Thanks for all the help and info! Pretty sure it’s a signal problem and the base unfortunately didn’t help. Ok though as in my travels I often get closer to this system so I’ll probably still be able to monitor it. My only reluctance is that I started out with a g4 and was so pleased with its performance that I decided to pull the trigger on the g5 with the express purpose of being able to monitor the 150 mhz system...oh well. Not sure I need two Unications so might be selling one soon🤷♂️ This system is a bit flakey from my location anyway as I get spotty results when monitoring with my Unidens and see the most traffic when I use my 8600 on just the site freqs minus the control channel
That's a shame it didn't work.
If one of my Unidens decodes a VHF site pretty well using an outdoor antenna, my G5 will often do as good or better using the amplified charging base. But I find if the Uniden has a hard time maintaining a lock on the control channel, the G5 will usually fail as well as it drops in and out of range.
None of the VHF trunked sites here are simulcast so any radio that gets a solid signal will decode the voice traffic very well.
For Simulcast sites in the 7/800 bands, the G5 kicks butt and is very immune to strong nearby in band signals unlike the Uniden SDS series where their attempt at filters are also no help.
I do the same here and monitor some of the VHF P25 stuff using just the voice channels on an R8600 or the R30. Both those Icom's do very well for P1 signals as long as the trunked system is not a super busy system.
Our Moswin system looks a lot like the Wyolink system where the VHF sites don't have a lot of voice channels per site. Most our VHF sites have two voice channels, 1 Primary and 1 Secondary control channel and an ID channel. The secondary CC and the ID channel can and do become voice channels but only during the rare times the two voice channels are in use. This makes monitoring the voice traffic from those sites pretty easy on one of the Icom's!
All in all, the G5 is a nice radio as long as you can get a decent signal into it. They can have issues with VHF again when used inside a vehicle where the steel body shields the signals. I'm surprised Unication has not come out with a charging cradle that also supplies an external antenna signal for use in a mobile environment.
There are contacts on the bottom of the G5 that are a direct connection to the VHF receiver. Two pins are signal ground and another pin is RF in for the G5 but it only works for the secondary band (VHF in our case). If one could find a mating connector and fabricate a drop in socket to hold the G5, they could make a cradle that would supply external signal to the secondary band.
The same contact for the secondary band also supplies signal to the primary band but Unication does something to enable that using the amplified charging base. The contact for external antenna is always live for the secondary band though. That makes experimenting with an external antenna for the secondary band pretty easy. Just don't try and solder to the contacts!
Somewhere in a thread in this forum is a picture of the pinout of the bottom of a G series pager. That may help if you are up to experimenting.
