Understanding Ham Radio and its Role In Survival

[Music] how's it going everybody my name is Josh ki6 n AZ I came out to fieldcraft to talk about survival comms I've brought a couple of the pieces that I use that I keep with me on a day-to-day basis or depending on what I'm going to be doing I've started out if you're talking about survival comms I feel one of the important things is making sure that the equipment stays powered all these radios run off of power and the great detriment in a survival situation is that you're going to be without a grid so I have a simple solar panel the idea behind this was use something that's off the shelf so I have a gold 0 panel with a charger that has double-a batteries in it everything up until you get over to the ham radio side of the house is all running off of double-a batteries and if we go from the left to the right we're basically going to be looking at comms that you can use without having to have an FCC license so starting out the two radios right here or general coverage receivers the first one is a county column gp5 this one runs single sideband this will run am/fm weather radio and it will also do shortwave the advantage of shortwave is there are stations out there that are broadcasting on a commercial level but it gives you access to the amateur bands specifically the HF amateur bands same thing with the C crane skywave single sideband this is the personal one I take with me everywhere particularly when I'm traveling the advantage to this is its small its tiny it runs off of two double-a batteries and it can charge them so if you use rechargeables you can keep that going as well this is great because it pretty much covers everything am/fm weather air shortwave and you also have the single sideband capability why I put this towards the front of kind of your emergency preparedness radio equipment is that you want to do sort of a sitrep if you're in a disaster situation you want to understand what's happening and having a general purpose receiver is gonna be really really good for that because you can go through each of the different modes that it runs off of scan through them figure out what's happening hopefully get some information out of that record it hopefully on a notepad or something like that and then you can plan accordingly is it an earthquake is it a biological problem should you be filtering your water should you be boiling all that stuff is gonna come out on am/fm likely once things are better understood if you don't have this capability then you simply won't know you'll have to talk to other people and that can be problematic so solar panel with the ability to charge the doublea's both these radios run off of double-a and they get you the information coming in so Homeland Security FEMA the local police certain situations they would be transmitting on those frequencies that you can access with those devices but if you're looking for more local coms coordinating with people that are in your community and you might start looking at things like FRS radios FRS radios are just blister pack radios like you can get at Walmart this is a read of SRT 45 it runs off of two doublea's so sticking with that double-a cell power system idea these are going to be good for in close range a mile maybe it's going to be local coms we call it tactical comes in the local community sense so if you had a gang of these you could hand them out to people that are going through the same situation as you I'm in California if we have an earthquake where we lose power and natural gas I may want to hand these out to people that I know are going to be involved in case we need some help I use the example of we have somebody that has an air and oxygen machine that they use to maintain their status or quality of living and if for some reason can't power it their generator runs out of gas or maybe they're off of a solar system for some reason we can give them one of these or give someone that's giving care to them and then they can call us if they need help something I add to the list just because it's small and light is a kind of mesh device this is a go ten of mesh there are many companies that do things like this and this is definitely gonna have to be pre coordinated with your team or your community but this allows you to basically send text messages back and forth provide information like where you are at it's it's better in an outdoor situation this has a limited effect of limited application sense in a survival situation but it can be charged really easily off of a USB power supply and it has some mesh capability that the more you add the greater your ability to propagate your message is so it's useful if it works for you in your situation or what you're trying to accomplish now starting on this side we're going down the ham radio route a little bit first off is the bow fan you v3r you could replace this at the UV 5r or a similar handy talkie that just does analog these radios are great because you can kind of program them to do whatever you want I do caveat you do need to be a licensed amateur to use this so you do need to go get your technicians license which is a really simple 35 question multiple choice test with this charging capability is off of a USB specifically that's why it's in this kit so it will charge off of the goal zero system you would pre program this for emergency frequencies your simplex call frequency so one for 6.5 to zero megahertz would be a good place to get started and then you'd want to find local repeaters repeaters are like big radio stations or bigger radio stations that we put on mountaintops that can have a good line-of-sight to the radio that you're transmitting from and back to you and what it'll do is when you're transmitting to it it will amplify and trans what you're saying over a much larger area giving you way more power to reach more people in an emergency situation this is going to be really good to monitor because you're gonna hear a much bigger area of effect 100 miles or more in some cases which will allow you to coordinate any kind of help you may need if you're going down the amateur radio Road I would recommend that you consider joining a club or a group like Aires or races those are emergency preparedness minded they are affiliated with