Your Radio Doesn't Have a Range Problem. It Has a Hill Problem

Everyone told me the same two things: better antenna, more watts. I did both. I still couldn't talk half a mile. So I flew a drone straight up from my front yard to find out what was actually in the way. My in-laws' house came into view at 60 feet. Sixty feet. That was the whole problem. VHF and UHF are line of sight. A hill, a row of houses, a stand of trees — those aren't things that weaken your signal, they're things that block it. And you don't fix a blocked path by yelling louder. You fix it by getting above it, which is exactly what a repeater does for you. In this video, Chris and I run the same half mile four times: the original bubble-pack radios, a DM-32UV and then through a local repeater on low power. Then we sit down at the kitchen table and build the channel start to finish. If you've got a radio you bought, maybe even got licensed for, and then it just sat there — this one's for you. You're not too dumb for this. You had a doorbell problem. YOUR HOMEWORK THIS WEEK Find the repeater nearest you. Get three things: output, offset, and tone. Build one channel. Just one. (GMRS: myGMRS.com. ) Then tell me in the comments which repeater it was and whether you got in — and if you got stuck, tell me where you got stuck. The tone, the offset, the software, the zone. If enough of you hit the same wall, we'll cover it in a video. GEAR IN THIS VIDEO Midland FRS bubble pack radios Baofeng DM-32UV DJI Mavic 2 Pro REFERENCES myGMRS https://mygmrs.com/ RADIO ACCESSORIES I make desktop stands, vehicle cupholder mounts, and MOLLE antenna adapters. Check us out on Etsy: https://coyotefieldcraft.etsy.com Thanks to the folks who keep the local repeaters running. Clubs are infrastructure, same as the tower is. NEXT IN THIS SERIES Somebody else's tower isn't a plan. Next video, we build one that goes where the terrain wins.