Frustrated over my new "hobby" of ham radio

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i would aspire to range approaching that of CB but with cleaner reception. back in the CB's heydey i knew people who had the fancy beam antennas on the top floor of their house and they could talk to people in the next town over no problem, no special weather conditions required.

You should get range something like that of CB. Depending on how far 'the next town over' is, it should be feasible.

There are a couple of NTS nets on 2m in the evening here. I can hear people in 'the next town over' on the repeater input on my HTs.

Another thing to remember is to make sure you get the right type of co-axial cable for the frequencies you are using. At higher frequencies, the cheaper co-axial cable is not as efficient and you lose power over long cable lengths.

i guess i like the idea of not having to use repeaters, IOW just a direct a to b with nothing between but space. one example of the "next town over" whose conversation i intercepted, was tacoma to puyallup. i don't know how the geography helped or hurt, IOW tacoma is "the city on the hill" whereas puyallup is down in the valley.

Height gain rules. Anywhere your primary propagation mode is line-of-sight groundwave, get the antenna as high as possible.

The city on a hill can see what's in the valley, and vice versa. If you're talking two valleys with a hill in between, then you want a repeater on top of the hill.

cost me $700 to get the giant flyswatter [violet zone VHF tv antenna] mounted atop a tree in the backyard, will have to find another suitable tree for the amateur antenna.

i'm near the Ohio River
Repeaters do have their use but it is nice to talk on old simplex too, Ive done that a few times. I'm in a valley in Ohio where I'm near the Ohio River, got mountains in the Ohio side, got mountains on the West Virginia side too. I can only hit one repeater in Wheeling although I am trying to see if I can hit Steubenville but so far, no luck. I hear a lot of marine traffic on the river though including the radio Coast Guard Bulletins on 157.100 Mc. Some of the traffic is funny and you hear a lot of F-Bombs.

the FCC must be lax on enforcement these days. i remember working at a local business [late 70s] when the dispatcher got into an argument with one of the field technicians who wanted to go home for the day rather than do one last call, and the dispatcher said over the air, "come back here you [SOB!]" - and sure enough, the very next day, mr. FCC came by and issued a warning to said dispatcher.

The budget for enforcement isn't what it used to be, and a lot of field offices were shut down. If that incident repeats itself long enough, someone will probably get a Notice Of Violation in the mail.

I did see an electronics or ham radio magazine where it listen all the FCC monitoring stations around the country, many of them were in out of the way places, one place I do remember was Chillicothe, OH.

Yeah, I think it is one of those things where they tend to look the other way because of the lack of "boots on the ground" but if it became a problem or of someone complains about it long enough, they will act. I know in the ham radio field, they have voluntary "official observers" who issue unofficial orders of violation where they point out what is wrong and gives the ham a chance to correct it.

I'm sure temp inversions would affect MURS in the 151-154 Mc range, it affects 2 meters, 144-148 Mc, so why not? As to FM on CB, they have FM CB in Europe along with AM/SSB in the 27 Mc area. There was talk about doing that here in the early to mid 1970's but that was shelved into the round file. At that time, there was talk of taking all or part of the 1.25 meter band (220 - 225 Mc) from the hams for FM CB but that died on the table too. Then after that, it was the 900 Mc band, I assume it would have been in the 902-928 Mc band where the hams have 33 cm and it would have been FM mode. The Australians have a 477 Mc CB band (FM) along with 27 Mc. 11 meters, 27 Mc, used to be for the hams, but that was taken away for CB in 1958 because the original idea for CB in the 460-470 Mc area, did not get long legs at all, the equipment would have been too expensive then. We have it today, sort of, in FRS and GMRS. They even talked about ditching 11 meter CB for the 220 and/or 900 scheme but then again, it was so entrenched and even then, people would have ignored it so why bother?

i had no idea that other nations beside USA had 11 meters for CB.

FM is prohibited on 27MHz in the US. The FCC claims it takes up too much bandwidth to be used below 29.5 MHz.

The International Telecommunications Union would be why frequency allocations are somewhat standardized globally.

i wish america had 76 mhz FM broadcasting like in asia.

Most countries actually do, many times, it is expanded, I pick up foreign CBer's on my SDR, Software Defined Radio dongle and longwire antenna from 26 Mc to 28 Mc. Many times, they are outbanders and many countries don't give a "you know what." Then around 28.3 to 28.5 Mc, over the horizon "Ghadir" radar from Iran too. As to FRS, in Europe, they use 446 Mc which is part of the 70 cm amateur radio band here. However, most countries do allow FM along with AM/SSB