So you want a ham radio for emergency communications!

hello youtube preppers this is a comms prepper with a video about ham radio or amateur radio i often hear people say i'm going to buy a ham radio or get a ham radio license as part of my preps as part of my communications plan but i never hear people really say what type radio they're going to get or why they're getting it so there's many different kinds of ham radio or amateur radios out there on the market today and which one are you going to buy do you want a portable mobile to get mounted in the car or a base station but there's even questions that go further than that is what bands you're looking to cover what are your requirements because each radio band has different operating characteristics that give you a different capability and people may disagree with me but i break communications down into three categories local communications regional communications and international communications local communications is the type of radios you would use for things around the house within your town cb mers frs gmrs but to get regional communications and international communications capability you're gonna have to get down into the lower bands into what they call the high frequency or hf radio band and i keep defaulting back to this chart and i encourage everybody to download a copy of it these are the bands assigned to the amateur radio service by the fcc and the vendors build radio equipment to match these bands this is their market when they're looking to make a radio they look at these bands and they build their radios to have one or more of these bands so when you're selecting a radio you want to make sure the radio you're buying has the capability for the bands you're looking to operate on and why are bands important to preppers and for communications well different frequencies have different characteristics many of us are familiar with cb frs gmrs or mers and these are line of sight type systems and that's what is represented here with that blue circle on this slide it's line of sight it's local communications it's typically in the very high frequency or ultra high frequency range vhf uhf and that's the area where mers operates gmrs operates frs a lot of people who buy these watson dual band radios well these dual band radios are vhf and uhf it's local line-of-sight communications and this is what i mean by your local communications requirement however if you're looking to get into regional communications or international communications you're going to want a radio that has the bands that are capable to produce the radio skip or have the frequencies that'll go up and bounce off the atmosphere of the ionosphere and come down across on the other side of your state or across the country or and across the ocean so this is why bands are important when you're building a communications plan for your preps and determining what class of amateur radio license you want to get so local communications around the house and around town you can use cb radios frs gmrs mers and if you have the license amateur radio vhf and amateur radio uhf and this is where you can get access to the local repeaters in your town or in your county for regional communications you're going to want a radio that has high frequency or hf capability specifically the 80 meter band 3 megahertz the 60 meter band 5 megahertz and the 40 meter band or seven megahertz for international around the world or across the country communications you're going to want to make sure you have a radio again in the high frequency band that gives you the 40 meter band 7 megahertz 20 meter band 14 megahertz and the 15 meter band at 21 megahertz and as i said there's different classes of amateur radio license but again i broke down that awrl chart to give you an idea of what class of amateur radio license you're going to need based on the operational requirement you have so if you only have a local requirement around the town then all you need is a technician class license that gives you 2 meters and 70 centimeters but if you want that regional capability for transmitting then you're going to want to get a general class license or an extra class license because this gives you operating permissions in the three meg five mag and seven meg band and also up in the international realm again you're going to need a general extra class license to get that international capability i'm going to try to break this chart down a little bit so you understand what they're trying to express here there's different classes of radio license today there's technician general and extra there is a legacy class of license called the amateur advanced class license that you can't get anymore but there's people who still have it and that's why you see on this chart eag extra advanced in general class you notice there's nothing there for technician because technician class license holders aren't permitted to operate in a high frequency or hf ban or have radios that give you that skip that's why you're restricted to the local communications but if you look at the chart that the awrl puts out for the extra class license holders their privileges start at 14 megahertz and go all the way up to 14.350 megahertz and as you go down in class of license you get fewer and fewer operating privileges and the design for this was an incentive system so as you increased your class of license learned more about radios the fcc would reward that with extra operating privileges but for prepper just looking to establish a basic capability general class gives you plenty of privileges to have the local regional and international operating authorizations and capability and then i have down here in the right hand corner the color coding for the block so the red block here for the 20 meter band means you're limited to radio telephone teletype or rtty and data from 14 megahertz to 14150 the green section that's when you're allowed to start transmitting in voice or phone is what they refer to it as so let's meet some radios now i'm not aligned with any vendor or any seller these are just a few of the few examples i pulled off the internet there's dozens of radios but here's some ham radios that are out there on the market today that you might come across and they range in price from 500 bucks to 2 000 uh depending on what bands you need and what you're looking for a common radio today is the icom 7000 it's about 300 bucks notice it has high frequency vhf and uhf so this one radio could cover all three requirements local regional and international communications the radio below that which is one i recommend for anybody who's looking to get into high frequency radio as an entry level radio is high frequency only so this only gives you your your regional international capability because it doesn't have the vhf and uhf and that's the icon 718 and that's around 850 bucks i'm sorry 750 bucks depending on who you get it from another great little radio i call a little man pack radio is the yay sue ft 817 nd which sells for around 700 bucks but again this radio has high frequency vhf and uhf so you have one radio that has the capability of meeting all three requirements of local regional and international communications and that's a low power radio i think that only goes up to five watts uh below that is the asu ft 857d it's about 850 bucks again this radio has hf vhf and uhf uh which is a pretty nice radio and i think that's a 100 watt radio and then you have high end radios i have an example here the kenwood ts 2000 it's about 1500 bucks that's a good base station it does hf vhf and uhf but it's a pretty pricey item but i don't own one but i hear it's it's a nice radio so now that we've met some ham radios where would you get one well the two biggest suppliers of amateur radio equipment in the united states are ham radio outlet www.hamradio.com and amateur electronic supply or aes ham.com this is where i buy my equipment my cables my connectors and my radios when i get permission to go buy a new radio from the wife so i hope i didn't lose you on this i just wanted to do a quick uh synopsis of what ham radio is and how it could apply to you and what to think about when considering what license you want to get and what radios you want to get what what are your requirements what are you trying to cover here and as always thank you for watching my videos and subscribing to my channel this has been the comms prepper

Channel: Commsprepper

Views: 263,471

Keywords: shtf, wrol, prepping, communications, emergency communications

Id: treLJc_QogQ

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2012