The Beginner's Guide to GMRS Radios

hello everybody this is Carri with Trail traveler and today we are starting at the beginning this is gmrs for beginners this is going to be everything that you need to know to understand what gmrs radios are which is General Mobile Radio Service why you might want gmrs radios what Pros cons all that good stuff how to get licensed everything you need to know in this video right here let's get started first off off want to thank rivus for sponsoring this video uh big thanks to them for helping me out with this uh we've got their r87 radio their mobile unit here which is a fantastic mobile unit on sale right now check it out and this is their newer ha 1G handy talkie both of these are excellent radios so big thanks to Rivas for sponsoring this video so what are the benefits of gmrs well if we compare gmrs radios to the other most popular options out there such as CB Radio and ham radio it has better range and Clarity than CB so that's a big plus CB radio just never had much in the way of range although yes I know you could do things like put on amplifi fires and huge antennas and sideband and stuff but that's not really legal now is it so an out ofthe boox CB radio only has a few watts of power compared to something like an r87 which has 40 watts of power so big difference now compared to ham radio gmrs doesn't require you to take a test there is a license fee it's $5 for 10 years covers your immediate family we'll discuss more about that later later the radios are fairly inexpensive I mean this is a high-end um handy talki unit 65 bucks the mobile stations are very inexpensive so in comparison to a good ham radio gmrs radios are on the inexpensive side now on the very low end you have F FRS Family Radio Service walkie-talkies now they look very similar to this and they have um usually up to 15 channels but they're much lower power they're 05 watt compared to 5 watt so a lot lower on the wattage Spectrum however gmrs radios are compatible with f FRS in fact the first 15 channels that you can dial into with either one of these radios are the F FRS channels from 16 to 22 are the GMS channels so a gmrs radio is compatible with an F FRS radio now another big Advantage for some people again not everybody but some people is that you can use these gmrs radios with repeaters so if there's repeaters in their your area and in a lot of major metropolitan areas is there are gmrs repeaters these can be used with those repeaters to get exceptional range for example with uh just even the lowend uh lower power I mean uh h1g and and definitely with the r87 from right here in my front yard I can reach a repeater down in Denver which is right at 30 mil away now that's going to rebroadcast that signal from a antenna that's up on top of a water tower at 50 watts and I'm going to have another 5060 70 miles worth of range so I can talk pretty much from Northern Colorado all the way down to basically Colorado Springs and and stuff with a little radio because they use repeaters now Ham radios can use repeaters as well but CBS can't so there's that now let's get into some some common questions how much range can you actually get well that's going to depend on a lot of factors mostly line of sight now we're not skipping off the troposphere and doing all kinds of weird uh stuff we're talking line of sight Communications and it really just depends on how clean that line of sight is honestly um we have tested little tiny wristwatch GM Mr RS radios that we were able to get almost 3 miles of range with we can get 5 six 7 miles of range very easily with a handy talki depending on conditions with a a mobile unit like this we can get a lot more range 60 70 miles depending on those conditions now if this is sitting at ground level and I'm trying to get through miles and miles of buildings or trees or whatever that range is going to get cut down significantly if I have a clean line of sight well then I can get a lot more range so the distance that you're going to get is truly dependent on your environment and what's in between you and the receiving side or the transmitting side and your side depending what's in between you could get pretty short range you can get some pretty phenomenal range it really just depends now we mentioned repeaters a little bit so I'll touch on that again that's just going to be something similar to like this Rus which actually if you take a second one and connect a data cable one is a receiver and one is a transmitter so you can use two of these to set up a repeater station there's also dedicated repeater boxes that you can get that take a signal in and then rebroadcast it out so that's what a repeater is it repeats your signal so a common question is why not just go to ham radio well there's a few reasons for that honestly uh for a lot of people it's simply the license requirements you have to take a fairly technical test to get a ham radio license now a lot of people are going to say but it's so easy just study you know what I've studied this over and over and over again and because the material on the test is just absolutely not relevant to anything that I want to do I have trouble memorizing it for the sake of the test it's ohms and watts and amps and antennas and all kinds of things that you have to know in order to pass the test and I simply struggle on it not because I'm not intelligent it's just because I know that the material is irrelevant to what I want to do so also depending on your use ham radio may be Overkill so uh again those radios are typically going to be more expensive there's more to learn there's the test to take all that kind of stuff and if you're just on a trail like we are trying to do vehicle to vehicle Communications ham radio is probably overkill for that situation where gmrs is an ideal setup for that so now if we look at what are people on the trails using well gmrs is way more popular now I'll put some statistics here uh a poll that we recently took on the trail Traveler YouTube channel that asked what type of radio that you're using gmrs was far more popular than all the other options combined so it blew away all the competition out there if we go and we hit a trail and there's people there that we've never met before it's a very safe bet that they're either going to have gmrs radios or they may have F FRS radios in which case we can still talk to them so either way gmrs is definitely a lot more popular in the off-roading Community now one phrase I think I heard it from somebody but it's worth repeating gmrs is a tool ham is a lifestyle so if you want to have crazy power Reach people all over the world help in emergency situations then get your ham license it's an excellent choice if you just want simple affordable short range communication then gmrs is a better bet so they each have their place in the world where CB these days really doesn't have a place but gmrs and ham they're close enough in some things and they're different enough that