the Amateur the a double RL which is the American radio relay League and FEMA or DHS in the case of races they will allow you to interoperate if you need to or if the situation requires it with emergency services for getting outcomes or making sure you're staying in touch with whomever needs help during an emergency situation the last radio this is my personal radio that I carry all the time is a yaesu ft 2 D R this is a dual band so VHF UHF radio similar functionality to the bowel Fang in terms of analog it operates on FM which is frequency modulation you're probably familiar from your car or radio stations you listen to but this will also do digital modes and what that means specifically is that when you talk into it it's encoded into a digital audio stream and that can be good in a survival situation because digital digital audio can transmit further and be picked up easier by digital radios and analog radios ones that when they transmit the audio comes out as a human voice tends to taper off as you get further away from the transmitting station with digital audio when you transmit it maintains a pretty strong peak until it just drops off and so that area of effect that ability to transmit far off and have an easy-to-understand human conversation is a little bit better with digital radio the caveat with this is there are multiple types of radio's there is DMR which is probably the most popular Yaesu system fusion and D star so if you're gonna go down this road you've probably done some research because these aren't cheap but you need to pick the mode that is most used in your area and you can figure that out by talking to other amateur radio operators either via a club or you can use websites like radio reference to figure out which repeaters aren't active and then program that on the radio start scanning through those repeaters see which ones are active talk to the individuals that run it and you'll get a pretty good picture I'm lucky I have a ham radio outlet in my area in Anaheim California and so I can talk to people pretty quickly and they have ads or flyers for repeaters that have opened up so keep your eyes open talk to people online because we won't have that in a survival situation or an emergency situation so the work you do beforehand in prepping these radios is going to be very important so far we've basically been talking about line-of-sight transmission FRS the Baofeng VHF UHF and the Yaesu aren't all gonna be line of sight communication meaning when you hit the atmosphere it keeps going and in it won't kind of curve around the earth or long-distance comms so local work local tactical communication groups friends people in your community you're gonna use that capability the last radio here is an Ella craft kx2 which is what's called a QR p hf transceiver I use this for long-distance communications particularly where I'm packing very light this radio is extremely light but it's also pretty expensive so if you're going further down this road you probably have a goal in mind my goal is to hike to the top of mountains and make long-distance communication with it so this fits the bill for that really nicely in a survival situation where would you use that well this radio can interface with my iPad using a rad very pi device as a computer to send digital nodes I can do digital chat I can request help if I needed it I could even send email if that was the case via the HF radio the longer coms is good in the situation that I need to get out of the affected disaster area to people that have internet access to then take that digital data that I sent and get it to an email server server that can then send it out over the internet but this still has effect of being useful for voice comms this does Morse code which believe it or not really valuable with a low powered radio like this because you are getting more effectivity out of your transmitted power through this little antenna than if it was just voice so multiple layers of kind of coverage for how you might handle an emergency situation and again moving from the left to the right these are things that I think you absolutely have to have you need a general-purpose receiver the two that I have on the desk are high quality they receive very well I do like the emergency kind of hand cranked ones but they are not the most effective receivers so keep that in mind when you start thinking about putting money towards this both these radios are about a hundred dollars the county comm is going to be cheaper DC crane which arguably I feel is a better radio it's more expensive I believe it's one hundred and seventy five dollars the FRS radios are cheap you can get them off of Walmart but if your goal is to get a uniform power application and again double A's are going to be plentiful in an emergency particularly if it's a prolonged emergency the ability to have them rechargeable also sanyo eneloop double a's the ikea the white batteries that IKEA sells are basically made from the same manufacturer as the ANA loops is a great solution for that and the ability to have them all charged kind of in that space is something you're definitely going to want in an emergency situation [Music] [Applause] so those are some of my thoughts in emergency preparedness for comms specifically get a goal in mind and what you want to accomplish you may have two different disaster issues I live in California I got earthquakes you might be in a tornado area or a hurricane that's gonna change what you may want to add to your kit but it's something important to think about it doesn't take that much money to get something relatively cheap that mostly is available off-the-shelf so take a look at that if you have any questions post in the comments below thanks fieldcraft for letting me come over and do this I'm Josh ki6 nez from the Henry a crash course on YouTube and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The FieldCraft Survival Channel

Views: 154,376

Keywords: fieldcraft survival, fieldcraft, survival, mike, glover, mike glover, ham radio, ham radio crash course, learn ham radio, ham, radio, how-to, learn, baofeng, yaesu, hand held, hand, held, walkie-talkie, walkie, talkie, antenna, survival radio, prepardness

Id: EwfQ-Zd5-0c

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020