Is the Wouxun KG 1000G Plus the Right GMRS Mobile Radio for You?

does your gmrs use case lend itself better to a mobile rig or base station let's look at a 50 watt multi-band rig from OSHA hi and welcome to the gadget talk Channel where we do reviews and how to's on a variety of electronic gadgets that catch my eye in this video we're going to take a look at an updated version of the ocean kg 1000g it's called the kg-1000g Plus I need to thank my two-way radios.com for providing this unit for the review like the previous version the kg-1000g plus is an up to 50 watt mobile or base station device with multiple receive bands so you can program a wide variety of receive only channels including the popular two meter hand band channels MERS and Marine band channels and the 50 megahertz or 6 meter band the 350 megahertz band as well as business and public service channels in the 400 megahertz band and also frequencies in the 700 to 986 megahertz range this also has a cool feature that allows you to program channels in the VHF Air Traffic Control Band to listen to conversations between controllers and Pilots if you live near an airport the VHF received range includes the air traffic frequencies and there's a menu item to have the radio automatically recognize am signals that's important to set since air traffic radios transmit and AM signal since this is an analog FM transceiver other received Transmissions will need to be analog FM signals not digital ones air traffic Transmissions accepted the kg-1000g plus has all the usual gmrs menu settings to help you customize your radio to your specific needs and preferences what is unusual is that the kg-1000g plus like its predecessor can be paired with another kg-1000g plus along with a couple of other accessories to make a repeater for a small business or Farm operation this can improve your Communications ability without purchasing a much more expensive dedicated repeater built specifically for that task now you may not find this satisfactory for a high volume public repeater but for a personal or portable use this feature is quite interesting for most of us though the kg-1000g plus will be used as a mobile rig or a base station having more power and the ability to choose an antenna to meet your specific needs can greatly improve your range over an HT in my case as you'll see shortly I'm using the kg-1000g Plus in my Radio Shack as a base station I've got it mounted to the underside of a shelf using a power supply to power the radio before we jump into the radio tour let's take a moment to go over a few of the things that were changed on this model of the kg-1000g first was Hardware based and that was sound quality they've made some improvements there the other changes are mostly in the software and how various keys are labeled one of the things you'll notice is that the menu items that share the ham radio history of the firmware have been changed to things that make more sense in the gmrs world to the extent possible the menu items reflect less technical or cryptic names the menu items also better match some of the other new ocean gmrs radios so you don't have to remember two names for the same function there are also several changes to the labels on the microphone keypad quick commands for example instead of the more ham Centric V slash m button to switch between vfo or frequency mode and Channel or memory mode the number six button just says mode when in frequency mode the number three button Cycles through the various receive only bands the kg-1000g plus can receive and it's labeled bad last in this abbreviated list the radio now has five programmable keys with several choices per key the a through D keys are easily programmed in the radio menu system as is the programmable key on the microphone these choices allow you to quickly and easily make changes and choices to meet your individual use case let's take a quick look at what you'll see when your kg-1000g plus arrives okay so here's the box at the ocean kg 1000 plus uh comes in this uh is a pretty big box but it's chock full of stuff so let's take a look at what's inside so the first thing we have is a warranty card and the owner's manual and uh you know owner's manuals aren't all that exciting but I found this one particularly well written it defines all of the items in the menus fairly well and because you can use this as a repeater if you have two of these radios connected together it goes into a really good explanation of DTMF operations and so forth that I know I get a lot of comments on uh in in some of my videos for most of us we don't care we don't use it but if you're curious the manual here does a really good job of explaining that as well as the rest of the other um operations of the radio next we have two additional face plates this one and you may notice I've taped the little screw sets down so I don't lose them but this one is if you're going to mount the control panel remotely in your vehicle and then Mount the radio say um underneath the seat or in the trunk that kind of thing so that's this face plate and then this face plate here is connect to the front of the radio and then it just faces outward the one that comes on the radio that we'll see in a minute faces the control panel up at a bit of an angle so you've got three connectors that come with the radio depending upon the kind of mounting that you plan to do next there's a little package with some screws and extra fuses and then the mic clip is here and so there's a whole bunch of uh screws to help you mount the uh