Busy?
Rob198 wrote: "One thing you might want to take into consideration is system busy. When you have your mom’s HT on, you are adding another user to the system tower which could contribute to the system being overloaded at times. Almost like a cell tower you can only have so many users before it fills up. When that happens a user could get a system busy message."
Affiliations with a particular tower are done on the control channel, has nothing to do with getting a busy tone when someone tries to transmit. If there are too many folks on the tower trying to talk at the same time, yep, the radio will honk. That is an issue of not having enough voice channels on the site. Affiliations and deaffilliations and other data commands and queries are handled so fast (milliseconds) that hundreds of radios can be affiliated on the same site at the same time and not cause problems. Where cell networks get into trouble is when too many people try to yack at the same time and the system just doesn't have enough bandwith or voice channels to handle the load.
JFAB, would have to agree with everyone on the list, let your mom handle the real radio, since she is the only person authorized to do so, and stick to a good digital scanner to listen with. Its like playing with a highly flammable liquid, eventually, you are going to screw up and its going to blow up in your face!!!