HAM Radio for Preppers- 101

what's up america neil here with jogger farms academy thanks for watching very excited today uh we're gonna do some really cool content something a little different than we've been doing before uh you guys probably have seen our video when i talked a little bit about uh having kind of a ham radio or having communications on the street one of our very good alumnus is here he's a subject matter expert on radios and in just a minute we're going to dig deep into ham radio so let's get started john thanks for coming so john is a subject matter expert uh how many countries have you talked to on this about 127 countries all right so i assume all the states as well 50 states so that's pretty incredible from this uh radio experience we can pretty much reach out and touch anybody we need to right anybody that you have an antenna that you can get out to and what if the cell phones are done does it still work oh yeah let's check it out first off the big question for myself and most viewers out there who want to get into this is where do we i mean if i look at all this equipment i mean where do i start i want to i want to basically you know create a neighborhood community if you will a safety net and start to reach out and expand my horizons so how does that begin well if you're looking to just get started off with the radio communication for the neighborhood gmrs radios family radio fmrs radios are fantastic for that they're short range you don't need a license for them anymore and they're multi-channeled and they usually have enough power to get around the neighborhood so these these are a good way to start into neighborhood type communications now when you say short range what are we talking well the literature on the radios will tell you 40 miles that's a joke um 40 miles if you're out on a totally flat ocean that's your horizon they may get there okay maybe right um typically if you run these on high power in good terrain you'll get one or two miles out of them sometimes three miles okay not a whole lot more if you're in hilly country and you're on the opposite side of the hill you won't get any communication at all these are direct line of sight if you don't have line of sight you're not going to have communications perfect so this would be something you would pick up at a big box a dick's uh outdoor store or whatever the case is so is there kind of a next step up from this but still kind of readily available yeah the next step up is uh the bowfang radios uh you can get them on amazon for about 25 a piece they go up to five watts of power however to use these on amateur radio frequencies you do need an amateur radio license these can also be programmed for the gmrs frequencies frs frequencies and merge frequencies so you can go in with software you mentioned chirp earlier chirps a good way to program these plug it into your computer and do the stuff on your screen and load it into into the radio it's a lot easier than sitting there typing up and down on the menus with these things so my limited experience just so you guys know chirp is a it's an open source software that you can download for free and um it looks pretty rudimental compared to most software programs you're going to see is it's what it is it does what it's supposed to do kind of looks like if i had to equate it to almost an excel looking type of deals pretty close and you can take this is my uh this is it this is this is this guy and i have this uh bowfing as well this is actually connected to my neighborhood and we have about a certain number of people i guess i should say on this on this network that if i keyed up right now somebody would probably respond and we use that in case of emergencies and things of that nature and then we got this is kind of my next step up uh radio here with a little bit better antenna which probably doesn't mean much but i did get chirp and downloaded it and so that's uh readily available so you mentioned a license yeah so there's if you spend any time on the internet there's kind of a little controversy there do we need it do we not need it what what's your well if you want to transmit on ham radio frequencies you need an amateur radio license okay and the amateur radio relay league arrl governs the licensing and testing of amateur radio people um they have a website you can go to uh it's a good idea to get a license uh you'll get a call sign with your license and screaming eagle 1000 uh nope um the licensing and the call sign is dependent upon the area that you live in the country code is usually the first two letters in your call sign those designate like my first two is kilo echo ke and that says that it's a usa call sign the letter or the number in the call sign designates the area inside the country that it was assigned to i am eight we live in eight land here there's zero through nine in the united states for that and then the last three letters in your your uh call sign are just randomized by the fcc they take whatever is next in order sorry no i understand one that that test by the way is public like there's a pool of 400 questions give or take and they're all public knowledge and it's it's a good idea to get those to study for those yeah um yeah they sell licensed books study books that you can actually get and they go over all the information you need to know for the exam they go over all the questions and then they go over all the answers so you know what the question is and how to answer it how hard is this test um the first test is not very hard all right and that would be called a technician technician's test is the first one is 35 questions multiple choice and is taken from a very large pool of questions and you can take the test multiple times in the same day if you don't pass it or you miss one or two and it puts you below the pass line you can retake it as long as there's time available for the guys i'm going to go really early so i have enough time now you can take all three licenses there's technician there's general there's extra class you can take all three licenses in the same day and if you pass all three of them in the same day you will walk out of the room as an extra class licensee sounds like a plan yeah let's say i want to get in this maybe i don't want to take the test yet is is there a legal way for me to connect to repeaters and whatnot and just listen to communicate just to get comfortable not transmit but just listen to that absolutely uh anybody can listen it's free