What's the Best Off-Road Communications?

are you new to off-roading and trying to figure out what communication device to get or maybe you've been running cb for a long time and now you want to switch to something else and trying to figure that out maybe you're just looking for some more general information about communications because there's a lot of confusion out there about what the rules are what the license requirements are what some of the best options are to use and i know i had a lot of those questions when i was first starting out and now that i've been doing this for many years and i've got a little bit of experience and i've got my license i wanted to take a minute and just share some practical information about communications to help you make a decision on what might be best for you so that's what we're going to talk about today in this video stay tuned [Music] welcome to trail recon i'm brad and today i want to have a practical conversation with you all about communications because there's a lot of good information i think we could discuss especially for the beginners that maybe just don't know now we're going to talk a little bit about mobile versus handheld communications talk about cb frs gmrs ham and satellite communications it's all good tools to use but some may be more practical and easier for you to use and some may be more advanced but man that's the one you want so we're going to talk a little bit about that but first a little bit of a disclaimer i am not some kind of communications guru i don't claim to be that at all i did a lot of communications work when i was in the military and over the last several years of off-roading and over landing i have used all of these tools in one form another and i'd get my ham license several years ago so i have enough information to be dangerous but i just want to share my opinion and practical use okay before we dive into this i want to invite you guys to head over to the newly designed trailrecon.com website go sign up for our newsletter check out our store i think you guys are really going to enjoy all the information that's over there and we're constantly going to be updating that okay let's talk about mobile versus handheld because does if you're going to go head out for the first time and you've never used any communication devices sometimes it's not as easy as just going to your local walmart picking something up and heading out there's definitely more consideration that's got to be factored in before you go by your communication device so one of the first things you should consider is do you want a hard mounted radio built into your vehicle or do you just want to carry a handheld device and there's pros and cons to both of those so let's talk about mobile devices first so typically a mobile device is going to be more expensive than a handheld you're going to need to install it or you're going to need to pay somebody to install it and i actually did a video a couple years ago where we installed the ham radio in my jk i'll leave a link down below if you want to go check that out it's really not that hard to do and the other great thing about a mobile device is you're always going to have power to it you don't have to worry about a battery and you're going to have an external antenna so when you are transmitting that signal is going to be much stronger whether you're transmitting or receiving you're going to get much better communication than you would with a standard handheld now handheld devices are great because they're a little more budget-friendly they're more compact you can throw this in a cup holder and you can just put this on your belt and walk around with it or if you're spotting these are a great tool a disadvantage to a handheld is the antenna is attached to the device and when you are inside your vehicle that vehicle is going to kind of limit your signal and so it's not going to be as good as it would be typically with a mobile device the other thing with the handheld is they have a battery in them and depending on how often you are transmitting and receiving and using it and how big that battery is it may not even last you all day long there are times where i've used some of these devices and we've been talking a lot that i've had to swap out batteries multiple times and if you're on a trip that's you know a couple days long you're going to make sure you need to either bring a charger and keep that thing charged or bring extra batteries it's a great thing about a mobile device is you don't need to worry about that i have a mobile device in all my vehicles but i also do carry handles because they're so practical to be able to put this on my hip and talk to the convoy when i'm filming or to be able to spot somebody or if somebody's with us and they don't have a radio i can just hand them a radio and and we've got instant communication so there's a lot of pros and cons to deciding whether or not you want a handheld or mobile you just need to think about what's best for you and your budget okay let's talk a little bit about antennas so there are a lot of factors that go into how well you're going to be able to transmit and receive a signal from your radio but the antenna is such an important piece of that and this is the ham antenna off of my jeep here and i mount this midway through my hood on the passenger side and it works really really well for me but that's not ideal if you're going to do a mobile install you've got to figure out where you want to put your antenna on the outside of your vehicle ideally you want that thing up high right in the center of your roof because it's not going to have any obstruction but that's just not practical for me i can't get in and out of the garage if it was there i have to take it on and off all the time so that doesn't work there are some other devices like this little gmrs antenna which is super compact and this works well i've used this antenna but this is not going to transmit and receive as well as an antenna like this now if you're going to run a cb antenna i learned years ago that it's not just as easy as just installing it and calling it good you're going to have to do a little bit of tuning using a little device like this like an swr meter you're going to have to make some adjustments and once you dial in that cv radio you're going to get some great communications now with a handheld radio there are some handheld radios that you can swap out the antennas like we've done here and you can see with this longer whip antenna i'm going to be able to transmit and receive a little bit better than i will with this one now with frs radios these are fixed and so you're stuck that's all you're going to get is that little tiny antenna there's some other factors that go into how well you're going to transmit and receive that aren't just the antenna but how much power is that radio putting out so how strong is the signal you're going to send and then what is the terrain like you know if you're in the wide open desert being able to communicate over several miles with some of these devices might be very easy but if you're in the tight narrow canyons there's been times where i haven't been able to talk six or seven vehicles behind me just because we had so much obstruction i did have a buddy here recently uh that was on his ham radio here in san diego and he was talking to somebody in japan just because the conditions were perfect the weather was perfect everything was dialed in it almost sounded like he was sitting right next to him so there's a lot of factors that go into how well you're going to transmit and receive but choosing the right antenna and mounting that antenna in the right place is very important all right let's talk about cv radios all right cb radios the citizens band radio this radio has been popular for many many years especially in the 70s if you grew up watching smoking the bandit you know those guys were always talking on the radio over miles and miles cb radios are very easily accessible you can walk down to most of your local walmarts and pick one of