them hooked up so that we could use them. I have no interest whatsoever in becoming a radio expert. One of our businesses is pivoting more and more into helping people who want to build a homestead who have a large tract of land and we have virtually no cell coverage and I need range to be in excess of say 5 miles and as much as 15 or 20 miles. 8-watt Baofeng BF-F8HP Pro this is what I purchased, and I was told “Those radios are ostensibly also “blocked”, but not really, if you use a laptop and CHIRP programming software. You just select another model number in the CHIRP menu and you can program to transmit in ANY frequency of the receive bands.” I have no idea even what all that means so I asked them and they said “that since these radios can be tuned to multiple bands, they can be used for FRS, GMS, or MURS push-to-talk, without a license, if set to low power. And in a total disaster, you would also have access to the ham 2-Meter band, and of course you could also use them Receive-Only on any of the National Weather Service weather alert frequencies.” So me not knowing anything about this kind of stuff, I think that it would be great if we had an all in one radio that could help us from a few hundred meters away out to about 10 miles but I assume that would require a ham as well as a license so maybe we can just use these that I got for those projects where we’re just a few hundred meters apart.
Got you. Sadly, power does not equate to range. I’ll use an example. My home is just under a mile from my office. Here in the UK, I sell and hire radios. We have similar bands available here, so your Baofeng here could operate legally on the VHF and UHF ham bands. As I understand the US situation, in a disaster situation, you could potentially talk to hams - if that would save lives when people are in a genuine life or death situation, otherwise - you need a licence. Same here in the UK in practical terms. In normal circumstances, operating on ham bands is out. You could put your radio on the GMRS frequencies, and the FRS etc etc - but you would be operating illegally - I will leave the morals and ethics of that for a business user to you. In the UK, your radio would be licencable on our Government’s business frequencies.
All that said - none of my radios I have in my hire stock, including some rated at 10W can get from my office to my home. Radio to radio is what is called line of sight. The rule being that if both ends had a pair of mega powerful binoculars and you could see each other, the radio would work. I have chatted to an astronaut in the old US space station - using a 3W hand held radio. As he came over the horizon, umpteen thousand feet up, he could have seen me with the hypothetical mega binoculars. Radio waves do not penetrate hills, or obstacles very well at all. So any buildings will reduce the signal so much that ranges of a few hundred yards are typical. A building site will probably work for handhelds, but ten miles is rarely going to work. One mile is doubtful in the real world. If you are on a mountain top, and somebody is on another, twenty miles away, with a valley between - that will work. At the bottom of a valley to the next valley won’t.
It is down to topography and obstacles. To increase range, most businesses would install repeaters - a device with an antenna up high, in the centre of an area. In my town in the harbour is a very tall grain silo. On the top is a repeater. Handheld radios can get into that repeater from at least 8 miles away in one direction, and 20 in another - because of hills.
You need experts to plan and coordinate good radio systems. My 6 year old grandson can turn a radio on and press a button to speak. Typical builder on sites want reliable comms - even when the radio is in their pocket - and in their pocket, with the antenna up against their body the range is even more reduced. The radios you have bought are hobbyist radios, made to fiddle - totally (in my humble opinion) useless for serious business activity. They will get broken very quickly, almost certainly fiddled with - those buttons are very tempting during lunch breaks.
Seriously - call the two way radio people and have a chat about what you want to do. Your radios are budget end products - perfectly decent - for hams and enthusiasts. They cannot take the abuse business users will gove them, and if you have had to already unlock them to get around your FCC regulations, you bought the wrong products. As I said - building sites and construction do not need any of the features people buy those Baofengs for. If you are not interested in fiddling with radios, they’re the wromng product. hand held radios of ANY price point can only have long ranges with repeaters and high antennas and frequency coordination so somebody doesn’t interfere with you. Let’s say you find just the spot where you can have a chat with somebody ten miles away. If either of you step sideways a few feet, the working radios suddenly aren’t! If the person the other end has the radio in their pocket, instead of held up clearly in the open, there is little point calling them - it won’t work. Any radio that has a distance on the box should be viewed very suspiciously - 8W means nothing at all. Well, it means it’d 5 watts more than 3 Watts, runs the battery down quicker and is probably heavier. distance is just a gamble. Sorry - but typically quoted ranges are the absolute best case. I can’t manage 1 mile, and my house is actually on a hill!
The BF-F8HP PRO is not a legal Part 95 certified radio. As such, it’s illegal to use this radio on GMRS.
I’ll go ahead and close this thread as it discusses illegal activity.