to listen um you're just not allowed to keep the microphone you can take these radios program them for the local repeaters and listen all you want uh before i got my license i got this radio right here i had a seven foot outside antenna in my living room and i tied this to it and i sat in my living room listening to communications from parma ohio and i thought that was really cool because that's quite a ways for me folks i don't know that how far would that be mileage like just rough from where you live to parma 40 miles okay wow that's pretty amazing yeah okay so it's a long way off but you can listen as much as you want you're just not allowed to key up until you have your license there's three classes so we have a technicians in general and an amateur extra okay extra class how what's the breakdown here like what what am i getting for level one or two or whatever the case is well technician's level is your entry level for the the exams and licensing it grants you privileges on certain bans uh each license class gives you more and more privileges and more and more bandwidth to play with um the technicians class will get you on the two meter band let you talk on repeaters vhf uhf frequencies and some of the hf frequencies 10 meters you get some privileges on that let me let me stop you for a second so so two meter you said i could connect to a repeater so yes for and i'll just do my lameness term as you can you can clearing it up but basically a repeater is a really powerful transmitter receiver type tower where i can connect to it and it boosts my signal essentially right almost like a wi-fi booster if you will right so i can reach out beyond the distance of simplex from point one to point two right yeah that makes pretty nice pretty close so with uh a two meter uh whatever that means that's the that's the wavelength okay and that's what would allow me to be able to connect to this repeater yes all right okay so technician want technician uh license we can do that so what do i get by going to a general license what's the what's the limitations like what would what would make someone say you know what i want to get my general license well to get the general license you will get privileges on all the hf bands and hf just means high frequency bands okay and that runs the 160 meter band all the way up to the highest frequencies that you're allowed to work for amateur radio the only limitation is on some of the bands they've shortened the width of the band that you can actually work in once you get the extra class you get everything but most of the people out there stay in the general portion of the band anyway so you don't gain a whole lot more by getting the extra class it's more of a prestigious thing you gain some knowledge you get a little bit more bandwidth out of it so if you did step up to level two you can communicate with this the farthest around the world perfect that's what i want to know got stuff here that looks pretty advanced from my perspective because this is about as advanced as i've gotten so far so this guy is called what is this called it's a quad band radio all right what would just so the general viewers know if i were to purchase this regardless of the brand or whatever generally what would this cost oh they're about 300 bucks okay now you got this big daddy here which looks like a lot of stuff on there what is this radio this is an hf radio okay it covers 160 meters through six meters so it has more capability than this well it's different bands okay this is higher frequency bands this is the lower frequency bands okay um this is limited to 50 watts this has a hundred watts okay so twice as powerful and that's powerful and what would something like this run this runs about a thousand dollars all right you can find it on sale you can find them used in the 800 range sometimes but this is a very popular radio well let me ask you a question for this 300 dollar range here this is where i stepped up to uh could i connect to a repeater and and talk to pretty much anyone in my county yes that reasonable absolutely okay all right absolutely and would that would that be possible with just a handheld or would i have to go to something like this oh you could use handhelds wow all right handhelds get into repeaters as long as you're within uh you know five ten miles if you've got a good antenna you can get into repeaters and it also depends on how high the antenna is on the repeater if you got an antenna like the one here by the sheriff's department that's on a 300 foot tower it's got a really good range and we can easily hit that here with the handhelds well we're kind of in unique area here in northeast ohio we're the second highest point in the whole entire state so uh i think for for this kind of communication that really that is an advantage i'd say good afternoon sally or good morning i'm not sure what time it is right now um just doing a little video here with some friends and we're showing how these handhelds can actually get into the local repeaters and uh i i know you're over there in burton ohio so uh thanks for coming back to me and uh i'll say 7-3 to you all right sally thank you k8 usa clear so that's about what would you say 10 miles give or take yeah rough so so basically right there this little handheld radio i mean this little guy not very big could clip that on your waistband whatever the case is throw it in your car whatever and you just got communicated with 10 miles so when you think about having uh again my purpose i think this is all super cool uh and obviously you can communicate to countries but for a lot of you guys that are kind of in the prepping and to watching this content on this video about getting again a resource together a community together you just covered 10 miles with the handheld radio i think that is pretty impressive and again cell phones are irrelevant at that point so that's pretty awesome yeah sonia what are you guys doing so we're going to be using this uh uh slingshot apparatus here it's called an easy hanger it's an easy hanger we're going to throw this over a tree and uh we're going to get an antenna up there so that we can uh talk to some people shortchange myself i think you got that one gotta go get the antenna and tie it to that we'll pull it up over the tree pretty slick and tie the other end off to something over there around the air all right feed that man pull it up over the tree all right now you can use anything conductive for an antenna what is