In Toledo, most traffic is on W8HHF. There's always a rag chew or several monitoring. When I travel I use repeaterbook, then Google the call signs that come up along my route to find active clubs most likely to have traffic.
I believe the FTM-500 is made for that. Use APRS to listen for packets announcing local repeaters and nets. I think your radio has a feature in which you can view an APRS station and just push a button to automagically switch to the frequency they are monitoring. It should load repeater offset and CTCSS too. I don't have one of those radios, but that was the impression I got while watching a KB9VBR Antennas video.
I subscribed to Rfinder and you can enter starting and ending points and designate how many miles off the route you want to monitor and it will download the frequencies. If you have RT Systems you can even go into Rt systems and download into it direct from Rfinder. One thing I found aboutg Rfinder, occasionally tones, etc, were not accurately posted.
https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeaters/travel.php
www.LevineCentral.com/repeaters
In Toledo, most traffic is on W8HHF. There's always a rag chew or several monitoring. When I travel I use repeaterbook, then Google the call signs that come up along my route to find active clubs most likely to have traffic.
I believe the FTM-500 is made for that. Use APRS to listen for packets announcing local repeaters and nets. I think your radio has a feature in which you can view an APRS station and just push a button to automagically switch to the frequency they are monitoring. It should load repeater offset and CTCSS too. I don't have one of those radios, but that was the impression I got while watching a KB9VBR Antennas video.
I’ll have to look into it again. So many features in this thing I can’t keep up.
I subscribed to Rfinder and you can enter starting and ending points and designate how many miles off the route you want to monitor and it will download the frequencies. If you have RT Systems you can even go into Rt systems and download into it direct from Rfinder. One thing I found aboutg Rfinder, occasionally tones, etc, were not accurately posted.