How about making it into a cheap wireless modem. You could run the audio out from a modem into the microphone jack. You could have another running into a phone line or another computer.

you do realize that gmrs radios require a license, don’t you? also they must be fcc type accepted to operate on the frs/gmrs bands, therefore no ‘hacks’. the rhino also was a rare exception and granted special permission to transmit data within the band.

i have a bunch of these. i’d love to be able to harness their power and use them as an R/C control, or at least figure out how to boost the tx power or change the frequency :)

After the obligatory comments about modifying this equipment being against FCC rules, I have a pair of Bellsouth FRS model 1050 radios that have actually have internal 10k pots for more high end radio features like squelch and microphone gain that can be broke out relatively easily. Adding external BNC connectors to the antenna and hooking the radio to some 70cm ham radio antennas will exponentially increase the range on the radios.

@4, @7:
Not in canada, Here they are bound only by RSS-210, as is FRS. Refer to Annex 6 of RSS-210 for details.

The freq can be readjusted pretty easily with a handheld freq meter and a pot tool on most model’s.

You can’t go far only .5 mhz but it’s enough to get all the channels to be in between the regular channel’s so that anyone without a adjusted radio only gets garble junk that doesnt even sound like a voice.

Aka poormans scrambler.

Ive done it dozen’s of times

I like the idea of sending video. You have a lot of channels can you make you of that as added bandwith. But how does that make use of the GPS? Maybe to encode the remote users location?

Man, I would love to see some hacks for these things. I’ve got a ton of these radios, a couple of them hacked apart.
Canada used to have the same legislation regarding GMRS. Commercial and private pressure got them to remove the licensing requirements. There is a substantial amount of pressure in the US to follow suit.

I’m not an electronics guru. I’ve tried to send video (NTSC) over a short range FRS link, simply by playing with the plugs. No dice.

However, if someone could come up with a method to do this, we have struck gold. A decent, hackable radio interface that performs well at range, with no need for tuning. Come up with a method to use it as a short haul wireless modem, and you’ve got a dream system.

I’ve seen some of the most innovative people on this board do some amazing things. I can’t believe someone hasn’t come up with something along these lines.

simple idea: how about a hack to make a 2-way system? that way it could be used hands-free.

if only 2 people are using the link, then a separate channel could be used in each direction. now you have a poor-man’s radio-telephone.

the only way i can think to do this is strap a pair together – making it quite heavy. however since it is hands-free, and if you take the skiing example, the “box” could go in a back-pack or deep-inside pocket or something.

FCC rules on FRS and GMRS say “No unmodified radios” (sigh) , and also say only an approved radio can be used… which annoys me, since if I were to freeband my Ham HT and set it for low power (both software changes), I could emulate FRS and GMRS except for the “no mods/approved hardware only” rule. Would be nice to have just one radio to talk to Hams and non-Hams alike just by turning the knob.

You’re also not supposed to push data over them, unless you have an FCC exemption.

That said, what kind of _legal_ fun?

I believe an FRS with Vox plugged into the soundport of a computer would be legal. Load up one of the voice recognition packages, add text-to-speech and build an FRS/eMail gateway. Have a pre-defined “Heinlein/Number of the Beast/Gay Deciever” syntax to control it, and you’d be all set.

Having it tied to an RSS feed accumulator of some sort would rock too – being able to be out on the far side of the farm and say,”Computer, weather report, execute” would rock.

Tie it into one of the cheap USB X-10 controllers, and you’ve got the house lights and outside light. “Computer, Front lights, fifty percent, execute”

The VOIP one has been done with EchoLink, but that’s a Ham-only set up. Should be able to use off-the-shelf software for the rest.

If you can track down one of those old “dialers” you hold to the telephone, or use your PDA headphone jack plugged into the FRS, you could send DTMF from an unmodified radio…. Might be useful to control various things.

