Ron

Here's a random question.

Are there any other amateur radio operators that drive the Dragon with us?

I brought some VHF gear one year and got in a few APRS position reports on the NC side but didn't have anyone else around to see how VHF direct would do vs the UHF FRS radios we all have. Still can't punch through rock but the lower frequency and greater power would reduce foliage attenuation.

I'm not aware of any repeaters or digipeaters that would allow us to work the entire Dragon but we could probably still drive out to where we could access an autopatch and call help if needed faster than driving to cell service.

CQ CQ?

Lovetodrive2000

Ron...

Sorry for 'ing your thread....

But... is this the new mod for your car?

Scooterboy

Boy, you guys made fun of me for my CB radio......

Ron

Yeah, but that's only the finder antenna.

This:

is the main antenna.

I love the reception but I have to admit it screwed up my weight balance. Oh, and I have to plan my route now to avoid low bridges.

Yours in superior communications,

Ron

They're just jealous of your longer wavelength. I'm sure you're used to that.

Yours in comparative measures,

CitadelBlue

Ron,,, who about a 'short' course of instructions on all of this radio "STUFF" ....... Some of us have used the CB radio from the 70's talking with truck drivers on the various locations of speed traps and 'smokies' giving out tickets or cruising the road ..... I recently bought a new smaller CB radio (cause I wanted to be like SCOOTER Boy - but the chatter is a lot more trashy and a lot LESS on road and smokie conditions) ... My father-in-law had a 19 channel Midland CB with an upper side band and a lower side band. He gave it to me in the early 80's and while I was stationed in Kingsville TX (I was in the Navy) ... one night I was able to communicate with someone in NC using that CQ CQ language ..... While floating around and cruising around South America I had an opportunity to talk with my wife in Charleston SC via ham radio. I wasn't the operator just a user. Obviously this was way before the internet and Skype.....And on another ship we communicated during underway replenishments via VHF marine radios. Now we use the FRS and GMRS hand held radios during our S2000 meets ...... So ... what's the difference in all of these ..... purpose, frequencies ?????

Ron

I like the pictures.
Amateur radio opens up new frequencies and modes and lifts power restrictions that we have with the FRS & GMRS radios. Just as important, we can use external antennas that have a higher gain than the rubber ducky style ones on our hand-held radios.

Let's see, how to break this down...

First, frequency. The FRS/GMRS radios operate in the UHF band. This band, like all of the bands we'd consider using in our cars are pretty much line-of-sight. But at these higher frequencies there's also more attenuation from the tree leaves all around us in the warm months.

Once we get into the ham bands we can use 2 meter radios that operate in the VHF band. The radio I usually have with me operates in both UHF and VHF bands. VHF is also line-of-site but has better penetration through the trees. This would give us slightly better range except when the mountain gets in the way. CB is slightly lower frequency operating in the 11 meter band but only has 40 channels, like you said, a lot of "jaw jacking" and, coming to our next topic, an upper limit of 4 watts.

Next, power.
FRS radios are limited to 1/2 a watt and GMRS does slightly better at 5 watts although I doubt any of the GRMS radios we use run that high. Ham radios operating in the UHF and VHF bands are limited to 1500 watts. There are areas where you can't run 1500 watts on UHF but that's academic since we'd never use that kind of power in a mobile application. You wouldn't be able to get far enough away from the antenna for the RF radiation to be safe and, without running the numbers, I think you'd slow to a crawl while the radio pulled most of the power out of your engine when you transmitted. My handhelds put out 5 watts and my mobile (think under-dash) radio puts out 25. 50 to 100 watt mobiles are common. Besides, power can be less important than:

Antennas.
FRS radios have to be made with intergal antennas. GMRS radios can have external antennas but I don't know of anyone but me who's ever run one that way. Having an external antenna gets it out on your truck lid and higher off the road for better line-of-sight. External antennas can also be made so that they have some degree of gain that increases the effective radiated power while also allowing the radio to pick up weaker signals.

Even with all this, the fact is we could be running a 2 meter radio at 1500 watts with a high gain antenna trying to transmit while frying our eyeballs and we still couldn't transmit from one end of the Dragon to the other. Line-of-Sight trumps everything. To get around this, amateur radio operators have created a network of:

Repeaters.
I rarely talk directly to anyone on my UHF/VHF radio. We have a a number of repeaters here in Charlotte that are based on TV antenna towers and tall buildings. I transmit on one frequency and the repeater picks it up and retransmits it at higher power on another frequency. Amateur radios are designed so they can transmit on one frequency and receive on another so the effect is as if you have a very long distance radio. There is a network of repeaters across the country but, just like cell towers, none of them cover the Dragon. For special events people sometimes put up:

Temporary Repeaters.
Just what it sounds like. It'd kind of expensive to put up a normal repeater because the equipment required to transmit on one frequency while receiving on another but there are things called simplex repeaters that do a store-and-forward kind of thing where you transmit a short message and, after you unkey your mic, it is retransmitted on the same frequency. It can be confusing to someone who doesn't know what is going on. But there are other modes that can make things easier like:

APRS.
This started out as Automatic Position Reporting System but was later renamed to Automatic Packet Reporting System to reflect that you can do more than report position. It's a digital mode that allows you to transmit your location and, optionally, other messages through special digital repeaters called Digipeaters. Temporary digipeaters can be set up as cheaply as voice simplex repeaters. Permanent digipeaters usually have a connection to the Internet and also pass APRS packets to a world-wide network. If you look at APRS.FI you can find position and weather reports from around the world. What this means in practice is that I have a 2 meter radio connected to a GPS that can transmit my position and speed so that other amateur operators around me can see it as well as anyone who looks for my callsign on the Internet. This is often used for bicycle, car events and various types of races to track where people are. Obviously, that would be nice on the Dragon along with the ability to signal an SOS if someone was in trouble. It would require us to set up a temporary digipeater which I'd probably be willing to do if we had enough people using it and I could find a suitable location with coverage of most of the Dragon. I've never surveyed it to see if that's even possible considering the terrain.