each one does have some pretty specific use cases now let's talk about getting a license who can get a license well there are some requirements for getting on the license the applicant must be 18 years or older not a representative of a foreign government licenses today are only available to individuals meaning no new businesses now in the past I believe it ended around 1987 you could get a license for a business and if you have one those are typically grandfathered but that's a whole another story there's no test just a payment it's $35 it's good for 10 years and the license does cover you and your immediate family now there's really no definition of what immediate family is whether it also includes your uncles and aunts and cousins but I'm like you know what to me Immediate is one removed from you so it's your your brothers your sisters your parents your your children that to me as immediate family and 35 bucks a year it's $3 and you know it's less than it's around $3 a month right whatever it is $35 a year uh for 10 years yeah so it's $3.50 per year right it's dead cheap so now there are some rules that you have to adhere to mainly if an FCC representative asks to inspect your equipment so that's your handheld your mobiles whatever you have to let them do it that is the law right so you have to make any of your equipment and any records you might have available when asked now you're not allowed to send any messages in connection with any activity which is illegal as a federal state or local law makes some sense no false or deceptive messages so don't lie about something don't say there's an accident somewhere where there's not things like that no Cod messages with hidden meanings um think this has to do with uh like hiding El legal activities type things now if you're familiar from the CB world the 10 codes you know 1020 where's your location 10200 you know 104 all those those are permissible and if you want a list of those 10 codes I will put a link in the description below but they're not that common because we just don't have some of the technical restrictions that we had with CB you get really good quality so having to abbreviate things isn't really necessary now you're not allowed to play any music whistling sound effects or material that is meant to amuse or entertain others you're not allowed to say have any ads or make offers for the sale of goods or services no ads for political candidates or political campaign no International distress signals like like Mayday unless a vehicle is in immediate danger now of course a lot of rules go out the window when there is immediate danger there's no communicating with stations in the amateur radio service well you can't because there are different frequencies or any unauthorized station or to any foreign station well you know if you're here in the United States you're not going to reach a foreign station with your gmrs it's just not enough power no Contin or uninterrupted Transmissions unless it's dealing with an emergency that's just keying down and not letting up so if there's immediate safety of life or property then you you like again a lot of bets are right off and you're not allowed to do messages that connect to a public address system and you must identify yourself using your assigned call sign and we'll talk more about that later on a periodic basis and at the end of Transmissions so again we'll talk about that when we get into using a gmrs radio so once you have a series of Transmissions or after 15 minutes you have to say your call signed it's pretty simple but something that you do need to keep in mind now some of the repeaters that you might connect to every 15 minutes you might hear like a morse code coming from them that's their station identifier and a radio not put out more than 50 Watts so again we have 5 Watts we have 40 Watts we have 50 Watts we have radios that have different Power outputs but the maximum that you're allowed to do is 50 Watts so how do you get your license well first you need an FCC registration number or an FRN as it's called and to do that you need to register with the Kors service link below here and in the description make it easy for you it's it's of course it's a government website they make things not as simple as they could be now I think that usually takes a day or so once you have your FR FRN you can go apply for your license again New link below and in the description you log in with your F FRN number you pay your your fee and you complete the process and at that point again a couple days you know 48 72 hours later you'll receive your call sign mine it's WL 483 now let's talk about choosing a ham radio what is important to you right there's a couple different things to look at when trying to decide well first off do you want something handheld for portability do you want something that's going to be permanently mounted somewhere like an RA 87 is it going to be a base station which actually with the ra 87 you can get a little stand for it and just make this a base station in your house run the antenna outside to a nice antenna and you've got yourself a nice little base station so depending on your goals there you might want to choose one versus the other simply based on form factor now what about power output well if you're just going vehicle to vehicle when you're on a trail or you know you want to keep hikers in contact with each other your kids are you know playing around at a park or you know when you're out camping and you want to just hand them a radio well you know what something like a five watt radio is probably going to be sufficient for those needs now another thing you might want to consider is making sure that a radio has privacy codes and this is going to eliminate you from hearing other people it's not going to eliminate other people from hearing you but you won't hear other people so any background noise any other radio Transmissions are going to be filtered out with privacy codes and very often if you're connecting to repeaters you're going to need to use privacy codes to connect to those repeaters and some of them are going to take one code for the transmission and another code for receiving and that's called split tones and again not every radio supports split tones so if you're going to be connecting to repeaters you probably want to make sure that your radio such as these supports split tones Now do it had does the radio have repeater channels if you're never going to use a repeater don't worry about it right if you're going to set up a bunch of repeaters well then you might want to see how many pre-programmed repeater channels they have or make sure that there's enough extra programmability to add however many you want now for example the h1g has eight pre-programmed repeater channels and you can go in and tweak the Privacy codes to make work but there's also 220 extra programmable Channel slots so you could add tons of repeaters from all over the country now you might want to