this i mean it's a specific antenna well that's specific antenna wire but you can use regular electrical wire i've got antennas that are made out of that like copper wire yeah so here's what's crazy i john's been here less than an hour and that's including us bs in and talking and filming and all this stuff and making this video and in that short amount of time we've uh set up this elaborate uh well it's probably very simple but to me it's pretty elaborate uh you'll see here we shot that uh basically that uh antenna up into a tree uh we drug it over to my porch here and it's connected to some other crazy looking antenna that john made but here's the coolest part about all this right uh unless that that hour of time we're going to probably do some cool communication here and there is not a single plug anywhere this is all done by battery i'll run on the battery and where did that uh battery come from uh the battery is homemade it's a lithium polymer battery uh maximum voltage 16.8 the radios don't like that voltage so i only charge it to 16 volts it's got 55 amp hours 1300 watt hours so like a gel battery or how did you make that um there's a online place called uh oh can you remember the name of the company don't blow yourself up dot com no they they buy used or abandoned batteries that corporations had in storage and never used they buy them and then they resell them to the public wow at like a third of the price you'd pay for a new battery what does something like that cost you to make uh the batteries themselves cost me 130 dollars okay the housing i made on my 3d printer and that was probably another 25 and i probably got another 20 in circuitry and meters and switches and plugs and stuff what would you guess i mean i know you might hold you but what would you guess if you bought that brand new something like that 400 yeah wow that's pretty crazy all right yeah they're very expensive if you buy them from a company already pre-made but you can make them yourself plenty of videos on youtube on how to put battery packs together uh standard batteries are made with 18650 lithium-ion cells and you can find those for sometimes 75 cents to sell so you can make some pretty big batteries with them what with the setup right now what's the estimated range i mean what would you say how far can we reach out realistically um it's gonna depend on the band conditions for the day okay what's a low end a low end where you won't get out of the state that's still pretty crazy though on the high end if we had good band conditions with this setup we could probably uh get to europe pretty easily wow south america most of that occurs in the evening conditions open in those directions so let's see i'm going to start talking to you ready this is what they call an sdr radio software defined radio okay it doesn't really have radio components in it it's a computer okay the only thing when the signal comes into the back it's converted instantly to digital it comes in analog goes into the radio gets converted to digital everything that happens inside the radio is done digitally and then when you talk on it it does the same thing it does all the processing digitally okay and then converts it to an analog out to the antenna interesting so this is what they call an sdr this is there's a lot of companies coming out with these now okay and they they keep the prices down and they give you a whole lot of features as opposed to you know regular old-fashioned big transistor contact analog aliens jumping working on it well if you get some aliens you give them your address not mine okay i get the first one you get the second one so these guys right now could be anywhere in the united states uh one guy is in nine land which is probably in illinois and the other guy is in four land which is down in kentucky not quite as old as you are well they don't though any to uh turn 80 i'll tell you that he's 80. now the way this works um say i wanted to get on and just make general contacts with anybody out there i would dial into a frequency that looks to be clear i'll get on the radio give my call sign and ask is this frequency in use because a lot of times two people may be talking on a frequency you can only hear one of them you can't hear the other one if the other one's talking you don't know anybody's on their frequency so it's always polite when you get on there you ask is this frequency in use is this frequency and you just give your call sign do that a couple times nobody comes back frequency is yours um so say i get on the radio i start calling out it's called calling cq and it's calling any station out there i'll call cq cq cq give my call sign a couple times somebody will come back to me and give me their call sign and that's what this lady here is doing right now she's taking callers um ham radio is almost mostly male okay when a female gets on the radio it draws a lot of flies okay it's just the way it is so when a lady gets on the radio you'll get guys lined up to talk to him so that's what's happening kilo echo 8 uniform sierra alpha now when you're trying to get a hold of somebody on ham radio you listen to what they're doing and listen to what they're calling if they're in the middle of a conversation with somebody else you never talk over them they'll let you know they'll say uh qrz which is whoever is next yeah and then you throw your call sign out now she may be receiving 50 people at the same time so what she'll hear is bits and pieces of call signs coming through she'll pick up like a number and a letter and repeat it and then that person will come back again and uh sounds like your battery operation is working just great ke8 usa uh anything else you want ah roger thanks for report you are five by eight to five by nine here in northeast ohio uh just running an antenna probably 25 feet off the ground so uh it's definitely getting out your way thanks for the comeback ke8 usa be clear that's pretty close that's maryland so that's maryland wow yeah so basically we threw a rope in a tree and we're talking to maryland that's that's incredible that's really incredible actually now one of the things you can do for ham radio that a lot of people don't take everybody thinks ham radio long distance but it is the most reliable short range communication available um the 40 meter band 60 meter band and 80 meter band are used for what they call envis communication near vertical incident sky wave okay and you place the antenna close to the ground so that the