What am I doing wrong?

General Discussion
1

All,

I have a few questions. I have a Motorola gp68 UHF radio (430 MHz - 470 MHz) which I set on scan mode where it scans around looking for active channels.

I’m currently listening to one on channel 455.7875 MHz UHF, this turns out to be a shopping centre about 20 miles from my house.

The shopping centre control uses a 25w mobile UHF radio on this frequency and all security staff, cleaning staff, parking control officers etc use 2w hand held radios.

My question is this, how can I hear them and that distance? Both the control room and hand held radios operate on the same channel for RX and TX.

I’ve tried using my own two way radios, from my house to check the distance on a similar frequency and I only get about 2miles before the message is unreadable. So how is it I can hear other frequency’s at miles away using a similar set up.

I can even hear Glasgow airport which is about 35 miles from my house where luggage staff are using hand held radios approx 5w……

So what am I doing wrong that I’m not getting the distance with my hand held radios?

Thanks
billy

2

Anyone any ideas?

3

This is likely because the shopping center and airport are probably using higher watt repeaters on their premises.

4

Yeah, even with the hand helds replying tho?. Also It happens with people using the pmr 446 uhf frequencey which is only permitted to use 0.5w?