Building a GMRS Repeater For Personal or SHTF PART1 - Repeater Build with Two Wouxun KG-1000G Radios

hello thank you for joining welcome beginners and newcomers my name is randy and i am a radio addict i guess it started when i was a kid started dabbling around the age of nine or ten with cb radios it was cool all the kids were doing it i went from a little walkie-talkie up to a full radio shack base station with a big antenna on the roof i stopped doing it for quite a while until i got older and then i stumbled across one of these on the internet it's only 26 dollars it seemed innocent enough but from there it got more serious i got more before i knew it i had one of these and then one of these next thing i knew i was pumping 50 watts out on gmrs out of my jeep my family said i was getting out of control so i think now i do have it under control all i have to do now is build a repeater if i can just build a repeater i'll be done i won't need any more i'll be cured so i will be building the not a rubicon gmrs 50 watt repeater sponsored by by twowayradios.com i'm going to make a few videos as i go through this process of building this repeater this video is part one the planning and figuring out what i need to do the next video will be actually putting it together and programming it and setting it up and then probably the last video will be choosing a location where the thing is going to go inside the house that is wife approved and where the antenna is going to go and how i'm going to get it up there that's going to be an entire adventure on its own because my roof is like this and the tiles it's got ceramic tiles and they're made out of potato chips and if you walk on them they break and they slide off and then you fall out i'm not even sure how i'm going to get that antenna up there but i will figure it out and i will share it with you so that you too will know how to build your own gmrs repeater so in this video part one talk about why why would somebody want a gmrs repeater it's not because i'm a radio addict talk about the uh what i'm going to need or what i think i'm going to need and the plan get it all planned out so there's a few reasons why you might want a gmrs repeater a lot of people want a repeater for emergency use for hit the fan use when things go bad they want to have communications just for their family so by building your own private repeater putting an antenna on the roof and handing out some pre-programmed walkie-talkies to the family you'd be able to communicate probably within a pretty good range a few miles around your house or wherever you put the repeater up that's probably the most common reason why people want to build their own repeater if there's no repeaters in your area the biggest comment i see on my gmrs videos is there's no repeaters in my area what shall i do well build your own put one up be a pillar of the community and put it up for everyone to enjoy now first if you watch my videos you know i am not an expert i'm not a radio head or an antenna geek so i'm learning all this as i go along and this series of videos will prove that if i can build a repeater you can build a repeater i'm not trying to build the best repeater in the world it doesn't have to be or have the longest distance and range in the world i don't care if the harmonics are not perfect i just want a repeater that works my goal is to cover the area from my house about 25 miles in each direction 25 to 30 miles in each direction east to west and south behind me i've got a mountain range so i don't have to worry about that but i am located kind of at the top of a hill so i've got good line of sight for many miles so 25 to 30 mile range in all directions except for behind me should be achievable i don't have to have the best equipment it does not have to be the most technical equipment i just want it to work that's my goal i don't want it to be too expensive i could just go out and buy a repeater a pre-made repeater but those are about fifteen hundred dollars it's out of my price range out of a lot of people's price range on the other hand i could go buy a pre-made redevist makes a pre-made little portable repeater and it's only three or four hundred dollars but that's only 5 watts or 10 watts i could also just build a simplex repeater using a couple of these bow fangs but i want something that's a little more powerful i want something a lot more powerful and more reliable it has to be easy to put together because i'm a and like i said it just has to work does not have to be perfect so in part one this video that you're watching now i'm going to be using the ocean kg1000g that i'm going to base my repeater on i'm going to be using two of these from buy2wayradios.com kg1000g is a 50 watt mobile gmrs radio and it is designed so that you can easily combine two of them into a repeater it even comes with the cable that you need plugs right into the side here plug the other side into another one of these i have two of these and then you program it tell it which one is the receiver and the transmitter and you set up your tones and everything so it is designed to be a repeater if you connect two of them together so that's going to make it easy the kg1000g is about 320 and i will need