One option for an unmodified radio being used more efficently with a vehicle would be a plastic box with a magnet in it. Use long earphone/mic cords through the car window, put the radio up on the roof so the car doesn’t block 90-odd% of the RF. You won’t be able to change channels, but it should substantially improve the range while on the road.

the garmin rinos only TX a position report when you key up, so they’re not much good for finding someone who isn’t actively wanting to be found.

data transmission on FRS/GMRS is strictly forbidden; garmiin was granted an exception for the rinos, and that exception has limits (no automatic position beacons – they must be requeted by a human operator).

there are some tools that go with xastir (unix APRS application) to import the rino data into xastir alongside APRS data. pretty cool.

and a minor nit, the opentracker is based on an MC68Hxx controller, not a PIC. I think the original TinyTrack was a PIC, but he’s switched to Atmel micros.

I use an FRS link for a DTMF controller on board my ROV.

please google “probe II sg” as I don’t have photos up of this project anymore.

Aside from repositioning the antenna to the outside of the ROV and wiring the external speaker output of the first FRS radio to the DTMF controller on the receive side, all I did was parallel the audio from the speaker of an old radio shack portable autodialer device and wire a momentary switch from that into the mic input of the other FRS radio on the transmit side.
(I tried to use VOX, but it’s cumbersome with DTMF.)

It works flawlessly, although I don’t get the additional dtmf a,b,c,or d buttons using the rad shack autodialer for the DTMF tones.

The DTMF system on the ROV controls a homebrew video camera switcher to select any one of three onboard video cameras, control the zoom focus and iris of the color camera and to trigger a little speaking thermometer to inform me of the internal temps of the two vehicle sections over the existing video link audio.
(My ROV was designed for outdoor operations and I was concerned about overheating.)

“probe ii sg” is currently mothballed intact, along with all of it’s support gear and spares in my den closet.

Regarding comments 10 and 19, the rules do not simply specify the bottom and top frequency of the band; the rules specify the exact frequency of individual channels. Modifying a radio to transmit and receive 500kHz off-frequency is a violation of the law. As well 500kHz is way too much; the GMRS/FRS channels are spaced 25KHz apart.

When it comes to something that is globally shared (radio spectrum), play by the same rules that everyone else does; the alternative is chaos.

If you could transmit data easily, pair them up with a 3-axis magnetometer, GPS unit and microcontroller, and play “real-life” scorched earth or something similar

This is kind of pie-in-the-sky, but you could use this for home automation or similar. Just set up voice commands on your “hub” PC and pipe the output from your “home base” GMRS into your mic input. You could even establish 2-way communications if the radio unit has a line-in (if it’s PTT, that might be tricky).

Going further down that path, you could leverage all sorts of voice-based PC interfaces, not just home automation. “Computer, Google ‘chinese restaurant 21050′” and it reads you a list of names and phone numbers. “Computer, playlist White Stripes” — I’m sure that would sound terrible in mono over this kind of radio link, but it’s still a neat hack. “Computer, email Jane, subject: ‘Lunch today’, body: ‘I’m going to be in town starting at 11:30…’”. Lots of possibilities here, and you probably don’t even have to write any code or solder anything yourself. Ehh??

Bonus: it’s not a violation of the FCC ban on data transmission if you’re doing everything by voice. Right?

Re: linking with voice recognition software… voice quality and interference is terrible on these puppies, so I don’t think that will work. However, DTMF (or your own equivalent) would seem pretty basic, and probably falls within the law. Furthermore, since you’re leaving the radio portion intact, it would not really be considered “modified”. What would be suitably hackish is to embed a custom tone generator with keypad physically into one unit (rather than taping an old DTMF generator to the mic) and a recognition circuit built into the other one, which could then send the “codes” sent over the link to a USB/serial connection for consumption by a computer or other device.

>I’ve been surprised by the lack of
>hacks for these little guys.

I hacked one, see http://www.GeoCities.com/Almost_There_Weather_Balloon/

Good Luck!
Ken_S.

Modifiying this type of radio to send video is not practical and would put out energy on frequency’s used by other services.

The FRS channels are 25KHz apart. An NTSC video transmission using AM or FM is at least 8.4MHz wide. (You can’t practically turn an FM walkie talkie into a vestigal sideband video transmission to get the bandwidth down to 6MHz)

There are lots of other radio services using the 3MHz either side of the FRS channels.

Even if you wanted to anyway, changing the receiver filters and building add on video modulator and demodulator circuits is not practical.

