For not much more money, you could get a 40-watt Motorola MTR2000 UHF repeater which will have decent sensitivity and excellent selectivity. I use MTR2000 and Quantars for my ham repeaters, which would also work great for GMRS. Also the Motorola GR1225 repeaters can be had for very cheap, and will work well for GMRS service. You can't go wrong there.
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate you watching the video. The radios are great as a personal repeater for a couple miles, but when you look at them for more than a couple of miles, they're not worth it.
Ive Tried 2 of the kg uv980 As repeaters with the same results. Two seperate antennas about 27 ft.apart. 1/4 mile Distance at best. These radios are Junk as Repeaters. No front end Recievers. Buy a real quality repeater on ebay Or some place reputable. It will make a difference. Thanks for the info. Best Of luck with Your project.
Dang I was just looking at getting two of these for a repeater build as well, especially since they are 50 watts and certified for GMRS use. This is discouraging news
I am a year late to this video, had similar issues for a while, I moved my antenna and it improved my situation. You may have noise in the area, or when it's repeating you may have an issue with grounding. I gave up, got a retevis rt97s , burned it out then got a pair of motos..had the same issue so I took my motos on a trip away from my home and discovered they worked without issue. The weather changed, got warmer and some of my noise went away. I am shooting in the dark, but outside of replacing everything, recently I had issues until I replaced my tone pairs. Again, I have noise, I also had issues with the current tones.
@@PRSH8YAPROJECTS What radios did you use? I`m scared of commercial radios, due to be so old. And the antennas, which one is for higher one, TX or DX and lower one? I am new to GMRS, made my own repeater, but had to return duplexer because few meters won`t have RX and TX about 4 miles around can`t even hear it, antenna mast is only 28FT, I am planning to raise it about, at least 45FT higher. I did a mistake, I put 2 antennas horizontally, next to each other, about 3ft, now I know they need to be separated about 2.5 meters away from each other vertically. My repeater is OFF until I rise the mast up.
Hello, thank you for the great information. I have a question that might seem silly or stupid but I had the exact same problem you had and the one thing that did the trick for me was reversing the cables that go to the duplexer. I have the transmit unit on the high side and the receiver on the low side. Before doing this I could only get like a block away before I lost reach. After switching the cables I have tested at 15+ miles on a baofeng handheld and only because I haven’t had time to test further out but I plan to do.
Update here, after switching the inputs in the duplexer as mentioned above I was able to talk on the repeated at 25 miles and I am positive I can go even further out but again just haven’t had the time. I did have to factory reset the radios a couple of times and reprogram them before I can get them to work correctly.
Unacceptable as Hell! I knew it! this is WHY I wait before buying OR wait for 2nd or 3rd Gen. The quality of ALL products and R&D and Beta testing have gone massively down since the 1980's. In the 80's they released practically perfect products. Man this saddens me greatly. Someone in the comments below complained as standalone the KG1000G locks up after a few minutes.
@@PRSH8YAPROJECTS he has a GMRS repeater build playlist. In his last video, he did mention that keeping the two radios together caused a desense as the tx rig would "leak" a bit of RF. He said putting a bit of space between them solved the issue.
Same issue with a pair of KG-UV980Ps. 10 mile radius on simplex, about 0.5 mile radius when in repeater mode. This isn't going to work. What business repeater did you end up with? I'm looking into the Motorola MTR2000 100W. Seems to be a solid move with more power.
were you having desense issues where the transmitter of your repeater would key up and hurt the sensitivity of the receiver? I wouldn't trust these radios as a repeater anyways seeing they don't have a real receiver front end. And if you were going to use these radios as a repeater, I would either use a bandpass / reject duplexer or run lower power if using only a notch duplexer.
Using 2 mobiles with a surecom duplexer controller works a lot better than linking them together in relay mode. But, by the time you buy 2 mobiles, power supply, a surecom duplexer controller, a duplexer, antenna, cables and wiring, plus your time spent, it's not worth it. If money is tight build a simplex repeater, otherwise buy a factory built duplex repeater. To cut down on cost find other gmrs users in your area, a lot of the time you can find 4-5 people willing to split the cost with you.
I know you tested a lot of things while doing this but as some suggested placing the radios apart from each other, did you try isolating the receiver from the transmitter via shielding or other means? If so can you list what you tried?
Bottom line, this is for a farm. The receiver in these radios when put in repeater mode are desensitized via the firmware. These radios are great to throw in your truck, but don’t think you’re gonna setup a repeater.
I wonder what the range would be if I installed the kg-1000g into my pickup truck? Just got my gmrs license and just learning how to navigate. A lot of the things you said in the video are way over my head. Maybe you could point my in the right direction. Thankyou!
So I got mine set up and having troubles , it won't transmit an audible sound. The transmit radio shows its transmitting but I don't hear anything from my HTs Also, at times after I talk on my HT to the repeater a d release the PTT button the repeater doesn't release and will keep repeating long after the transmission is ended. Any help appreciated -WRQC955
I set a wouxon on repeater mode (two way) and it did a similar thing. I had the PTT set to off. Once I set it to ON, repeater worked fine. I was releaved.
I also bought two KG1000g radios one for my truck and one for my wife’s truck. I have noticed that after about 30 minutes the radios will lock up. They won’t transmit or receive or respond to any buttons on the speaker mic nor the head unit except for the power button on the head unit. You can recycle power and they will work fine for about another 30 minutes. Also I configured them to auto power off at 30 minutes. But once they lock up they don’t auto power off and will drain the battery in my truck. Any thoughts or have you experienced any of this? One last thing when receiving audio the audio will play for 4 seconds then cut out for about a second and then back on. They do this all the time and it’s very annoying when trying to have a conversation. It doesn’t matter what freq I am on or what band I am listening too either.
@@marcodurazo2623 I did reset to factory default settings and that worked but anytime I make changes to the raio settings for example set APO to 1 hr the radios lock up after an hour and I have to unplug the power cable to recycle power to get the radios back up again.
@@RINNTY Yeah I ended up returning my 980. Despite the rave reviews online, it ended up being kinda a piece of crap. Thankfully, and only after negotiation, BTWR took it back.
@@PRSH8YAPROJECTS BTWR agreed all the flaws I found existed was actually in the design, that they couldn't be fixed because they didn't have the foresight to implement a firmware update mechanism, and that they had misrepresented the product and features.
@@PRSH8YAPROJECTS NO, I NEVER DID, I THINK THERE JUST NOT SUITABLE AS REPEATERS. I MIGHT SELL THEM, THERE UNLOCKED TO 479 MHZ. Most of these radios Have no real front end.
Nothing beats commercial when it comes to serious communication. Of course, you gone to have slack from individuals. Oh, that's not FCC typed accepted, you can't do that. Actually, you do what makes sense as long as you use the repeater as intended. Who cares?? It's like you setting up network and profiting from the system.
@@PRSH8YAPROJECTS oh man that's disconcerting, I feel like your a month ahead of me and your forecast isn't pretty. Thanks for the heads up. What repeater are you switching you?
