An Introduction to Radios and Emergency Communication

so given that we are in the middle of a coronavirus lockdown and we're just beginning tornado season and hurricane season and here in Tennessee we basically always have flooding season now is a great time to be talking about emergency radio communication and backup radio solutions I know that there's already people in the comments writing stop talking about technical stuff just tell me what gear to buy and people do that even in the training videos about guns but a radio or a gun is not a magical talisman that just protects you and helps you just because you have it you have to know how it works you have to actually have a plan that you're trying to accomplish and know how you're going to use that tool to accomplish that plan and so let's get some of the boring stuff out of the way so this right here is the radio frequency spectrum not to scale so these are our highest frequencies and these are our lower frequencies but officially speaking for the purpose of the video this band right here is what is technically called high frequency very high frequency ultra high frequency and I'm assuming this is ludicrous frequency so down here we have the HF band which ham radio guys can use to communicate then in VHF we have a whole bunch of things going on so right here around the 100 megahertz section is FM radio that you listen to in your car 120 megahertz is the aviation bands and then we start to get to the stuff that we're allowed to use so ham radio frequencies sitting in here some business band frequencies murrs up here we get two UHF some ham frequencies and then as the radio frequencies go even higher you get to communicate a lot more data but you get less range so up here is where you have cellphones up here is where you have GPS here is your slow Wi-Fi 2.4 gigahertz here is your fast Wi-Fi 5.8 gigahertz and then people are just moving in this direction 5g cellphone signals are supposed to go up to 50 gigahertz which is truly a ludicrous frequency it's this close to being heat and this close to being light which means that a single leaf will block that signal that's why they're talking about putting 5g radio towers every 500 feet which is crazy that's it's about as close as my closest neighbor but if we talk too much more about 5g YouTube is gonna cancel the video for some reason so let's go back to VHF and uhf radio UHF radio there's a tendency inside of our community to want to buy whatever the military or high-end law enforcement units are using and they tend to be moving in this direction where there's more data but less range and they get around that by using a ton of infrastructure so the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has about 10,000 deputies and when you do that you want to use digital radios in this spectrum that have a huge amount of data capacity and work more like cell phones and that works if you have the budget for a whole bunch of repeater towers and then the way that the military does radio is amazing because the infrastructure that they have they have fixed and mobile repeaters they have man-portable repeaters they have drones and helicopters and planes AWACS satellites and so don't buy into that system if you cannot support the entire infrastructure you need to come up with a radio solution that's going to fit the actual infrastructure that you have access to which if you're anything like me is not much now before we get into some of the practical aspects let's talk about legality the good news is that listening is always legal if people send radio signals into your house you are allowed to listen to those but when it comes to broadcasting there are some rules so if you want a broadcast in UHF with UHF walkie-talkies there's a sliver a frequency that is available to you to use called FRS this allows you to broadcast on fairly low-power radios that even though they advertise an estimated range of 35 miles it's going to be more like half mile or a quarter mile but these radios are cheap they're very easy to come by and they're free to use then in VHF there's a block of free Quincy's called MERS same thing more powerful radios this frequency because it's a lower frequency goes further and this is freely available as well with no licensing and then down here in the HF bands sort of is CB radio I wouldn't actually spend much time on this because it's not a low enough frequency to take advantage of some of the most powerful parts of HF but it is something that you can freely use the next step up is a ham radio license and that will let you broadcast on a whole bunch of amateur bands from stuff way up here all the way down to 160 meters and lower in order to get that though you do need to get the license you have to be tested for the license and even though it's a pretty easy test to pass it's hard to find anyone that is actually doing the testing right now but it's very possible that because no one's doing the testing right now the FCC will finally let people take the amateur radio test online so keep an eye open for that once you have your ham radio license you're able to use this band on UHF which hams call 70 centimeters because they like to use different names for stuff and there's a big chunk of spectrum down here in the 2 meter band but then there's a whole bunch of very cool HF bands we've got 10 meters 20 meters 40 meters 80 meters and 160 meters and that lets you do some extremely cool stuff because once you get down into these very low frequency which again they're called high frequency because the radio spectrum keeps going that way but once you get down to those lower frequencies the radio starts the radio waves start to behave differently they start to bounce off of the ionosphere you're actually able to skip your radio signal off of the atmosphere and off of the surface of the planet halfway around the globe or further so once you move down into this part of the radio spectrum you have the ability to talk a lot further than in here with a handheld radio you're able to go a mile or two regular analog on the ham radio bands pretty easily you can switch to mobile radios which gives you considerably more wattage and it's much easier to use a bigger antenna and that gives you more range but in order to talk to people that are in the next state or the next country or the next continent you need to be playing in this area now let's say you've got a group of guys and they're not all going to get their ham radio