Got this idea at lunch today, when a motorcycle set off someones sound based car alarm. Your own lojack system, would require I guess a Rino. Just hack the buttons (or you could build devise a mechanical actuator to keep the Rino unmodified.) You would want some sort of sensor in the car, that would activate the ptt button. It would leave it on for say 30 seconds so you can listen in, after which it activates 15 seconds every minute. If the gps doesn’t show movement, you could use a DTMF tone to shutdown the broadcast and rearm the system. Even if the car manages to go out of range, a grid search could be done to try to locate it. Probably less than $40 dollars for parts if you already have the Rinos.

How about instead of that little ‘Roger’ beep thing that it does when you finish talking, that could actually be serial(UART?) GPS data from one of the smaller modules, so they would be transmitting their location whether or not they know it…? It would probably require some rather larger or more expensive equipment to receive and plot the position (a-la a laptop with some custom hardware) but I could see it being useful in a military setting(paintball anyone?).

You can boost the reception on these things with just a little soldering and a scrap of wire. Pop the case open and find where the antenna solders to the board. Make a rough measurement of the antenna and find a scrap of small wire that is approx. the same length. Solder it onto the same spot the stock antenna attaches and route it in the case so it points roughly 180 degrees away from the factory antenna. Instant boost in reception for most of these. The basis of this hack is that most of these radios contain 1/8 wave antennas, not very efficient. by doubling the antenna length you make it into a 1/4 wave antenna which is infinitely more efficient in propagating the radio signal.

Enjoy

I would love to see a software program that could take a live feed of the screen (or at least the tracks of other identified rinos) and put it on the web, into GMaps, etc.

Would hacking the screen data feed be the same thing as hacking the radio (wrt fcc regs)?

One excellent thing that differentiates Rino from Opentracker is that the Rino is already tracking peers.

With the right setup, I imagine OpenTracker could be set up to track larger events with multiple GPSs.

The GPS and FRS technologies married together are much more capable and less expensive than the Project Lifesaver http://www.projectlifesaver.org/site/ system being touted by many law enforcement agencies. My county just spent $15k for two receivers and some training – for 50 year old Ham radio fox hunt technology!
Hey Garmin, do you smell business possibility?

What a really fantasic idea! I’m pretty sure that you’d better patten and market befor I DO! “COUNTDOWN!”

GMRS requires a license. All these hacks mentioned are either in violation of FRS regs, GMRS regs, or both.

FRS/GMRS AUTOMATED DISPATCHER
———————————-
using a pc with voice synthesizer or wave file player you can program, like in vbasic, an automated dispatcher. you would use the frs’s built-in vox (voice operated switch) feature set to mid-point. you program your pc application to check your email, your home environment, caller id, phone messages, room temp, room audio, your keyboard, or whatever.

the application simply uses canned (pre-recorded) or text-to-voice messages to send one way messages to you from 2~10 miles away via your frs radio. To overcome the vox’s behavior of cutting off first syllable just add an audio preamble like ‘uhh’, a ‘beep’, or a noise to get the vox ptt to key before your pre-canned message starts. Remember to start audio within a 1/2 second or less later depending on your vox setting.

All you need is an audio patch cable between your pc’s sound card’s line out or speaker jack to your frs mic jack (available at radio shack). an audio splitter would be good so you can run an external pc speaker to hear whats going on too. experiment with different audio output levels.

one neat feature is a user interface that allows a dispatcher to make his/her responses on the frs/gmrs routine by simply pressing a number from a displayed menu, mouse clicking a button, or pressing one key on keyboard. things like ‘calling unit number’ (fill in the blank), ‘over’, ‘roger that’, ’10-4′, ‘what is your location?’, ‘repeat that’, ‘return to base’, ‘call hq by land-line’, etc. the human dispatcher would hardly ever have to actually talk. they could just push a button or click a mouse to send and reply to your frs message. this is a more efficient and standardized way of communicating when the human has problems speaking or conveying information correctly. it also makes one voice for many ppl using the system. a female voice is more attention getting.