the mic clip where you need to as well as screws for the mobile Mount that I'll show you right now this is the mobile Mount and the radio can be mounted on this either hanging below the mount with that facing right side up or upside down if you're going to mount it underneath or on top so it's really easy to do these little Sawtooth openings right here are the front and that allows you to use the screw on the back of the mounting portion to the radio to maneuver this around a little bit and then give it an angle to best match the situation in which you're mounting your radio so that's the mobile mount now there also comes a couple of coils of wire that are going to be important to you this one's a pretty long piece of wire it's got kind of those little RJ Clips on it and from reading the instructions it's very similar to a network cable however there's some pin outs that have changed to allow the two-way communication from the control head to the radio itself so this black wire is what you're going to use to remotely Mount the control head away from the radio itself and then because this is a 50 watt radio the chances are if you're going to mount it in your vehicle you're going to want to run the wire through a grommet in the firewall and directly to the battery itself so that you have a lot of capacity now ideally that would be the way you do it cigarette plug or 12 volt outputs in the vehicle generally are 20 amp and this thing is supposed to take a 20 amp circuit and the fuses that are in it are 15 amp and so you might get away with some casual use by plugging it into a an outlet in your vehicle but with more powerful radios like this going directly into the battery is usually a better bet if you want to mount this directly to a power supply you wouldn't have to cut it you could keep the wires coiled it comes with tinned ends and you could just wrap those around or add a connector of your choice to a 30 amp power supply if you're going to run it indoors now here is the radio itself here's the back side of the power cord it's got that little t-style connector that are common to these on the back of the radio you see it's got the so239 it's got a cooling fan and then it's got a lot of extra surface area molded into the top of the radio plus this extra heat sink on the back to provide for cooling you can also see that there are two circles here this radio has two separate speakers and it has two areas you can monitor at the same time so you can have one channel on one speaker one channel on the other and then on the front of the radio here you've got the volume controls for each of those speakers here is channel tuning by the knob you can go into menu key the area key age goes from either the left or the right area to identify which of them is going to be primary which one's going to transmit when you press on the mic a long press here will move you into the Weather Channel there's a little icon right there to your NOAA Weather Channels the exit button will take you out of the menu system as with most of these menu systems in these radios and then there is the the power button up here and then four programmable Keys around the top that would allow you to put in a variety of functions to make operating the radio easier and then last but not least we have the uh the microphone again it's got the uh RJ I think uh this is probably a 45 that plugs into the radio and then it's got uh um the same buttons that are on the front of the uh radio here's the area button menu up down exit uh you can lock the radio here with the lock unlock button you can turn the light on that'll illuminate the keys here and then there's a volume control which is kind of Handy here at the top plus two little uh LEDs that show transmit and receive and then again here on the top we've got push to talk and a programmable button on the microphone itself so that's what you're going to find when you open the box in this video clip you'll notice I have the kg 1000g plus mounted under a shelf on my radio desk it's connected to a 30 amp 12 volt power supply as I mentioned in the clip I'm using a diplexer to split the UHF and VHS signals from my antenna so that the kg-1000g plus only gets the UHF signal and my 2 meter rig gets the VHF signal my next step is to get a VHF UHF dual band ham base station rig and a gmrs dual band antenna for the kg-1000g Plus I'm looking at an ed Fong gmrs j-poll I can mount in a window like many of you I have to deal with the homeowners association too the j-poll I have feeding both rigs now works quite well so let's look at the power on operations and the menus okay so here's the radio in the old Radio Shack here on the shelf and uh I've got it mounted on the underside of a shelf because I'm planning to use it as primarily a base station style radio let's turn it on and see what it looks like the power button is on the top of the radio on the left hand side all right so it comes up in the last settings I've had it I've got the the uh the Dual mode selected here I've got a local repeater on the left hand side another local repeater on the right hand side so let's look at the buttons just real quick right here we've got a a volume knob that's for the left speaker volume knob over here is for the right speaker not only are there two displays but there are two speakers a speaker for each of the displays I pointed out the on off button on the top there are four a b c and d buttons on the top here you probably can't see but they're programmable we'll look at those in the programming software across