Dirtstiffs-1000
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Two-way radio equipment, sat com, and accessories focused on motorized off-highway travel. SXS Radios. GMRS Radios. HAM Radios. Midland GMRS. Jeep Radios. Satellite Communication. SPOT. Baofeng. TRAM. Browning
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J
NitroDriver... If you mount a base/mobile unit on your UTV with a good antenna, the base/mobile radio should show a useable improvement over a GMRS handheld with a fixed rubber Duck antenna. Even more so if you use the base/mobile radio on a vehicle with a good mag mount antenna. So the challenge is getting a good antenna on a UTV without a metal roof.
The full answer is rather technical, so feel free to ignore what follows.
Basically if you can get a 6dB gain, about one S unit, you should see a usable improvement in performance. You will lose some of the gain unless you run good cable such as LMR240 to the antenna.
Most handhelds have an antenna with about -3 dBi gain (minus). My mobile UTV antenna has 2.5 dBi gain. My base station antenna has a gain of 8.4 dBi. The advantage of a good antenna is the gain is there on both receive and transmit which is important if the rest of the family is on a handheld.
5 watts vs 15 watts is a gain of 4.8 dB. This helps only on transmit, not on receive. Still, the extra dB is useful if you are acting as net control.
Jeff
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lowrider
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LOL... IMHO, the Midland MXT275 is worth the upgrade over the Midland GXT1000. With the MXT275 and a good antenna I can hit the PL encoded GMRS repeater on Channel 20 in my region and talk to folks about 30 miles away. The GXT1000 does not even seem to support PL codes on Channel 20 running in Duplex.
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