On topic, only as regards the fact you can' t trust the sumary: Last year they had this thing in the sumary about how you couldn' t cast light at an animal, and when I checked about laser range finders, they were a little embarassed, and said no problem. Technology sure is difficult to keep up with.

GT; the attached link gives a good outline of the differences between frs and gmrs:


http://www.compusmart.ab.ca/resqdyn/...CommLeader.pdf


The gmrs appears to be the commercially licensed version of the frs.

Dan O.

Dan O I finally did get an answer for the problem I was having getting GMRS in Canada. Acording to someone int the know in the Canadian Government, GMRS radios are not legal for use or sale in Canada as of yet. This gentleman told me that they are in the process of passing them into usage.

Currently in the USA you need a licience to operate a GMRS radio, but in Canada there will not be the need for a licience when they come available. HE told me that they should be available in the spring or summer 2004, maybe a little latter. Also that GMRS radios are up to a maxium or 5 watts but generally they are produced at a maxium of 2 watts (most only at 1).

GT; please check the above link. It is a Canadian source. It says that GMRS radios are being licensed now. We license 2 or 5 watt Motorola radios in the mentioned frequencies for use at our manufacturing facility. It' ll be interesting to see if they come out with unlicensed versions in that power range.

Dan O.

Dan O I believe that your talking about private industral chanels for this type of radios. Here is the link to a site I was given
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/s...oc/spect1.html .

The gentleman I was talking with was named David Warnes. He is the Senior Advisor, Spectrum Policy, Industry Canada. Spectrum is the office that over looks the radio waves in Canada. They control who is allowed to use what. My MP' s office contacted him on my behalf and then passed the phone to me to talk with him.

This is my understanding from the converstation. The reason GMRS is not allowed in Canada right now is because some of the private industral channels under contract to people are in conflect with the open channels of the GMRS. Those people and their private channels will have to be moved (assigned radio freqs.) to eliminate the conflect at a cost of which the GMRS manufactures will have to cover. The open GMRS channels will not have to be licienced in Canada to use them, but if you use the private industral channels you will still need a licience. The private channles restricts the channel to just you and not anyone else to cut in on you.

About the wattage of the GMRS. They are limmited to 5 watts maxium, but the open channels are usually manufactured to 2 watts but normally only 1 watt currently. In my opinion this is to allow growth in a few years to keep sales going.

Sorry I could not for some reason get your link to come up. All I got was a blank page and Acrobat Reader [:@].

The company that I work for is using several licensed channels, that' s why I couldn' t understand why you said the radios aren' t in use in Canada or if the radios that we' re using were gmrs.

Try the following link:

http://www.provide.net/~prsg/wi-gmrs.htm

Dan O.

Dan O the site you list above I believe is an Anerican site. They list as the US/Canadian boarder as lines you can' t operate north of. Further down in the site they talk about 18 different States. I was confused (not difficult to do) until I read and figured out it is an American site.

GT;the first link was the Canadian (Alberta) link. The last one was just for information purposes. The first should load if your firewall settings are on low and you' re accepting cookies.

http://www.compusmart.ab.ca/resqdyn/...CommLeader.pdf

Dan O.

Dan O all I get from your first link is a blank page. It sends me to " Acrobat Reader" and another page, but then it loads nothing, leaving a blank page [&o].

But acording to David Warnes, at the present times, GMRS are illegal in Canada. There were a few retailers that did sell them, but his agency shut them down (had them pull them from the shelves). When I told him that an American Store would not ship into Canada, he praised that store [:@]. I guess that I can wait for another year before I can get a pair of GMRS radios. I just wanted to have a greater range for my dad, he is in his 70' s and has heart problems. He still hunts and fishes. I hope when I get his age, that I will be able to continue to hunt and fish like he does.

GT; the 5 watt CB portable radios have an approx. 5 mile range. At the end of the CB craze they were going very cheap for the 40 channel units and you can still find them in second hand stores. They' re not as small as the GMRS radios but they' ll do what you' re asking.

Sometimes with the links, I get them working by chopping the last few backslashes and then walking through the website manually.

Dan O.