two of these the antenna i'll be using a tram [Music] 1486 [Music] that is a base station antenna designed for gmrs that will go somewhere up on the roof if i can get up there i do have a crippling fear of heights that's going to be an issue i might have to pay somebody to come up and get on my roof because like i said it's like this to power the two kg1000gs i've got a power supply this is the dwc dwc30 wi-n it's a 30 amp dc power supply should be plenty for both radios also available from buy2arradios.com i'm going to need a duplexer because a repeater requires an antenna to receive an antenna to transmit so i need either two antennas placed far apart so they don't interfere with each other or a little magical device called a duplexer which i will also be getting from by2arradios.com i'll be getting the xlt gmrs 50 watt duplexer which is about 150 the other option is to use two antennas as we know i'm already going to have enough trouble getting one antenna on the roof i don't want to hassle with two antennas and two coax feeds it's just too much of a hassle so for me it's worth the extra money to get a duplexer i'm going to need coax line and i don't need the most best lm 440 dollars a foot coax i'll probably get some standard rg59 type coax to run up to the antenna i'll need mounting hardware to mount that antenna to wherever i'm gonna stick it to i'll need to ground the antenna so i'll need grounding cable and i'll need a grounding rod probably because there's no cold water pipes on the entire side of the house where i think the antenna will be going also need some patch cables to connect the radios to the duplexer and things like that but all of that extra stuff shouldn't add up to more than 100 or 150 dollars another thing that i might need i'm not sure yet is something that's called an idealmatic which will connect directly into one of the kg1000s and automatically transmit an identification every 15 minutes or a half hour or however you program it for it only costs about 50. and buy2warradios.com will be selling a interface cable specifically for that id omatic to connect to the kg1000 i'm not sure legally if i need to have the repeater announce its identification automatically every 15 minutes or any length of time i gotta read up on the legalities if you know what the fcc rules are for a repeater identifying itself leave a comment below and let me know i'm learning this is all a learning process i'll be asking questions if you know the answer leave a comment and let me know but leave a link to the source of where you're getting this from like the fcc website so i know that you're right now if i was going to be using the repeater for real hit the fan situation it needs its own power supply because when things go south first thing to go is the electricity so i do have a jackery 1000 solar power generator so i'll test that out as well that's a good option for real hit the fan because that should be able to run it for days we'll see some of the other things that i'll need to figure out is uh choosing a channel what what channel what repeater channel do i want to use it on i've got other repeaters in my area so i've got to make sure that i don't use a channel that's in use by another repeater i also need to decide if i'm going to make this repeater open for everybody to use because i'm a pillar of the community and i want to give back to the community and let everybody use my repeater or i might want to keep it private also need to figure out if i want to put a tone on it so if i want to keep it private i have to put a tone on it even though people can easily figure out the tones even if i make it public i still may want to put a tone on it just to keep the riffraff that are driving by from accidentally using it and if i do make it open to the public then how do i let the world know how do i get it listed somewhere like mygmrs.com and also things like licensing does the repeater need its own license do i use my license i have no idea how any of that works so these are the things i'm going to have to figure out if you know leave a comment below so if this is something you're interested in doing yourself and following leave a comment i'm asking this is one of the only videos where you're going to see me begging for comments because this is i'm learning this as i go if you have questions about what i'm doing or why i'm doing it if i didn't already cover it leave a comment let me know i'll try to answer them if you have built your own repeater or are going through the process now or thinking about building your own repeater if you've got any tips or lessons learned or things that i haven't thought of let me know i'm learning here we're going to figure this out together it will be a community project i hope to have the next video up in just a couple of days or weeks once i get started putting this thing together i get a lot of comments or people show a lot of interest i'll probably do it faster thank you for watching we hope to see you on the trip

Channel: NotaRubicon Productions

Views: 73,741

Keywords: build a repeater, how to make a GMRS repeater, gmrs repeater build, gmrs repeater setup, DIY repeater

Id: exAdO2898wI

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021