the front we can go into the menu the next button over is the area button and so in this case we've got area one is primary and area two is secondary so the push to talk is going to go out on area one over here quick press moves over to area two and then back over to area one now I've got this set up So the antenna is split so it's only getting the um the 462 megahertz range from the antenna I've got another two meter rig right beside it that's getting the um the VHF frequency so if I press and hold this I'm not going to get the weather channels but if I had it mobile if I had just it straight to the antenna I would indeed get the weather channels you see a little Cloud right there this is up and down for the channels up and down and then exit from the menu system which will take a quick peek at right now to enter the menus on the face plate we press the menu key and so you can see there is squelch if I want to make a change to squelch I press it again and then with here I can change the level of the squelch using the rotating knob right here if I got it the way I want it enter I press it again and then I can exit the menu mode like that now again going into menu and I can go up with my buttons wide narrow backlight repeater transmitter power I can also go up with this this is the work mode it's the display mode that the radio is working in right now again go into menu and then I can work my way up through this and then make any changes that I want to again just using the menu to make a change so I can keep going up through about 60 menus a bunch of them are for the repeater so if you're not using it as a repeater this will all just work the basically the same way as the other ocean menu systems do and then the last two things I want to point out on this is that I've got my microphone plugged into the side slot over here and then over here there's a little flap and that flap covers up a similar port to the microphone but that's for the PC and so you would run a wire from this radio to a second one of these if you're going to run it as a repeater set or more likely you're just going to put in the programming cable that plugs in there and then plugs into your computer now the microphone there are a couple of things that are important here you've got a lock button here that will lock the mic you can illuminate the mic with the switch right there there are two LEDs for transmit and receive there's a scroll wheel right here for volume and then the buttons that are on the front of the radio are here on the microphone as well so we've got the area button uh to move it but left and right we've got the menu button to move into the menu up and down buttons to change the items uh either going from menu item to menu item or once selected the Alternatives in each menu and then you can exit via that and then we also have some little shortcut keys that are printed here on the number keys and so if we wanted to move to any of the various menu settings so for example we wanted to make a change to power setting for example we could press menu select you can see that it changed there press 5 and it takes us right to menu number five the transmitter power and then we can go right to exit and leave the menu system so those are handy little uh shortcuts down here if we can press the uh the hash key a long press will lock and then the little star key up there a long press will put it into scan mode and it'll scan through the various frequencies so uh and then of course the push to talk is over here on this side of the of the microphone right up here while I didn't record it I did do a Power output test using a dummy load and a little mfj SWR and power meter in the high setting the radio produced about between 35 and 40 Watts my power meter tends to run a little low as I've seen others with a little bit higher outputs but these outputs are certainly within my expectations now with that out of the way let's do a brief tour of the kg-1000g plus CPS okay here's the screen display for the kg-1000 plus CPS and uh it's got the typical menus kind of layout here file open saved so forth edit copy paste those things what I'm looking at um settings memories windows and then we've got icons here in this Row for just about each of the things that we just looked at so you can use either these buttons or the menu and memory settings to do what we need to do to get in to the radio before we get started with that though we need to know what port the radio is connected to and so I have the programming cable plugged into that computer port on the side of the kg 1000 G plus and then plugged into my computer and so I'm going to bring my device manager into view here so you can see it uses the Silicon lab cp210x driver and it's on com3 so I'm going to set my port to come three here in this software so I'm going to go up to Port I have two com ports active on the computer and com3 is the one I want so I'm going to set okay the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to read from the radio so I'm going to press read and you can see down here the status bar is working its way across and the display on the radio says um uh communicating on data Port essentially an abbreviation for that radio rebooted and it tells me the read okay is done so now we've got what's in the radio you can see that the transmitter frequencies are off for 8 through 14. those are the interstitial channels and those are reserved for handheld transmitters only and so we can move down here and we can work our way through the various uh channels and