Hi, apologies if wrong place to post - I can’t seem to find any other info.
I have some old baofeng handhelds - Gt-3WR and UV-5R. Messing around I tried to program to UK marine frequencies and some PWR. I have a handheld marine radio I use on boats in the Solent but am currently far from the coast!
I tried to program them using UK marine frequencies on CHIRP. The simplex frequencies work fine but the duplex (I guess semi-duplex for mine) do not work.
Am I missing something or will they just not work? I used a standard .cfg for all the devices but where duplex is on, there is no reception between the devices. The ± sign appears and they switch frequency when I transmit. Can’t seem to find any info or advice online and happy for any input.
Thanks.
Update- you will see the extent of my ignorance in basic knowledge!-
Some further reading makes me think that in the absence of a separate repeater, semi-duplex not work between the two radios. Is this correct? Thanks…
They dont work? In what way. Keep in mind that two marine radios on channel 80 and the other duplex channels cannot talk to each other normally. Do you mean yours can?
What exactly is the problem? Paul. Lowestoft in Suffolk.
I think it may just be my basic misunderstanding of the technology. The radios work fine on simplex.
I was thinking that the radios would be able to work on the duplex channels with each other but I think I misunderstood.
Am I right in thinking that on the duplex channels (eg 80) it is essentially set up with transmission on one frequency and reception on another and the shore station is using the reverse frequencies? This means you only hear the shore not other vessels. This would explain why they seemed not to be working radio to radio for me but in fact are working as they should!
Absolutely - in the UK channels 1-5, 7, 18-28, 60-66 and 78-86 cannot be used from radio to radio. In practice the only duplex channels you are likely to ever use, is the marina channel 80. all the boats hear the harbour master. and the harbour master hears all boats. Causes chaos sometimes, because you do not know somebody is reading off a huge list of supplies, and they get stamped on innocently. people then get cross and it escalates. The only other channels you will find it on are the ones the coastguard send you to from 16 - which are the ones in the 60’s. The duplex channels were historically used for two-way ship to shore telephone patches - this was certainly still active in the 80s on our coast. A few crafty fishermen with radios like yours use them for a semi-private chat channel. I don’t think anyone has noticed. Nobody would even look up in the 85 numbers.
best wishes Paul
Are these channels not like amateur repeaters? I’m just curious. If they are, you could hear other boats even miles away by listening on the input frequency and talk to them by transmitting on the output. Even the older Baofengs have this “talk around” functionality
Sort of. You would telephone (in my area) Humber Radio, you would give them the name/callsign of the vessel and they could do a VHF patch. They would contact the vessel and ask if they could take a ship-to-shore call from XXXXXX. They then went to the designated channel. This is where it isn’t the same as a repeater. The telephone would be connected to the appropriate transmitter on Channel X - everything the caller at home, who importantly does NOT have a PTT would be sent out on Channel X, but the receiver on Channel Y would send anything it received out onto the telephone line. The person at home could ask a question and the ship operator could press their PTT and say yes, so the home user had a quite telephone like experience. Of course if the ship station was in a long conversation, the shore station could NOT interupt. They would try but while the ship PTT was pressed, they could not hear the shore station. Clearly, the UK phone system has a thing called side tone, which allows a little of the signal in to be sent back out. This meant that scanner users and ALL marine radio users could listen in. I went to Humber Radio’s coastal station up near Withernsea in 1980 to take a Morse Code test. Interesting place, long gone now.
If you have your Baofeng programmed the wrong way, you can indeed use these channels which are rarely monitored nowadays as the phone patch system was shut down years ago.