One of the clubs I belong to has an 850 on GMRS, that is a nice machine. The 
820 is good too and often can be found cheap but we like the 850, one of the 
guys bought it from someone who said he tried to modify it for the ham bands 
and it didn't work anymore, he just had it so out of whack it wasn't even 
funny, so my friend bought it for $50, went to our friend's shop and tuned 
it up and put it on GMRS and that's a nice machine. It's been up for a few 
years now and no one's even had to touch it. When he bought it it was so 
messed up you pretty well needed to sit there with 50 watts next to it to 
key it up, that person really messed it up, now it's great, right back to 
spec.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Butch Bussen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 12:50 AM
Subject: Re: Managing a repeater


>I have a kenwood 820 on uhf and considering the 850.  I put up one of
> those for our club in Las Vegas a year or so ago.  A little of the
> programming software is accessible, but I find much of it is not.  I'm
> fortunate in that I use to do commercial stuff so I have a service monitor
> and I can tune my duplexers.  I control the ifr 1200 with a program I
> wrote in basic and then compiled.  I can recall memories, take meter
> readings every so many seconds and so forth with this little program.  Of
> corse the ifr makes it easy to tune up the machine, check receiver and so
> forth.
> 73
> Butch
> WA0VJR