FRS Radios

okay good morning - I'm the tech prepper today I wanted to take a look at FRS radios these are those little handy talkies that you see like at Walmart and Target and the sporting goods stores that come in a pack of like two four six and eight I believe and they're really inexpensive and the reason why I like the FRS rate is is because I believe there's a specific place for them in the prepper comms area so personally I'm a ham radio operator which is a FCC licensed amateur band but that does require you to study and there's a bit of work involved the FCC also has I believe since 1996 has had the Family Radio Service and their license free and in fact they actually don't call it license free they call it licensed by rule and all that means is you don't actually need a license you just need to follow the rules that govern the Family Radio Service and I've got a really cheap midland x talker here I've had this for a few years and the reason why I like it is because this is what my wife and I use to communicate so we do a lot of trips in our RV and we have invest the point yet where we're towing it so we do something called chasing so she just follows me in our our Jeep and rather than having to use our cell phone when we want to be in contact for example pulling over or if we get a couple cars between us we basically just agree on a channel on our FRS radios and we're able to communicate we also use it for we arrive at a campsite for her to help me back into a space if it's a tight fit and I can't do it with just the camera and then she typically doesn't go hiking with me so when we do go out and she's in the RV I'll typically hit a trail and what about it is that I typically get pretty good range when I have the line of sight on the backpacks and I can actually see the campsite I would say that's about the only time I actually get decent range out of these guys I've been able to get probably about seven or eight miles of range but in reality it's more like half a mile to a mile especially when you're chasing each other in the cars and if you lose line of sight like all radio you're not going to get anything so if there's a place for you where you want to have communications this may be the way to go because it does not require a license just look at the rules and these radios are actually pretty locked down for it to be a FRS compliant radio it can't have a detachable antenna I mean this antenna is almost worthless I'll show you in a second it also has power restrictions on the effective radiating power I believe for most channels it's half watt and then on some of the other channels it goes up to two watts but I think that overlaps with gmrs what's interesting about the the emperor s channelized frequencies is that I can actually take something like my pal Fang and what's interesting about these Chinese radios and the reason why the FCC does not like them is because you can actually it has the FRS frequencies among other things fully unlocked so you can both transmit and receive on FRS which is not allowed by the FCC for a number of reasons one is the power output level on these radios exceeds the FRS specifications so this is a five watt radio I believe and I have another one that's 8 watts so obviously that exceeds the half watt some channels and the 2 watts on the other channels and this one also has a detachable antenna which is also not permitted on the FRS frequencies what's interesting is that this is a very inexpensive radio in fact it might cheaper than the FRS radios I think I paid $30 for this valve Hank ham radio and it supports those features because I guess trying to doesn't give give a darn and my more expensive handheld like a co ft60 R which is a moderately expensive handheld radio actually requires a hack they call it the Morris cap hack and you can take it to like the ham radio outlet and they will basically hack the phone or hack the handheld so that you can actually transmit on those FRS frequencies again it's not allowed by the FCC because of the output requirements the fact that the antenna is detachable and this device has not been blessed for FRS use let's see if I missed anything Oh a few things here so these radios also have a nice feature insofar as that allow didn't have a NOAA weather scanning support so you can actually get a those transmissions so I'm gonna turn this guy on and I'm gonna go ahead and scan weather and since I'm in Department I'm gonna have to turn this on full-blast and actually put it up by the window [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so it's kind of nice if you are in a situation where you want to have local weather communication and this would be perfect for a bro-down scenario the other reason why I like these is that they have a USB charger so as you've seen in most of my videos a lot of the devices I use standardize on five volt half-half amp USB charging so this works with all of my battery power plant systems um I think that might be it so there's another service called gr grms which is licensed but it's just a fee that you pay I made you a series on that one and then obviously the the Big Daddy would be getting into ham radio and I'll certainly do a series on those so be strong be safe and think about adding an FRS radio to your collection thanks guys

Channel: The Tech Prepper

Views: 6,983

Keywords: thetechprepper, prepping, frs, radio, family radio service, midland, comms, communication, episode 18

Id: FyXdiA2Ghi8

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020