Good to know, that's one potential good use then for caravans and stuff. Don't have to carry 2 radios if I can just program this one.

I believe the reason it doesn't comply with 95 is because of the possible power output. These little guys are able to put out a much higher wattage than what the FRS/GMRS are allowed to put out. I think the low setting is similar to the low power settings allowed by FRS/GMRS.

Anyone interested should check into this before buying one!!!

Just another reason to get licensed!!!!

Awesome!!! That's great to hear!

These radios are a little difficult to figure out, but it's relatively easy once you get the hang of it. Matthew claims you can save a channel to a preset, but I can't figure it out. I was able to do everything in Frequency mode though.

Press the orange button on the side and tune to 106.900mhz- this lets you monitor Hippie Radio and if someone keys up on the other frequencies you are dual monitoring, the radio fades out and let's you listen to whoever is talking. Kinda cool!

I'm getting good!

Well I must say I've been reading/studying/playing with this radio for the past few days and it's fun, if not addicting! I've picked up a ton of knowledge about amateur radio and I feel pretty good about taking the test to get my technician license.

Got my sync cable today and the CHIRP software makes the radio a ton more useful. Of course you can program it through the keypad on the radio itself but having all the presets loaded in (plus the ones I got from Nick and Matthew) make it so much easier.

Tonight I shared with Matthew how to get the software to work on the Mac, and we talked about going to the next meeting on August 6th to take the test.

And these are definitely not Part 95 certified because of the transmit power. FRS is supposed to transmit at no more than half a watt, these little radios can transmit at 5W!

You can hit the bottom right button (# maybe) and it will cut it down to 1W. I think it's like menu option 2 or 3 aka TXP

Yes, the permissions are going to be reset every time you plug it in, because /dev/ttyUSB0 isn't a traditional file. It's created dynamically by the device manager (udev) when it detects new hardware being plugged in.

The simplest way around that is to just run CHIRP with root privs, i.e. sudo chirpw.

Alternatively if you didn't want to do that, you could write a udev rule that will set the permissions automatically for you. To do that, you'll have to copy /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules and then edit the new file. Look for the comment that says serial, that's where the rules for serial devices are. Below that, you could add a rule that sets the permissions of /dev/ttyUSB0 to 666. Mine now looks like this:

# serial
KERNEL=="tty[A-Z]*[0-9]|pppox[0-9]*|ircomm[0-9]*|noz[0-9]*|rfcomm[0-9]*", GROUP="dialout"

# modify permissions just for ttyUSB0
KERNEL=="ttyUSB0",              MODE="0666"

Now when you plug in the cable, it will automatically set the permissions for you and you won't have to run the software as root.