licenses but you still want to be able to talk to each other there is a third option which is an itinerant business band frequency you can buy a license to use portion of the spectrum that's been set aside for business use which is great it's something that we a t-rex are doing because technically you're not allowed to use amateur bands for commercial purposes so we have these itinerant business band frequencies over here that we are able to use once we buy that license and the other cool thing about that license is that not every single person in the business needs to go get the license unless the business has it everybody can broadcast on those frequencies for that business and the other thing is that encryption is legal one of the downsides with the amateur radio bands is you're not allowed to encrypt your traffic and there's reasons when you might want to do that and that's something that broadcasting on these itinerant business frequencies will let you do okay so now is the part where I tell you which radio to buy except not exactly this is the equivalent of one of those cheap Walmart FRS radios it is UHF only I prefer it to the Walmart radios because it charges over USB it has the Kenwood adapter for speaker mics and stuff that I'm already using this is an extremely affordable option if all you want to do is low-power UHF the next option would be a dual-band radio this is one of the ubiquitous valve fangs not a UV 5r but inside it's basically the same thing as well as you listen and talk on all of the UHF and VHF bands that you're allowed to as a ham radio guy and you can program them to talk on the FRS frequencies but technically you're not supposed to because it has a removable antenna which is against the rules for those frequencies you can also get really tiny versions of dual band radios when I was a volunteer firefighter I carried this everywhere they couldn't always hit the repeater but I could pretty much always hear calls going out so the great thing about these analog radios is the simplicity if you just go to a frequency either by programming it on a computer or typing it into the front panel if you have a keypad you're on that frequency and you can hear everything and if you broadcast you can talk on that frequency there's not much to it but there are a couple of downsides one is there's not a lot of privacy and the other is that analog modes are not quite as efficient as digital voice modes so for digital modes like d-star fusion or DMR you get a bit more range you get some error correction and theoretically you also are saving some battery you also have the option to get encryption on top of that but not if you're on the amateur bands remember so this radio is a little bit bigger and chunkier than I would like but it has everything in it it's got GPS it's got bluetooth so I can use it with a headset but also a Bluetooth push-to-talk thing this digital radio is basically an old Nokia and also send APRs messages so text messaging over radio on this should go three or four times farther than voice and it's front-panel programmable so that it's great for tinkering with now it's technically not sturdy enough that I would run it with kit or give it to Lucas but there's a whole bunch of DMR radios that are more affordable and sturdier and that's what we're experimenting with the t-rex right now the next step up in terms of range but also price is hf radio hf radio gives you considerable advantages but it also takes a lot more power it's bigger and clunkier but there's just so much more that you can do with it when it comes to talking to people far away so this is a mobile radio that could easily go in a car or be built into some kind of backpack system which is my plan for it this is a 20 watt radio and if I throw this 50 foot antenna up in a tree I can probably talk to most of the United States and a big chunk of Europe on 20 watts of power most of the time but certainly certainly I can cover all of those areas at night when the HF bands actually work a little better so with a setup like this I could actually do a huge amount all the digital handheld radios also work in analog mode so I'd be able to listen to regular FM traffic and talk to people on different analog ham bands and hit repeaters and all the same stuff that the BAL fangs could do and then with this HF radio I'd be able to do a huge amount of long-range stuff voice Morse code digital modes this is more expensive to get into but it's also much harder to learn how to use properly and get set up but even if that is outside of your price range and the time that you have to learn it you can still do an awful lot with the cheaper stuff if all you had was an analogue dual band radio and an HF receiver you could accomplish quite a bit remember when I said that listening to radio broadcast is always legal it's also a lot simpler and easier so this HF receiver is probably capable of picking up almost everything that that HF mobile radio is especially if I throw a smaller speaker wire antenna up into a tree it cannot broadcast but I would be able to hear all kinds of things and even plug it into my phone or a computer and try to decode some of digital modes that are out there one of the cool things about this is if you put rechargeable batteries in it you can recharge it over USB so depending on what it is that I'm trying to do this set up is extremely capable so now you need to think through a little bit more about what you want to accomplish with your radios if this is you or in this case this is me I want to be able to talk to friends who are nearby so I need to get them all radios that operate inside of this range now when I was a firefighter we had a large run area that was the entire county and because we had a repeater I was able to talk to people who were further away if your radio plan requires you to coordinate with people that are further away then you need to figure out a way to do that if you already have a plan with your guys that says in the event of an emergency a tornado a disaster of some kind come to this area where all of our radios are within range of each other then all you need is this capability but if your plan with radios like mine is is to help people I also want to be able to listen to folks that are outside of my group that may have FRS radios that may have MERS radios that may have CB radios who are asking for help they may not have power they may not have cell phone they may not have the ability to travel away