I get this email. It says that I am a Network Solutions GOLD VIP Program member. I get special access to Tech Support and huge discounts on service.

Since PopularWireless.com has today been plagued with INTERNAL SERVER ERRORS, INTERMINABLE LOAD TIMES, and in general damned poor service, I decided what the heck I’ll try the special 800 number.

What I get is the PHILIPPINES. Network Solutions is based in the USA but I, a valued GOLD VIP PROGRAM MEMBER get support from a third party company in the Philippines. Nothing has changed. Service as usual. They could CARE LESS, as usual.

There is NO dedicated team to resolve the DAY LONG SITE ISSUES that any reputable company of Network Solution’s size would have detected on its own. There is no priority issue handling as claimed because everybody at Network Solutions is at HOME over the weekend. I did not notice ENHANCED on-line account tools either.

It doesn’t matter how loud you yell, or how strong the language is anymore. American companies just no longer give a damn about about service. The one I work for is of course excluded from that broad brush. Just don’t tell me you work for Network Solutions, because if you do I will HANG UP on your sorry self.

The Internal Server Errors experienced today, the LONG LOAD TIMES are all courtesy of NETWORK SOLUTIONS.

…and PNC Bank is also on my list of financial institutions that could care less about the average Joe.

Apparently when you travel to a foreign country INCLUDING CANADA VIA turns off your ATM card. My wife is currently traveling in Toronto and has NO ACCESS TO HER ACCOUNTS.

When I called my BANK, PNC Bank based in Maryland, and D.C. all they could do was tell me to call a VISA 800 number.

This has been going on for TWO DAYS and she has yet to be able to access an ATM there.

This was NEVER a problem beofre and now it apparently is a VERY BIG problem.

I am POISED to take all of my accounts out of my current bank PnC Bank for their INABILITY and UNWILLINGNESS to help my wife access her funds a few hundred miles outside of the USA.

When you travel to Canada be SURE to call VISA AND TAKE AMERICAN EXPRESS. I am calling American Express Gold Card people next!

I am SO TIRED of being treated like SCUM by so-called American businesses. Damn tired.

Today I heard a GMRS repeater owner shouting at the imaginary. It would be funny except for the obvious impact he’s having across many thousands of square miles. Mild tropospheric ducting is in effect. Weak signals from a good portion of the Eastern United States are being heard at my home as I am sure are everywhere around DelMarVa. I can hear THREE systems ID’ing on the frequency in question and ID’s on other channels from Virginia, D.C., Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Someone somewhere is testing on the same repeater frequency pair used by the repeater owner in Virginia. The person testing is also apparently on the same CTCSS or DCS tone. This is one reason why GMRS licensees that own repeaters should coordinate tones!

Instead of realizing this and just ignoring it or turning his own rarely used repeater off during the tropo event he spends tens of minutes shouting at each and every burst of static announcing the time and date, you’ll never use this repeater, this is my repeater, this is private property go away, ad nauseum. I imagine the greater Eastern US is also listening to him rant.

Other than the obvious silliness of the entire episode from a technical perspective some other points come to mind:

1. GMRS licensees are required to control their repeaters. The other user is bringing up more than one system. The user doing the testing should WAIT and test another day if he detects he is bringing up multiple repeaters. Both repeaters should coordinate tones. The affected Virginia system should shut down.

2. Since the Virginia repeater is rarely used why shouldn’t it be shared and new users encouraged. My repeater in Calvert County, MD is available to any GMRS licensee that wants to use it as long as the GMRS rules are followed. We are going to lose repeaters if don’t stop being so ridiculously territorial and/or restricting allowed users to “members” of an elite service group or club.

3. Based on my personal experience since 1995 the interference could be INPUT interference from commercial pirates or foreign shipping. The latter being more a possibility in DelMarVa. Listen on the input to an affected repeater.

4. GMRS licensees do not own repeater pairs. Our repeater pairs are NOT coordinated so anyone can build a repeater anywhere. We are required by the rules to share and prevent mutual interference.  Shouting at ghosts during tropo is interference. Well after the first time anyway.

5. I wish everyone that owned a repeater had a listed telephone number.

6. There is also a repeater on the same channel with very loud INTERMOD. The owner needs to correct that condition.

Shouting at a mystery user in the static makes you appear comical and doing it during tropo rude. We are NOT going to popularize our service and keep it by shouting anyone down. Even ghosts.

