Tag Archives: HAM radio

Practical application FRS/GMRS radios

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Practical application FRS/GMRS radios

Many people plan on making use of the FRS/GMRS radios during an emergency situation. As long as you keep in mind the actual capabilities of the product and that the advertised capabilities are misleading at best, the FRS/GMRS radios do have a place. Albeit very limited use. If you need to talk just a few blocks and there are a lot of people in your area making use of the radios, stock FRS/GMRS work fine without walking all over most other people.

These radios have a cruddy, stubby fixed in place antenna. The up side is that you don’t have to fiddle with it, the down side is that you cannot put a better antenna on, nor can the existing antenna be tuned. The other issue is that the stock FRS/GMRS radios are limited to 0.5 watts….. that is one half of a watt.

Your local music / news radio station broadcasts around 50,000 watts. The antenna is very tall and really good. Point being that if their signal only goes 100 – 150 miles normally, how far do you really expect the stock FRS/GMRS signal to travel? In most cases in the real world it will not be the 20-38 miles they claim.

Finely getting to the point of this post ;]

In situations where regular communications are down and you have a group who you want to keep updated on local information in a SNAP [situation not as planned] time. You can use the Baofeng type of radios to A. monitor the FRS/GMRS chatter and B. with a GMRS license you are allowed to transmit at up to 50 watts of power. So during an emergency you can update your team on vital information. Just like your local music / news station.

If you have a large area of town to cover and several people to communicate with it would be helpful to have more than one communications hub to be able to hit everyone. This is a good idea in general as you should not have all your eggs in the one basket. One possible configuration would be the main hub in the center of your area of operation. Then another one at the four corners of the area. Set up properly the main hub would hit your whole area. If the main hub is down for whatever reason traffic can be handled by the other hubs. You may have to have each of the sub-hubs to broadcast the same info to be able to overlap to cover your whole AO.

http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/product-review-baofeng-radio/
http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/range-comms/
http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/comms-part-1/
http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/cb-radio/

CB radio

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CB radio

So often in today’s high tech world we forget about the older tried and true tools that have been around for 100 years.

A friend is planning a road trip in a few months and wanted help installing a CB radio so that he would have a reliable form of communications with the big trucks that stream our interstate highways. It is amazing just how much information about the roadways and local areas that can be obtained via the lowly CB radio. The newer radios in addition to 40 channels you can listen to 10 of the weather radios’ channels. This radio has weather alert that can be programmed in along with a scanner of the CB channels so that you can catch active frequencies while you travel. There are many bells and whistles with this one including an alarm clock. ;]

The basic CB radio mounted in a vehicle can realistically get between 7 and 15 miles range. Yes, I know that does not SOUND impressive compared to FRS radios which CLAIM 28 to 36 mile range [with a crappy built in antenna and maybe 1 watt of transmit power] compared with a good outside mounted antenna on the outside of the vehicle.

FRS / GRMS radios have their uses at very close range. However I and many others think that there is still a place for CBs today in both emergency situations and everyday common use. I do have FRS / GRMS radios right next to my CB and HAM / shortwave radio systems. I also carry in my COMM kit a battery operated AM/FM transistor radio for local broadcast content. Also carried in the kit are chargers for the cell phones and computers.