from their homes and so they've dug through their attic and they found a couple of those terrible blister pack FRS radios to call for help on so I want to be able to have a second radio that can listen to these guys so I want a wider radio net that lets me listen and talk to people that are further away and then I want a smaller net that's people that I already know and trust and that's my tack net now for those of you who are about to jump on the comments and criticize me for talking about tactics when I've never actually even been in armie you should know the tact channel is not short for tactical but it stands for talk around channel it's a smaller low-power radio channel lets you talk around the repeater frequency but that being said it's all for tactics so for this small circle attack radios I'm going to be using my itinerant business band frequency and DMR digital radios with encryption then for this group here I want to be listening on several frequencies I forgot to mention it before but just outside of the regular VHF and uhf MERS and FRS frequencies just a little bit higher frequency are a block of frequencies that are generally set apart for EMS volunteer fire now a lot of ambulance services fire services police they're going to have trunk systems that are encrypted you won't be able to listen in but some of them will be open and free to listen to and by listening to these frequencies you'll be able to get a better picture of what's going on in your area so I want to be able to have the ability to listen to these which I can do with actually any radio but in order to talk to some of these people in the wider area I actually am going to need to use my ham license for that and then when it comes to talking to people in other states that's where things get really interesting I'm going to be using an HF radio plugged into a computer and I'm going to be using a digital mode called js8 call I want you to research this and there's some guys on Air 15.com that are already building a mesh network of guys who are communicating with each other state to state using text messages on JSA call using very very low power now I can't stress enough how important it is that you think about this plan now before there is a disaster if your plan is just to buy a cheap Chinese radio leave it in the box until your power goes out then try to read the manual then try to get it charged then try to scan through some of these back and hope that you can find somebody to talk to that's not going to go real well for you while the internet is still working and if you're watching this video I guess it is now is when you should be doing your research and your study and even if you don't do complicated digital encryption type stuff you still want to spend some time learning about these radios and how radio basically works if you were to hear this signal would you know what to do to understand it it could be so right now I would like you to go to a couple YouTube channels the first is ham radio crash course and Josh can explain all of this stuff much better than I can and in a lot more detail and if you're interested in the super long-range super low power digital communication modes you need to check out o h8 stn he's in Finland and he's talking to people on the other side of the world with 12 volt batteries which are just from solar panels extremely cool stuff so the other thing I'd recommend that you do for research there are STRs which are software-defined radios and that's a whole nother video in itself that are actually shared on the internet so you can log on to a Kiwi SDR and you can actually see and listen to huge swaths of the spectrum before you buy anything so while the internet is still up I want you to take advantage of the opportunities that you have to study and learn this stuff before you actually need it [Music] and more important than the technical research is going to be building this little community this group of guys radio is an incredibly powerful tool for coordinating with people you need some people in this group who can help you get out and help other people in time of disaster but you also want to be able to talk to people in the wider community you probably want to get in touch with your local EMS and EMA guys and figure out what frequencies of radio they are on so that you can communicate with them and then there's gonna be wider groups out there there's gonna be people like Aris and races other amateur radio guys further away who are trying to help in terms of disaster if you can figure out how to coordinate with all of these folks you'll be so much more informed and so much more effective in times of trouble but the most important thing that you can really be working on at this point is building this core group of guys right here the people who are the trusted members of your group they're going to help you out now is the time that you should be building this group of people who you know and trust and could work together and once you know the strengths and weaknesses of people in the group and you know the goals that you have as a community then you can start to build out not just your equipment but your actual communication system so that you can accomplish those goals [Music] you

Channel: T.REX ARMS

Views: 439,091

Keywords: ham radio, emergency radio, emergency communication, commo, baofeng, anytone, business band, murs, backup radio, xiego, Isaac Botkin, t.rex arms, t.rex labs, radio communication, amateur radio, uhf radio, vhf radio, hf radio, js8call, disaster preparedness, comms, tacnet, ares

Id: nzDj0u1HhvE

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ConspiracyRobot]

I was a radio operator in the Army and I just want to stress that we used very expensive radio systems BUT would throw away the factory made antenna and make our own because it was better. Factory made ones are usually built for a wide range of frequencies, but if you know what frequency or range you are using, you can build your own accurate antenna easily. Some wire, solder, and bnc connectors are all you need. There is a formula for cutting the length of wire based on the frequency you are using.

[u/SeaPoem717]

SS: Video covers radio wave lengths and uses. The last half of the video covers various radios starting from $15 Walmart radios all the way to expensive radios.

[u/afromagicdanny]

Later

[u/MrOBear]

Why becoming an amateur radio operator is on my list(after some debt and student loan is paid off) .