Around the 7,000 square mile parish he calls home, he is referred to as Father Leo. To the 185 families in Circle, Richey and Jordan, Montana, where he has served the past ten years he is a spiritual father and guide, celebrating with them weddings, baptisms and funerals. To the United States Air Force, he is Chaplain, Major, Leo McDowell,

(Father Leo rocks! Fr. Leo is the Personal Radio Assn’s honorary chaplain. A GMRS licensee from Montana, he likes gadgets and all things radio. I know Fr. Leo is going to be a big fan of the radio room on base. PRA members are encouraged to offer prayers for Fr. Leo on his mission as well as for all of the American service members deployed worldwide. God bless you Air Force Major Fr. Leo!)

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PopularWireless advertiser RadiosOnline.com (Advantage Communications) sells Comtelco antennas. Comtelco makes UHF marine antennas suitable for GMRS mobile operation. Contact RadiosOnline.com and tell them Clip Leader sent you.

Our web provider Network Solutions has upgraded PHP to version 5 from 4. something. Please if you notice any anomalies with the blog or the UBB community let us know.

Yuri Sushkin is a real Ham He’s one of those guys Hams call Elmer. He’s the Elmer of the ultimate DX-pedition. Yuri is taking a few good Hams with him to a an out-of-the-way place in Alaska. They plan to operate Ham radio stations there so other Hams from around the world can say they have talked to another Ham at that rare elusive place – Chuginadak Island.

Hams like Yuri do the things most of us can only dream about. We will share the experience vicariously through Yuri’s visit to the rare island group in the Aleutian Islands. As most of Yuri’s customers here at PopularWireless know – Yuri rocks! That being said PopularWireless asked Yuri to spend his next advertising check toward the big event. Yuri is a dealer of ICOM GMRS and Amateur Radio products. His customer service is second to none.

The DX-pedition is being done as an activity of IOTA, a group of interested Hams sponsoring Amateur Radio trips to out of the way islands groups. Operation on shortwave through six meters begins July 31, 2008 and runs until the departure date July 27th.

PopularWireless wishes Yuri and the Hams on this unique trip a safe voyage to and from not to mention a whole of radio contacts with the rest of us Hams!

Please visit the official expedition home page for more information.

,,,and that is not friendly behavior.

There is no reason for a repeater beacon ID on a GMRS repeater. None.

All these beacon ID’s do is interfere with communications in progress and scream out loud, “This is my channel!” Well it isn’t your channel. It is shared with thousands of other GMRS licensees in your repeater’s footprint. Don’t you think it is about time you killed your beacon ID?

Night and day. Apples and oranges. Each has its place and both are very different.

CB, or the Citizen’s Band is the Personal Radio Service between 26.9 and 27.5 MHz. CB was the first popular American radio service. Its hay-day was in the 60′s and 70′s and its popularity declined the 80′s as a result of wide-spread abuse.  The FCC gave up enforcement and declared license-by-rule. Nowadays the service is primarily occupied by the illegal power abusers and hobbyists that destroyed the service. There is the occasional local user who still tries to make use of CB regardless of the skip interference from many hundreds of miles away. Now interference to American CB by hobby stations in the Caribbean and South America is a major problem.

CB is still useful for close-in caravans, traveling by highway, and even for some local communication when the band is quiet. When I traveled across country in September 2001 I had more contacts using my first CB radio than I did using my VHF and UHF Ham radio equipment. There are more truck drivers than Hams. Drivers were an immediate source of traffic information, local news, and restaurant reviews. They made travel a whole lot more fun.

GMRS is a very-local line of sight radio service not beset with the problems in a short-wave radio service like CB. GMRS has been around for almost as many years as CB. It wasn’t until the popularity of GMRS began to increase in the mid-90′s that people started to see its true value.

The major advantages of GMRS over CB are:

1. Shorter antennas.

2. Up to fifty-watts of power.

3. Use of radio repeaters to extend range beyond direct simplex communication.

4. GMRS requires an FCC license and this truly is an advantage.  When people have to pay for a license I believe that they tend to value the radio service more. Certainly more than the plethora of unlicensed bubble-packers out there now.

5. GMRS line-of-sight operation is generally not subject to skip like the CB band. UHF radio does experience tropospheric ducting occasionally allowing communication over a hundfred miles or more but you will not hear or be interfered with by stations from many thousands of miles away.

6. Family communication is generally encouraged in GMRS and hobby chats like those of the Amateur radio Service are generally discouraged.

7. Because the FCC has worked with the GMRS community over the last ten years with GMRS to end commercial piracy GMRS is quiet enough to permit families to develop and maintain real communication systems.

8. Like CB, GMRS licensees use the service for personal business and personal communication.  The five minute restriction required for CB operation is not a requirement in GMRS.

9. GMRS does not cause RFI in televisions, stereos, and telephones like CB does.

10. GMRS allows voice scrambling for a small degree of greater privacy. The use of tone-coded squelch is possible in GMRS and not in CB. This makes it possible to hear only calls from your family’s radio sets versus everyone else’s.