to send commands back to the base station some sort of dtmf touch-tone decoder might work. except mfgs don’t make tone pads any more due to drug pushers (et al) using them on pay-phones to send secret msgs to beepers. you’d have to make your own or get one on ebay. there are many dtmf decoder downloads for your sound card on the internet.

there’s also the possibility to use voice-to-text but prolly won’t work well as most systems are speaker dependent and don’t work well in high noise environment that frs might introduce to the audio input stage. but if you said the same command 3 or more times perfectly the application could filter out false triggering from static, squelch tails, channel chatter from kids, and deliberate voice hackers trying to take control…

ultimate pc to pc remote control via an frs unit in a high noise low-audio-bandwidth environment? psk31… google it… its the latest low-tech method to get pc data across a low-bandwidth audio channel even in poor conditions… imagine what remote control scenarios you can come up with… its even been heard in operation on noisy cb radio!!! here’s what it sounds like in the wild (scroll to bottom) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK31 (or click on my site’s url).

Cheers
spooks

I think you should use some kind of voice modulation to send a specific command to the paintballgun, then you can include some very simple encryption/code because otherwise you would be vulnerable to other players using your gun. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK31
You can put all this on a PIC controller, really easy

Privacy codes are actually a squelch system.

details here:
http://www.rei.com/expertadvice/articles/twoway+radios.html

The code can be analog or digital (I have digital), and are used such that a radio set with a privacy code will only transmit audio when it receives the
proper privacy code. This lets you skip anyone elses chatter on the same frequency.

It doesn’t eliminate their chatter, so there can still be interference, but less likely.

Video is possible on this radio. But in order to do it, it would have to be digital. Not sure on the fps this would give you. Also, you can hack this to get an easy 10-20 mile converage and 20 – 40 mile from base to base. useing some high grade heliax coax and a good collinear antenna high gain base antenna(Specially digned for 460mhz) up on a good tall tower. you can buy a SWR meter for 144/440Mhz and will work for your needs. my tests with this setup and a simplex repeater as stated above, i could talk to friends around the county easy. also note that turning the squelch pod a lil to get extra range. also dont forget to use tone codes to keep people out of your way. now if i unplug the repeater from the base and use the scan feature… I hear more people talking then what i do on a CB radio. beat that. this is old news. i should have posted this 4 years ago when i was testing it. ok now within the last year. i put 2 VOX boards together. built a dipole CB antenna and mounted it in the mid section of my tower. I connected the mic of the FRS/GMRS to the CB useing VOX and the MIC of the CB to the Speaker of the FRS/GMRS and now i can goto the other side of town and show a CB buddy I can talk to him on my wrist radio. So now back to my double duplex data repeater research. peace out.

The guy a couple of comments up who was so rude (fags, gay, slurs etc.) doesn’t have very nice manners. This is a great forum with incredibly creative minds, very few here could be seen as running in the middle of a mindless herd.

Normally, everyone knows to ignore “trolls” so as not to encourage them. Unfortunately, he was not a troll. He just was frustrated and had very bad manners. Essentially, I have to admit, he is right.

We should be focusing our creative technical minds on extra-legal effeciencies in communicating, and perpetuating that knowledge to as many people as possible, before “the grid” goes down. No longer is this the advice of “conspiracy theorists” that I used to lampoon. It is the advice of former Reagan cabinet officials (read “Paul Craig Roberts) and Wall Street analysts who told the truth.

Strip out what the young ruffian above said about aids, sexual preference, etc., but take the point well that the government is careful to fence the people into small legalities which forms our prison, while they offer to any company or organization that can pay, all the exceptions and access and freedom they want. This renders our lawfulness inconsequential, like a frugal wife pinching pennies while her husband is out buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

Respectfully,
a Patriot

thanks for posting, very useful

I have a great hack for these. I have converted one to use a magnet rip cord to ativate the alert freature found on one of the motorola brands. When a red button is pressed it freeses the recieving radios and lock open the alert radio mic for 30 seconds. So I have a handicap erson that I trained a dog to alert to an epiliptic seazure. The dog pulls the rip cord setting off the alarm and the school nurse has one of the radios in her office. This has worked great. See my blog at abetterdogkennel.com or google mark thompson dog trainer charlotte nc