I've made some changes to this so we can see what's going on on this tour but and we'll talk about those here in just a second so channel one is a basic gmrs channel it's got the the receive and the transmitter frequency we don't have any codes either CT CSS or DCS codes power on those channels is set to low it's wide band and these familiar settings are there with the name at the end through gmrs Channel 22. now starting with channel 23 we've got the gmrs repeater channels and they are called repeater 15 16 17 18 and they go up through um repeater Channel 30. and so these are ones that you can use you can set the ctcss they're often used with handhelds to set a code for a temporary repeater when you're just kind of in a new area but most of the time I'm just going to leave these clear and then I can add repeaters which I've done here so I've got a another repeater here it's the 462 725 and so if I tap there I'm going to be able to enter the frequency and so that'll be important and then and we'll just try a blank one here so 462 7 25000 and then when I kick out of that I'm going to end up with 462 725 here all this other stuff fills in but here since it's a repeater not Simplex I need to use the drop down box slide down to 467 because repeaters use a positive 5 megahertz offset and I want to get down to the 467 725 which is right there and so now I've got basically three channels with 467 set or 462 725 I've got this one here I've got this one I programmed in channel 30 and then now I've got another one that I just added right here and this is where I would add the ctcss codes or the DCS codes and they are all listed and you just select them via drop down boxes and then over here you've got six characters to give it a name so that's all works out pretty easily I'm going to delete that click out and it all goes away now I'm going down a little bit further to get out of the 30s and into the 40s here and just I've added a different frequency that's out of band and it works the same way you just type in the number you're going to leave the transmitter frequency off since the radio isn't going to transmit there anyway uh and then add CT CSS codes if you need to if it's a hand repeater for example but again you're not going to be able to transmit but you will be able to receive and so that's how this works and so I'd recommend because there are a lot of frequencies that you can program that you give some thought to how you're going to program these and then we're going to be able to make use of the scanning groups so you don't have to scan through you know nearly a thousand channels to get to what you want as we move over here we can move into our configuration settings these are again the menu settings available to you from the face plate of the radio and so those are my configuration settings I can move into my frequency mode setting and here are the bands where the radio will receive in most cases you're not going to need to mess with the stuff in this menu the broadcast memories I've added some broadcast FM channels here remote settings we've got it off we I don't need to control this radio via remote or through DTMF code so we've got that turned off and then here is our scan groups so if you want to scan frequencies that you've assigned in into the area of channels 100 to 199. you can just scan that without having to scan through all the rest of these channels those are the tabs associated with this on the CPS now when you've gotten the changes made here that you want my recommendation we go up here to file you want to go into save as and you want to give it a name and I've got it in the folder with the Radios name stored here on my computer now with all those changes made and with my file set I'm simply going to write this all all back to the radios the radio rebooted back to its operating mode and we're done so that's the quick and dirty on the kg-1000 G Plus CPS here's a little audio clip from a regional net on a group of linked repeaters as you can see the sound quality is good and the signal from the repeater was easy to understand and if you knew the speakers you'd be able to recognize their voices early check-ins for the Southwest Regional met how this works is if you're a regular here you get early Vice state so what do you think of the ocean kg 1000g plus well I like it I have a couple of mini-sized mobile or base Edition gmrs radios and they do okay however the extra power and the styling of this unit makes it a keeper the extra receive bands lots of programmable channels the am received for the air bands and the ability to pair two kg 1000g pluses together for a personal repeater makes this gmrs mobile or base station rig a great choice if you don't need or want all the features or power of this rig you can find less capable but perfectly fine radios for less but for many of you the ocean brand reputation and the feature set of the kg-1000g plus will be worth the extra cost as always if you found this video helpful please click the Thumbs Up Button below the video and subscribe to the gadget talk Channel click the Bell icon to be notified when I post new videos if you are looking for a small water resistant gmrs HT to keep with you Outdoors beat me over here as we discuss another nice Ocean gmrs radio thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Gadget Talk

Views: 12,768

Keywords: wouxun, GMRS, best GMRS Radio, Base station, Mobile radio, long range GMRS, mobile GMRS radio, off road radio

Id: VECNNxFBUlc

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023