Best wishes from a Noob,
I am a FireWise neighborhood council member in a rural, high-risk forested area (70 miles from the Paradise Fire) of northern California. Several neighbors and I want to set up a backup evacuation radio notification system for our neighborhood in the event that power (lose cable internet and VOIP phone service) and cell towers are down (the local tower burnt last year during an event). And we have spotty cell coverage at best. We found the best-seller Arcshells on Amazon are powerful and reach through our hilly neighborhood OK. But I understand that 1. The devices are not FCC approved; 2. Antennae is removable; 3. Stock programming is a mix of FRS and GMRS frequencies. Fire chief has given go ahead for us to use them if we don’t interfere with any of the EMS, police, and fire frequencies. The stock frequencies programmed in the Arcshell AR-5 are indeed different than all the official ones used. But some neighbors want the radios reprogrammed so they are strictly only using FRS frequencies. I’ve been able to query and download the memory from an arcshell, and I believe I have figured out how to save a modified memory profile to a file so that it could uploaded to all units. Questions: 1. Using the chirp edit function can I just go ahead and change all channels’ frequencies to strictly FRS permitted ones? 2. Do I need to change any of the other settings like Tone Mode, Tonesql, DTCS Code, etc, or can they just remain as is? Thanks for your knowledgeable help! Jonathan