ammo can GMRS radio

[Music] is [Music] wrk x-607 radio check hello this is brian krausek with vigilant firearms training in this video i put together an ammo can gmrs radio i think you're gonna like it's got a lot of neat features so stay tuned and thanks for watching okay here is the radio itself we'll start with the outside i chose an ammo can because of its availability durability and the protection that would offer to the radio components i also chose to make the penetrations through the can so that the controls and i could operate and all the connections are made on the outside so i don't really have to open up the the cover to expose it to the weather or whatever here is the jack for the speaker mic here is the power jack and obviously the coax cable so all those things are accessible on the outside by drilling and making all those penetrations i was concerned about you know kind of compromising the integrity of the can so before i spray painted it i actually undercoated it with an automotive type undercoating to seal things up somewhat i use silicone in those areas where it was appropriate too so it is i wouldn't say water waterproof but it certainly is a weather tight and then i spray painted it just to look a little bit better and now something else on the outside is a volt meter here a digital volt meter that i can access it's actually nice because with this latch closed it offers some protection yet i drilled a pretty good size viewing window there it shows in dc volts or percent of battery capacity so that's nice you can also shut it off so that there's no drain on the battery when you don't don't need it on let's take a look inside the can okay as you can see there's a lot going on inside the can i'm not going to do an unboxing or an uncanny i guess in this case but as i pull things out i will kind of explain what my thought process was and what the actual purpose of that component is so there are total of let's see five radios within this can so the main radio that serves as uh as the ammo can radio itself there's three other smaller handhelds and then another uv5r which is the basis for the ammo can build so speaker mic pretty important because um that allows me to plug it in on the outside of the can and have that speaker on the outside with the lid closed and everything closed up and just for convenience communications uh here's the spare uv 5r what's nice about going this route with the uv 5r or with any handheld really anyone would work in here as long as it has the k1 kenwood style connector for the speaker mic any handheld would work in here so i could just change these out if something happened to the main radio something failed there or whatever i could certainly replace it very easily i've got a number of different power options for the ammo can build this is obviously uh just alligator clips and you could plug my cigarette lighter in there that's how i've got it powered up now is just with a standard cigarette lighter plug here's some of those spare radios i was talking about we'll get them out of the way and this uh this radio here which serves as the basis for the the build is actually hooked up with a battery eliminator so it's powered through the outside source but you don't wouldn't have to do that if you wanted to and you didn't have an outside source you would just use one of the standard batteries this happens to be the 3800 milliamp uh capacity battery that i leave and it's charged up all the time in there here's an antenna so if i wanted to go on the on the move with this particular radio that would be very easy to do it just kind of snaps down in here with the belt clip on a little bracket i made so it's nice and secure all right another key component to this build is the btec amplifier rf amplifier essentially what it does is takes the transmit power from the radio which in this case let's just say 4 watts and multiplies it by a factor of approximately 10. you know your your mileage may vary so we're up there in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 watt output from what was a 5 watt handheld so obviously it gives you much more range and punch and power and whatnot when you're running that of course if you're gonna run the power amp that is a bigger drain on your power supply and you're gonna have to take those things into consideration as well but you can use it without that on and just straight through the the radio itself while we're on the subject of power i also have a solar charged back backup battery or power supply here that works really well this one's actually 8 000 milliamp hours so that works out pretty good i've got usb adapter cord here that allows me to directly charge the uv5r battery so the the 3800 milliamp batteries anyways have a charging port right on the side so i plug that in and i can charge this obviously with the solar charger out in the sun you can charge your battery while the radio continues to operate so that's another really good option and i could charge the other little radios that same way without the bulk and necessity of a regular charge cradle now talk about antenna options and there are kind of unlimited options only by your imagination this is one antenna that's kind of cool one of the tactical antennas i don't find them to be the highest quality as far as receive quality but they certainly do work you know they're serviceable so with that screwed on the outside bulk fitting this radio would be ready to go and it makes it nice because from a portability standpoint pick it up by the handle and you go there's no big bulky antenna to have to worry about catching on things or or whatever so it makes it kind of nice so that goes in my antenna kit i also have this bag that clips to the outside of the ammo can and um it's got other antenna options in here one is just a coax manufactured dipole which i made from a youtube video that works exceptionally well that could be tied up in a tree or or whatever you want to do with it there's some other coax cable in there that would extend so i could raise up my ed fong antenna that i've got with this ammo can too i'll show you more about that one when i get outside cause it's a little bit bulkier so there's several different options or if i brought the can inside and wanted to use the antenna on my roof of my home i could also do that just through the coax connection and that would give me a whole lot more height and clear range and why would i want to do that well this ammo can radio is also a simplex repeater and that is this little unit right here works as a repeater and essentially what it does is opposed to a duplex repeater that operates with an offset so in other words there's a frequency that you receive on a frequency that you transmit on with the simplex repeater it's doing those both on the same frequency so what happens the radio would receive a transmission it would record that transmission on the repeater and then when you unkey slight delay then it just retransmits it so if i'm at a higher elevation through my house antenna maybe with the power amp plugged in i could get much greater range and allow me to you know two handhelds that are definitely outside the normal simplex range from each other because of terrain or obstacles or whatever it may be or just distance now they'd be able to communicate via the simplex repeater i'll demonstrate that in a little bit and it's a really simple switch to change this from a regular two-way radio to that simplex repeater i'll go over that in a second here okay now i have the radio configured for simplex repeater operation and it was simply a matter of unplugging the cord the adapter cord that says speaker mic and plugging in the one that says repeater so that's the control cable for the repeater i'll turn the repeater on here and you can see the lights light up there and now the feedback and the clipping on the repeater is