- On Sun, 5 Jun 2005, Glenn wrote: > At 10:55 AM 6/5/2005, Glenn wrote: > >10 miles mite be quite possible. Most of the GMRS raidos that we all > >use are 1 watt max. transmit power. The T7100's are 2 watt and the > >Midlands that Kono is looking at > ><http://www.dak.com/reviews/2027story.cfm?Ggmrs#pic>http://www.dak.com/reviews/2027story.cfm?Ggmrs#pic > >are 3 watt. > > > >The 2 extra watts would be a nice boost. > >At 10:14 AM 6/5/2005, Chris Binder wrote: > > > >>I have some motorola T7100's. They advertised a 7 mile range on > >>them. They are absolutely true. I can talk from my house, near > >>Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital, and talk to my friend who lives > >>near south high. 6 miles as the crow flies, and I'm fairly sure I > >>can get that 7th mile out of them because I can still hear clearly > >>after 6 miles. There are two things to remember about portable radios: (1) Wattage does not have a linear relationship to distance, and (2) the more power you push the shorter your battery life is. The trick is to balance these two problems. As someone who has been using commercial band portables for over 30 years, I have come to adore the radios that allow you to switch power outputs at will - normally, I stay at .5 or 1 watt, depending on what I expect to be doing. If that doesn't cut it, I can then move up to the full rating of the radio in use (usually 5 watts). This maximizes battery life. As to distance, a 4 watt radio does not "reach" twice as far as a 2 watt radio. While I forget what the actual formula is, in practice I'd say you can generally expect about a 1.5x increase in distance for every 2x increase in power. At the same time you cut battery life in half for every doubling in power. Of coursem the above numbers all assume that a 1 watt radio actually puts out 1 watt, and thereby conveniently ignores something called Effective Radiated Power ("ERP"). ERP is what you really care about, and it's most affected by the antenna choice. A 1 watt radio with a really crappy "rubber duckie" antenna may have an ERP of .3 watts, while the same radio with a really good center loaded whip could reach an ERP of 1.8! The moral of the story is to buy the radio you can afford, but buy the best antenna you can find. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@xxxxxxx 0xBD4A95BF "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer 1907 Speech **************************************** Our WebPage! Http://WWW.GeoStL.com Mail List Info. //www.freelists.org/list/geocaching Mail List FAQ's: //www.freelists.org/help/questions.html **************************************** To unsubscribe from this list: send an email to geocaching-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field