What Ham Radio To Get?

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Thats kind of what I thought. The purpose for my question isn't for idle chat with someone but for my wife and i to stay in contact with each other here on the ranch. She gets worried when I'm working in some remote area and she can't contact me on our cheap hand held radios. On a good day they're good for maybe 3 miles, bearly enough to reach the mail box.
Excellent point. If you have a high spot or tree on the property that has line of sight, you can get creative with two handhelds and some wire to make a repeater. Purchase of a Wouxon KG-UV9D will simplify it. Add a solar panel to keep the battery charged up, put the radio(s) in a weather tight box and swing a homebrew wire antenna up as high as you can. Now you have a repeater. Without any height advantage, you have doubled your range. How much of an increase is going to depend on height. There are ID requirements to make it legal, but I can explain how that is done on such a setup.

If you need more coverage, you can set up more cross-band repeaters. There are a few things to work out with such a system, but it isn't difficult to do and not terribly expensive either. BTW: The reason we would use a cross-band repeaters here is dual band radios can work with it and a very expensive cavity duplexer is not required due to the wide difference between input and output frequencies.
fast and dirty repeater.png
 
I think your lower Circuit should be Radio 2 Speaker Out - Radio 1 Microphone In.

How do you control the switching to transmit?
 
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I think your lower Circuit should be Radio 2 Speaker Out - Radio 1 Microphone In.

How do you control the switching to transmit?
Absolutely correct. Thanks for not slamming me. The labels you suggest are correct. As long as I have been noticing that you would think I would have corrected it long ago. It is a .PNG file and I need to dig up my original .PPT file to correct it. Transmit is controlled by VOX on both sides (there is a bit of tweaking of VOX trigger levels), Whichever side receives a valid signal/tone first takes precedence until either released or the timeout timer runs out. I have demonstrated this circuit without the matching audio transformers, but using them means you can safely use different brands of radios on each side.
 
Good solid design, well thought out. Antenna height is what gives you range on VHF and UHF repeaters. de KA5SIW
 

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