controlled by the volume knob of the receiving radio so it takes a little bit of experimentation to get it right but i'll just do a little test here what you'll hear is me transmit a message over the frequency and the simplex repeater will repeat that message back to me and that will be followed by an id that i've already pre-recorded and programmed into the the repeater that will only happen once every hour after a new transmission so in other words if there's no transmissions for eight hours nothing will happen but that first transmission will get the id message and then every hour after that as long as transmissions continue so i hope that made sense so here we go i'll just test it out five wrkx60754 three two one one two three four five wrk six zero seven five four three two one one two three four five java hq simplex repeater okay you also heard the confirmation tone at the end in addition to the the id message it takes a little bit of a learning curve because everyone in your party has to understand that they may or may not hear the message twice the way they can know it's time for them to go ahead and key up if they need to is to wait for that confirmation tone you'll hear it here now this is brian wrkx607 whiskey romeo kilo x-ray over this is brian wrkx607 whiskey romeo kilo x-ray over all right so you heard the confirmation tone at the end and that way your other parties would know that the the repeater has cleared and it's okay for them to transmit their message now the simplex repeater will record very long transmissions but typically you're not going to do that in this application we're using it for you know search and rescue or just hiking or whatever it's usually brief transmissions and that's the way it goes so that is the ammo can build the essentials to it we'll go outside and i'll show you some of the antenna options that i've come up with and i will say i've had this thing for a good couple weeks now and i've really been kind of dragging around with me and beating it up as much as i can trying to expose the shortcomings and whatever and so far i'm really happy some of those tests have resulted in changes to the design and i'm happy with those as well so it was a fun build i could have went a lot of different directions on the inside obviously instead of a handheld an inexpensive handle in this case the much maligned but much celebrated also 5r i could have put a little mobile in here and that would have been better in some ways and maybe not as good in others with regards to the flexibility that i would have so anyways there it is let's head outside and i'll show you some of the antenna options okay here's the ammo can just sitting on the back of my side by side i have it hooked up power wise to just this 12 volt automotive style jump pack now the antenna option i want to show you now is this one here that clips to the side of the can and it is a ed fong j pull antenna inside a pvc tube he sends you the antenna element specifically tuned for gmrs and it gives you the exact specs on the pvc i think it's 34 inches long total but don't quote me on that check it out when he sends you the instructions if you get one pvc this happens to be pr 200 pvc very light wall and again that's tuned specifically for gmrs so you don't want to try and use anything else to use it with the radio you simply put the coax through that little bracket there it's a little bit cumbersome and tough to use to but it clip it right up and it holds there fairly securely and there you have it that was the antenna and up to full height there you go so so that's how it hooks to the can so you can throw that down on the ground anywhere and it works really really well i'm impressed with the performance of the antenna overall but i also here's the contents of that camouflage bag that i showed you that goes along with my radio the antenna kit if you will and this is just the extra coax 18 feet of that and this spool of cordage um that's the way i'm going to raise the antenna almost like a flag up onto a branch of somewhere you know so i get the additional elevation and i think just kind of looking around here i think i can get like 18 to 20 feet of elevation by getting the antenna up to uh those branches right there so we'll see how many tosses it takes me to get it up there but hopefully it'll go fairly smooth and i'll show you how this works okay here's that coil of cordage and i'm not going to unwind all of it but there's 50 feet on here so there's plenty to get you where you need to go but what i noticed is trying to throw this thing up around the limbs and whatnot it's pretty tough it's lightweight and if the wind's blowing or there's other smaller branches in the way it's going to be hard so what i did is made two pvc panels one for each side bolted them together with them four bolts and added an additional six bolts you can see the heads of them right here with the nuts on the inside that you can't see and that definitely gives you more weight to be able to fling this thing almost like a boomerang type type arrangement to get it up and over and then carry back down so it comes back down close to the ground so that i can grab it so let's see how well i plan this out i'll try and throw it up around that branch okay i've got the uh the coil of cordage you know neatly coiled at my feet here i'm gonna try and throw this up over that branch okay and then things go well just by whipping it i should be able to get it to uh come down there we go broke off a little branch there got the coax screwed on 18 feet and i've made this little fitting too and i'll show you what happens there is as i'm pulling it up the rope goes through this through that little clip right there and that just keeps the antenna from swinging wildly if the wind picks up it'll actually help me bring the whole unit back down to the ground so so okay i don't know if you'll be able to make it out or not but there is the antenna okay and here's the final antenna option that i have rolled up in that camo bag this one works pretty cool and actually performs very well as as well i got the idea for this from one of our radio group friends who sent me a youtube link and it is manufactured out of just coax 58 cable cable to be specific here's the center element coming this way and here's the shielding going the other way so it just forms a dipole and it's very specific obviously with regards to the gmr's frequency how long you cut these off and tune it and it's actually pretty easy to tune but i've got tied on the ends just mason's twine on each end about five feet so you could string it up and tie it up and keep it nice and tight and steady and uh it works well now obviously i only have it here five feet off the ground for the video purposes but you could put this up as high as you wanted to as long as you had enough coax to get to the radio so that is another field antenna that i think works exceptionally well very lightweight it does take quite a bit of abuse though because normal coax you have it in place it really doesn't get moved around much but this is constantly going to be rolled up and unrolled and strung between branches and take some some stress as those trees move if it's windy or whatever so that's what's nice about the mason string is there is considerable give to that string itself just by design that's the way it works plus on this side you'll notice i've got it tied to a smaller sapling so there's some give there as well all right i'm going to hook this up and try and get some radio checks here tonight wrkx607 looking for a radio check [Music] thank you very much whiskey romeo kilo xray607 thanks for the radio check [Applause] [Music] talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Brian Krawczyk

Views: 21,714

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Id: bN0_fj_1lKc

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022