Yes, there are cases of some very cheap Chinese radios creating "spurs" - mostly dual-band BaoFeng HTs - but even this is more of a "hit or miss" proposition, depending on quality control more than an "every unit is dirty" situation. I also disagree with your FUD regarding spectral purity. So these options are just as "illegal" as using an amateur repeater. This seems like overkill for a five mile radius, especially for family use.Īnd show me a Motorola or GE repeater that's certified for GMRS use. The second option leaves you with a repeater that will maintain much of its resale value, but may be harder to sell. If nothing else, the first option leaves with you two mobile radios to sell or re-purpose, should you ever decide to take the repeater down. The second (new) option is quite simple, but much more expensive. The first (two mobile radios) option is more of an experimenter's project, but it's less expensive. They are very demanding and picky about their gear, and have no complaints about their choice. We have a local ham radio club using one of these repeaters for the amateur 1.25M band. They will also program in your callsign to transmit proper ID. They will program and tune it for you and make sure that it doesn't create "wild emissions and noise across other bands". Otherwise, Bridgecom has a complete setup (minus antenna and feed-line) for under $1500. You can cover five miles with a home-built 1/4-wave ground-plane antenna and 25W at 30 feet, IMO. It's a hobby-type repeater, and a little de-sensing isn't a deal-breaker. After all, this isn't something that's intended to cover 30 miles with commercial standards. And, with 5 MHz between the input and output (and relatively low power being used) isolation isn't as critical. A duplexer is nice, and it allows you use only one antenna for both transmit and receive, but it also robs you of output power. It's common in this case to put the receiving antenna at the top, and separate them by at least a wavelength. I'd also add that you can do without a duplexer, provided you have enough vertical separation between the RX and TX antennae. Older repeaters often require TLC and re-alignment to avoid "wild emissions and noise across other bands". You don't need an expensive commercial 60W repeater to cover a few miles for a family to use.
It's best to run this radio at mid-power (25W) to avoid over-heating, but that's just the power range you need for your application.
The TH-9000D has a DB9 connector that accesses COR, audio, PTT, etc. Strangely, none of them mentioned "wild emissions and noise across other bands". In this case, we were setting up an amateur repeater, but several people have contacted us over the years to tell us that they've had success using the UHF model TH-900-D as a GMRS repeater.
On my blog, I wrote about how to use two mobile radios as a repeater. I'd agree with everything presented by zap_p25.