I’m hoping to be buying a portable base station with a microphone so when I have my GMRS license, I can talk from my car without having the ridiculous 14 inch ship antenna on my Baofeng all over the place. I was wondering what the best choice for this would be, and where a good place to buy one would be.
For GMRS, a Part 95 certified commercial UHF mobile will work if it covers the 462-468MHz section of the UHF band.
Back in the 90's and early 2000's, I used Icom F-420's and F-2020's, but those are old radios now, DOS programming software, etc.
Modern day stuff, Probably the Kenwood TK-8180 would be a good choice. There are some lower tier models that might save you a few bucks. The Kenwood stuff will all require programming software and cables, plus the knowledge of how to properly set up the radios to do what you want, and more importantly, not accidentally cause interference to others.
Midland makes some low tier GMRS mobiles. Benefit to those is that they are pre-programmed, and unless you have programmed professional 2 way radios before, that can save you a -LOT- of headaches.
Also, if there is one with TRUNKING, that’d be an option, as my local school bus company recently trunked their radio system, and I can’t listen now.
Any help would be appreciated,
A couple of issues with that….
Without knowing what type of trunking and what bands they are on, no one can offer any advice. There are several types of trunking, as well as analog or digital. Add in encryption, what band they are on, where they are, if you have authorization to use their system, what the authentication is like, etc, it would be impossible to tell.
Almost always it's much easier and safer to buy a scanner that will monitor trunking systems.
