Tone or No Tones?

TheBronze

TheBronze

Rank IV
Launch Member

Enthusiast III

1,033
Montebello, CA
First Name
Brian
Last Name
Washburn
Member #

20064

Ham/GMRS Callsign
K6GBW
Service Branch
US Army
Just curious, when you go out as a group do most of you run PL tones on your GMRS radios, or do you leave them carrier squelch to hear everyone? If you do use tones is there a particular tone that has become standard? Just wondering since one of the great things about CB was that everyone could hear anyone else on the frequency, but I can envision a scenario where groups operating in the same area with different tones might not be aware the others are there.
 
I have never been a part of a group that uses tones on GMRS. I think that the "industry" really muddied the waters by calling them "privacy tones" since they do not provide any privacy; possibly a better name would have been something like "I don't want to hear others tones". As I am sure that you know disabling tones allows you to hear everything on channel regardless of what tones others are using making it more like using a CB radio (with no tones).

Interesting and good question!
 
Agreed! The reason I asked the question is that I've been using tones for years. Mostly to block out all the weird roger beep junk on the road to the trail head. But once in the back country I rarely hear anything. I'm thinking about putting a tone on only one channel and using that to convoy and then leaving the others open. If there was another group nearby I'd kind of want to know.
 
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If the band is busy, it's busy. The tones just make the situation worse. You need to be able to hear if anyone else is on freq IMO.


And.. not directed at you or HAMs, but in general....Just hang around moab to hear how bad GMRS users can be when they pay no mind and blast tx. It is getting worse as Midland floods the market with 50 watt radios to consumers who don't understand that they shouldn't blast 50w just because they can. tx power does mean you can receive anything any better. (so, please turn down your power to minimum required for your use case)

I think that is one benefit of HAM, is you at least go through a very minimal amount of reading and training that hopefully gets some basic sense of what being a good citizen on the bands means.

A bit on the same topic, but radio quality and antenna setup makes a massive difference (as well as band.. i mean 2 meter is going to do better than 70 cm/gmrs) If half the crew is using a baofeng inside a metal box, then the one guy with a 50w midland isn't doing anything all that great for you. (And I do like that baofeng at least help get people into ham, but they should move on to a better quality radio asap, because HAM can be SO much more than what a uv5r can give you).

Ham really can teach you how little power is needed to make contacts.
 
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No Tones. My off-road club is just now getting away from CB (still use it sometimes), but many of our guests don't have much training on any radios and using tones confuses the matter. We probably could implement tones since we typically loan out handhelds for our trail rides....
 
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Well, it seems that tones aren’t needed so I won’t program them in except maybe on one channel for the caravan.

Thanks everyone. I kind of felt the tones would be counter productive and it seems you all feel the same.
 
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Only time I could see tones being useful is in a large group. I would get the leaders set up with tones on a secondary channel in case they needed to talk about something that the rest of the group doesn't need to know about, things that are personal and require some discretion.

I am with the others though, running "open" is preferable so you can tell if there is traffic on the channel before keying up and creating interference to others. Also, I kinda like making random contacts as I put down the trail!
 
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