CB was more attractive for years because the cost of equipment was much less than the commercial grade equipment required for GMRS. That also was a negative because anyone could buy a radio. Behavior on that band is often very child like and sometimes pornographic. The low-cost benefit wore off fast.

The major drawback to CB was also the size of the required  antenna. A quarter-wavelength antenna for CB is one-hundred-two inches long while a quarter-wavelength antenna for GMRS is about six inches long.

GMRS still requires a license and the cost of real GMRS radios as opposed to the chew-toy bubble-pack radios is still more expensive than CB. To get on the real GMRS new users need to contact a real commercial radio shop or find GMRS licensees near them that can help find equipment and local repeaters that can be used. It is not as easy as it should be. PopularWireless.com and before PopWireless the Personal Radio Steering Group website have been the lead sources of GMRS information on the Internet.

GMRS sounds clearer and more natural because of the FM modulation used. Your reliable local distance of communication can be greater with GMRS when you choose the right antennas, power levels, and radio equipment. CB communication will suffer where GMRS will get through.

CB always tended to attract abuses. Over the years it was popular for CB users to have their radios modified to operate on unauthorized channels and at illegal power levels. A fishing charter would have their radios modified to avoid being heard by another charter service. The end result was interference to military, Civil Air Patrol, and radio-control communication also in the vicinity of the CB band. GMRS tends not to be plagued with illegal behaviors except in urban areas where some unscrupulous radio shops still put unlicensed systems on GMRS channels.

GMRS has  had recent FCC enforcement. The FCC did its best to rid itself of the enforcement responsibility for CB back in the late 90′s. The FCC allows local law enforcement to handle typical problems associated with excessive power use in the CB radio service. Local jurisdictions never did get excited about doing it and few actually do. The FCC has helped GMRS licensees shut down unlicensed commercial users that made it difficult for families to use GMRS.

GMRS is in many ways a better option but it remains the more expensive licensed option.

After I wrote the article on using real GMRS radios on-board vessels in the US I started looking for equipment to recommend. The problem is the retailers and manufacturers see GMRS as a chew-toy bubble-pack market. It is easier to sell a toy GMRS radio for $39.95 than a real repeater capable GMRS radio because repeaters are just not everywhere. Still, you would think someone is making UHF transmitting antennas for marine use since the rest of the world including Asia, Europe, Australia etc all use UHF marine channels which happen to be in part on the same frequencies the same as the United States GMRS!

The one or two watt GMRS bubble-pack radios are convenient and make excellent supplemental portable radios for a complete family GMRS system. The bubble-packs do not do repeaters and are of limited range. Despite what the inflated range claims say a bubble-pack will not talk back home if your home is eight miles inland on the other side of a forest.  Use a bubble pack to stay in touch with your real GMRS boat radio while you are in port but don’t get more than a haf mile away for a reliable signal.

I checked the 2008 catalogs of the most likely sources for marine antennas. Both West Marine and Boater’s World have huge selections but not one marine antenna outside of marine VHF and marine SSB or cellular. I’m a big fan of both retailers. Each store is a terrific place to go for marine electronics and twelve-volt accessories.

Australia seems to be the most likely importer of real UHF commercial quality antennas for boats. A company called ZCG makes the ZCG Scalar brand UHF marine antenna. It appears from their website that they offer antennas made for other than the 477 MHz UHF CB radio.  Plugging in the lowest GMRS channel 462.55 MHz and the highest 467.550 MHz puts one of their specialty antennas within their manufacturing range.

Please take a minute to email us if you are aware of other retail sources for UHF marine antennas in the United States. Send us photos of your own UHF GMRS installs on your boats and the pictures will be published here. Do a write up the magazine can share about how you did the install and how well it works.

PopularWireless would like to hear from retailers in other parts  of the world interested in selling UHF antennas for the US GMRS. Tell us about your products and how US residents can obtain them.

You idiots.

http://popularwireless.com/blog1/Km

In some years April Fools Day is better skipped. When your day is already ruined it really yanks your chain when you find a joke blue-screen-of-death program on your company-wide computer network courtesy of a brain-dead fool at a multi-billion software company. In this day and age it amounts to corporate sponsored terrorism.

MicroSoft and Sysinternals created a JOKE program that simulates the infamous blue screen of death. It was installed on a network I use until we figured out from a McAfee warning and a subsequent Google search what it really was. I solicited an employee confession so the offending program could be removed.  I don’t want to be a stick in the mud, but in this day and age this type of joke is really reaching to the bottom of a scummy pond of smelly amoebic slime.

Companies coping with this joke today ought to send MicroSoft the BILL and send McAfee a check.

Microsoft you’re getting my invoice you clueless dopes- not funny.