signal reflects off the ground and goes straight up and then bounces back down now using the two meter radios for me to communicate with my buddy 12 miles south of me i have to use 25 watts of power to get a communication through to him using the 60 meter band on this i can do it on 5 watts of power wow for the same distance and have better communications with it so a quarter of the power pretty much yeah because i'm bouncing off the ionosphere and coming back down i don't have all this stuff behind us in the way right where two meters line of sight it's got to go through everything that's between you and who you're talking to now this this here that is a two meter so this is another radio in there so these are both different radios they're different radios okay gotcha so this isn't a different frequency as well yes okay that handles the 70 centimeter band which is the 440 it handles the 2 meter band 6 meter fm and 10 meter fm now you can have am fm side band for all your voice communications now as a general question like our police radios are all digital they're all any of them okay and is any of this digital or fm um no these are analogous but they're all fm okay that fm is the same as the radio stations you listen to yeah actually the radio stations are a little bit lower than the two meter band that's why a lot of these radios they they have fm radio you can listen right you just dial in the radio stations and you can listen to them so if we knew the frequency for my police radio is it possible i mean legalities aside i'm saying is it possible that you could get and communicate no because it's encrypted well it's it's a trump system okay and these radios won't deal with that gotcha it's even hard for regular scanners to pick it up you got to have a scanner that can handle a trunk system like that okay but if you do yeah you can listen in it's it's hard to to communicate back to talk to a guy in maryland on this that's not a very that's what 500 miles 600 miles at least that's that's incredible not very far um i had a conversation with a guy on the big island of hawaii one morning i just heard him calling in on the 17 meter band talked to him for 20 minutes that's amazing just sitting in my i actually had the radio set up when i first got the radio was set up in the dining room yeah had the antenna wire running out or the the coax running out the window right to the antenna i just built in the backyard right and uh that's amazing talking to a guy in the world i mean like i said like for us just being able to communicate within our own little town would be amazing did you go to the store and still be able to have communication you just talk to someone in maryland that system yeah now would a technician's license cover everything we just did no okay technician's license does not cover the hf bands general license does that's another 30 question exam that much harder and a lot of the stuff that was on the tech questions seems to be on the general point we just did a pretty cool test there we reached all the way out to uh to maryland which is pretty amazing since we basically threw a rope in a tree and it was pretty clear so that's a fast thing so outside of that is there anything you want to tell folks that are potentially getting into this for whether it me for prepping or for a hobby or whatever the case is well ham radio is a lot of fun if you like communicating with people if you like playing with gadgets i mean you there's an endless supply of gadgets for ham radio so you'll you'll never be bored with that you can also connect your ham radio to your computer and do digital modes through the laptop into the computer that's quite common these days they keep inventing new stuff that you can use so uh it it's endless it it goes as far as you want to go with ham radio if you like gadgets this is the place if you like talking to people this is the place if you're looking at rock solid communications if you know stuff goes sideways this is where you want to be because everybody that's worth talking to when the grid goes down is going to be on ham radio somewhere so it's definitely something you should learn if you you're a prepper and looking for you know communications capabilities for your neighborhood or even you know across town to other people on the other side of whatever this this is where you have to be and there's like little uh competitions like fox hunts and stuff where they try to find signals yes there is right and then they have um contests on the radios and usually it's to see who can make most contacts in a weekend and they'll be like we just had the arrl field day here in the united states and we've had hundreds of thousands of ham radio operators on the air on the same weekend and my brother-in-law came over first time on the radio he sat down between saturday and sunday he made 90 contacts wow and we went from california all the way out to maine i even talked to a guy over in europe that day amazing john we covered a lot of stuff today i mean uh in a very short period of time we made quite a few contacts and quite a few long distance to me long distance i mean 500 miles and it's not seem pretty uh pretty straightforward so i appreciate all that i appreciate you coming out here taking your time to sure teach all of us about this ham radio experience it seems like it's pretty uh unlimited in its capabilities so to speak i mean there's a multiple levels you can get to so i really appreciate you doing that for everybody and they all appreciate that as well you guys know where to find us hopefully you guys love this video as always give us a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already obviously we're here on youtube we're on facebook twitter and we put all our a-list content on patreon until next time remember it's always better to be judged by 12 then carry by 6.

Channel: Geauga Firearms Academy

Views: 75,893

Rating: 4.9301248 out of 5

Keywords: HAM radio, ham radio for preppers, starting in HAM radio, ARRL, amateur radio, ham radio basics, basics of ham radio, ham radio antenna, how to prepare for the ham radio test, hf radio, ham radio technician class license course, ham radio basics how to call cq, ham radio basics for beginners, baofeng, baofeng 888, baofeng uv-5r, baofeng uv-5r programming, how to prepare for the ham radio exam, buying your first radio, ham radio antenna basics, prepper communications

Id: RDaptaQ3kCs

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020