look at some extra features that different radios have how about water resistance well again these are sitting here on the desk so I'm going to use them as examples right the h1g is IP67 rated which means it can withstand a tremendous amount of dust and it can sit in a meter of water water for 30 minutes and still be fully functional that's really cool for me that's important I drop more radios in the snow and mud than probably most other people combined I'm really clutzy with my radios I'm always dropping them and so having a rugged radio that can withstand water very important to me a lot of them have FM radio features well if you are just sitting at the beach or something and you've got your radio and you want to listen to FM great a L of them have it me I don't care about FM radio so that's not a feature that I'm interested in a lot of them have Noah channels now that's Weather Channels weather alert channels so you could set up you know there's dual channels on here on both of these you could set up one for your Communications Channel and another to receive the Noah weather alerts now some new radios that are hitting the market right now have some GPS features so you can broadcast your Loc to someone else and get it back and figure out where people are that's kind of a cool feature for hikers or your kids things like that I haven't been able to use one of those radios yet so I can't speak to how well it works but it's something that may be coming down the future something to look at now do you need that dual monitoring I've mentioned it a couple times right these have two different basically two separate radios in them an A and A B I can be talking and listening on one and I can be listening on the other and I can switch over and talk on that one so that's kind of a cool feature in certain situations where you want to have different conversations going maybe you want to be connected to two different repeaters there's a lot of reasons to have two different uh radios in there how about programmable buttons the h1g along with some other new ones this is I think going to be a common feature moving forward are having some programmable buttons on here there's two here on the side one on top I use one of the ones on the side for a push to talk button for the B channel so I can hit the main push to talk to talk on the a channel I can push the side button to talk on the B Channel that's a very very handy feature for us and we do use that uh if you watch later on when our review of this radio comes out I I discuss why that's an important feature for us okay how about using your radio properly so I like to recommend that you get some tape or a label maker and put your call sign right on the radio so that you can remember it remember when you're starting off you need to broadcast your call sign you need to say it every 15 minutes so having it handy until you memorize it it's not a bad thing so in practice you should start off with your call sign and what you are trying to do are you trying to reach somebody are you trying to get a check are you you know just announcing that you're available to talk what is it that you're trying to do so now for example I may want to check out a new radio see if the radio is working do I have it set up right especially when it comes to the repeaters so I'll make sure I'm on the right Channel and everything and I'll go W 483 radio check please odds are someone's going to reply assuming I have the radio set up properly and tell me how do I sound and um whether I'm coming across okay so my call sign what am I trying to do right now I may just want to call for someone specifically someone that I know that's out there who may be on the radio I may go W l483 wrfg 645 do you copy so I'm specifically asking for someone else now how do you know what your friends call signs are well they they need to tell you right I can't really help you with that one they need to tell you what their call sign is now often we'll give traffic reports or at least mention our location so if somebody has a question about the traffic in that area they can ask that question and that may be something like w 483 southbound I25 from 4 for Collins to Denver listening on 600 standing by and if someone wants to know hey how's the traffic in and thoron they can ask me so there's ways of communicating but you have to follow the rules and make sure that you're doing things properly especially especially when you are using a repeater because those people will get very very picky and call you out on it so make sure that you're following the rules make sure that you have your call sign handy that you state it when you start up when you hit that 15 minute Mark or less and when you're done with the conversation and that could be as simple as W l483 I'm out and that way everyone knows not to ask for you because you've just turned off your radio now let's keep talking about repeaters for a minute how do you find repeater information in Colorado once you have your gmrs license join the Front Range gmrs group on Facebook once they accept you you'll get access to the website with the repeater information that they have as well as radio files to make programming many popular radios super super simple now they maintain I think it's around six or seven repeaters now covering most of the central cordor of Colorado now there's also websites that you can go to and get Nationwide information there's repeater book.com just click on the US gmrs repeaters link you'll get a lot of help on finding local repeaters there another website is www.my gms.com again they have a list of available repeaters so not too hard to find repeaters in your area follow the directions that it gives you on how to set it up and you're good to go so hopefully this was a good uction into gmrs radios why gmrs over other types of radios how to get things up and running how to get your license and some of the basic rules that we need to follow now again thank you to Ras for sponsoring this video be sure and check out their ra 87 base unit and their h1g handy talkie these are both excellent radio choices big thanks to again to them for sponsoring this video if you have any questions about gmrs be sure and ask in the comments below and I'll do my best to get the answers for you so thanks for watching everybody this has been carry with Trail traveler stay safe out there we'll see you on the trails

Channel: Trail Traveler

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Keywords: Trail Traveler, gmrs radio, ham radio, how to use gmrs, gmrs vs ham, cb radio, gmrs radio for beginners, gmrs vs frs, what is gmrs, gmrs radio license, gmrs radio etiquette, gmrs radio range, gmrs radio for overlanding, gmrs radio repeater, gmrs radio vs ham, how to use gmrs radio, how to use gmrs call sign, gmrs vs ham vs cb, gmrs vs ham radio, gmrs vs ham license, what is gmrs repeater, gmrs radio explained

Id: On1PGGkZeJk

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024