TL;DR version.
If enough people passed a not-very-hard multiple choice test and got their amateur license we could use cheap 2-meter hand-held radios to have somewhat better communications over much of the Dragon. It would be much easier for leaders and tail-end-charlies to keep in touch. More ambitious people could also run APRS and one of the GPS units that can receive the signals coming back from the radio and plot other APRS users that are close by. Last, if some people really wanted to geek out, they could put up a digipeater or voice repeater along the dragon or maybe a repeater to cover Fontana to keep people in touch while we're in the village.

There, that took two glasses of wine and is undoubtably garbled. [tap tap, is this thing on?] Tell me what didn't make sense or ask any questions that I didn't answer. It would be nice to hear someone on the 2-meter radio while that kid in the minivan is screaming on the FRS.

CitadelBlue

Wow..... that was a mouthful .......

I think I need a little time to comprehend all of that and reading comprehension was NOT one of my strong subjects in school.......

A couple of questions .......I have a Midland 75-822 and am only able to HEAR for a short distance. I can see truckers talking to each other as they pass and the conversation fades pretty quick. Guess an external antenna would help.
Midland 75-822 40 Channel CB-Way Radio


What about the upper and lower side bands on my father in law's CB ..... Are these side bands compatible with the HAM radio but limited to 5 watts (since its a 1970's radio)....

Have another glass of wine .....

Ron

I'm starting to worry about developing a drinking problem...

You got it right in one. Antenna location and type make a huge difference.

Look at the size of the antenna on your hand-held radio and then look at what's hanging off the side mirrors of those trucks. Size matters. Plus, you almost always see two antennas on a truck, one on either side. I've only talked about omnidirectional antennas that transmit/receive equally in all directions but mounting two antennas that way leads to a beaming effect to the front and rear of the truck. So less signal is lost to the sides where the trucker is probably not talking and more signal is sent ahead and behind.

But you don't have to start hanging multiple antennas on our little cars to get much better performance. One mag-mount antenna on the truck lid makes a big difference. I'm sure you've seen the Miatas running around with whip antennas. Their group seems to use CB like we use FRS. Your FRS radio can't have an external antenna and your GMRS can, if it has a removable antenna. The FRS/GMRS ones never will to comply with FRS law. I use a GRMS-only radio and I can mount an external antenna. I typically don't because this radio already outperforms the family radios and the attached antenna already works better than your CB because it's a UHF radio. Antenna length is dependent on frequency. Remember how Sheriff Andy's patrol car had that long antenna mounted on the rear bumper? That's 'cause he was using a VHF radio with lower frequencies and longer wavelengths. You can "fold" antennas electrically so they can be shorter at the expense of performance but higher frequencies will always mean smaller antennas. One of the many reasons that we would never use HF in our cars is that the antenna would want to be larger than the car. Bad aerodynamics.

As for your CB sidebands, short answer, nope. (But you know I can't leave it at that...)

I didn't talk about transmission modes before but I have to if I'm going to talk about sideband.

The first thing that determines if two radios can talk to each other is frequency. So, your CB is operating in the CB frequency range and will not talk (without modification) to any Ham radios. The next thing is type of modulation. You already know about this by using your car radio. There are two dials, AM and FM. Amplitude Modulation (AM) sends a signal by varying the strength of the signal. Frequency Modulation (FM) actually wiggles the frequency around the base frequency to send its signal. The advantages of FM are the same as on your car radio, among them, less noise (static).

Our FRS/GMRS radios are FM as opposed CB which is an AM service. So, even if we modified your CB radio to operate (poorly and illegally) on ham bands, you'd still find that you couldn't hear anything. (There are people who operate AM/Sideband on 2 meters but that's now how the inexpensive hand radios work.) Now I've worked my way up to your sideband question. (Remember, that's what I'm explaining.)

WIth AM radio you have the central carrier frequency and the information is carried on the sidebands. There are two, upper and lower, that carry the same information while most of the power is wasted on the center carrier frequency.

Single sideband radios remove the carrier frequency and one of the sidebands so that more of your radio power goes into transmitting the information. You pick which sideband you want to use (LSB or USB) and transmit away. The person your talking to has to have selected the same sideband. In the receiver, you have to rebuild the whole signal to decode it so there's some electronics magic to reconstruct the carrier frequency. You've got that little knob to adjust that and everyone sounds like a World War II fighter pilot or an alien depending on how well you do that.

TL;DR
Yes, an external antenna would make a big difference to your CB radio. CB radio antennas are a lot bigger than FRS/GMRS and 2-meter antennas. The sidebands on your CB won't help you comunicate with any of our other radios, FRS or Ham, but there are truckers who run sideband rigs. It would be interesting to try 2-meter sideband on the Dragon but I'd have to get a different radio, which I'd do if someone else were trying to run it.

FluKy15

There was a guy I was talking to at WTD that had a radio boosted to 5x the amount legal, some kind of special radio. Not sure what it was, but it was big, bulky, and powerful. It was some commercial type of radio.