these up turn it on and start using it right away no license required which is really really nice now cb radio was the first radio i installed in my jeep many years ago because my local jeep club here required a cb radio for our events they sin switched to gmrs and a lot of other organizations like the jeep jamboree and more are switching over to gmrs and that's because well the technology with gmrs is just better than cb and the fcc has kind of opened those regulations up to the public which we'll talk about gmrs in a little bit but cb still has a lot of practical use now there are 40 channels on a cb radio channel 9 is typically for emergencies and channel 19 is for highway use and so i don't have a hard mounted cv in my vehicle anymore but i do still carry a handheld that way if there's an accident on the freeway or whatever i can get on there and once in a while i'll be able to get a trucker on there and kind of tell me what's going on so one thing to note though about cb is you're not going to get a whole lot of privacy there's others aren't going to get a lot of privacy either but cb radio it's easy to just cycle through and somebody just pick right up on your conversation so just keep that in mind if you are using cb and talking now these are max of 4 watts that's all they can put out so they put out a little bit of power and if you tune that antenna you're going to get some good range but really it's line of sight so line of sight range with the good ideally tuned antenna you might get three plus miles i've never had that experience uh with that uh typically it's just been able to talk within our convoy within like you know a quarter or a half mile together but cb is a good option and you don't require a license to use it now the next radio that you can go down to your local store and pick up and start using right out of the box are frs radios or walkie talkies and these are a great little radio if you just need to talk on short range these radios are typically pretty inexpensive and there are 22 channels on here that you can use to communicate with and it's really accessible for a lot of folks you know i've done some road trips where we've just used these frs radios between my wife regina and i it works great as long as we aren't you know getting further and further apart there have been times where i've been able to see her vehicle and she could just barely hear me these only put out about a half watt and they had that small antenna so you're not going to get a lot of range out of there but you don't need any license again you can just start using them right out of the box now gmrs the general mobile radio service is really becoming more and more popular and people are starting to kind of gravitate to it because it does get such good range with these and you have a lot more options so these only have 22 channels i believe these radios have 40 channels but some of those are privacy tone channels which gets a little complicated just depends on the radio you're using but the great thing about these radios and frs radios let me get the right one here is they can talk to one another so i'm on channel 4 channel 4 and they can talk to one another which channels 1 through 22 are low power channels and so you can communicate on those but if you wanted to go to the higher power channels you can do that through the gmrs radios and the mobile radio systems can go up to 50 watts so you have a 50 watt radio with an awesome antenna you're gonna get some great range with gmrs now it's not as easy as going down to your local store and picking up and buying it you do need to go on the fcc website and register there's no exam you don't have to take any tests you just have to register and pay a 35 fee now when i did it several years ago it was a 70 dollar fee so they've reduced that fee which means they're trying to make this a little more accessible to folks i think gmrs is such a great option it's better than cb and frs in my opinion but what about ham ham i've been a ham user for a long time and i love him let's talk about that for a minute all right ham communication and in my opinion this is the superior communication out of all of this stuff i have been a licensed ham user for about the last uh four years getting my ham license was something i was very glad i did it took a little bit of work i did do some studying and i took a one day class but i passed my exam and i got my ham license and being able to use the amateur radio system is so nice because your frequency spectrum is wide open and now you can run much higher powered radios and you just have so much more available to you and so i think ham radios is i think everybody should get their ham license just to get it even if you're going to use the others just get your license so you have that knowledge because i learned a lot going through that exam process one thing i will mention about ham radios is you need to be responsible with using them there's a lot of regulations about using a ham radio don't get on frequencies and be a knucklehead be responsible be respectful and make sure that you're licensed if you're using it and announce yourself on those you can get a ham radio just for listening purposes if you just want to listen in you're more than welcome to do that but to transmit on a ham frequency you need to have your license now you can transmit on all of these in an emergency anytime but you need to be responsible with it the other great thing about a ham radio is not only are these high powered and you can have some awesome antennas and talk over distances you can use what's called a repeater and so repeaters are these radio systems that are usually mounted up on a mountain somewhere and they're across the united states and you can reach out and touch people using those repeaters over long distances and i'll give you an example so my buddy and i were meeting up and we were about 50 miles apart and we had coordinated in advance hey let's just see if we can talk on this repeater channel we were 50 miles away and so i was transmitting up to the repeater and bouncing down to him and he was doing the same thing and we were talking clear as day the entire drive until we met up so there's some great tools for using ham operating devices and i think it's something you should consider all right one more thing make sure that you know that your conversations are not always private and that goes across all of these communication devices but marco and i were on uh ham frequency heading up north i think this was a couple months ago and we weren't talking we were just driving and we heard these guys on our frequency that we happen to be on and they were making fun of our vehicles they were like oh look at those mall crawlers i'll bet they never take those things off-road oh that's all the money they spent on those things and as they were having this conversation we see them driving by they were in a couple nissans and they're still talking you never know who's listening we never said a word uh you know go watch the videos we off-road a little bit but it was just funny to see that because they didn't had no idea we could hear their conversation so you just never know who's listening in so make sure that you're being responsible and respectful on your communications all right uh just a couple of last things one let's talk about race radios really quick i don't use these uh very often i own these when i'm like king of the hammers or down in baja it's nice to have the race radios these are pre-programmed radios there's business channels on here and then there's the rugged radios i think it's one through 30 channels that you can use your only license to use you can't program in specific frequencies but you need to make sure that if you are using one of the pre-programmed frequencies that you're either under rugged radios license or you're under one of the business licenses uh we don't want to get in the weeds about that i know we can have a conversation just about that again i'm a ham operator that's what i love using i just have those radios just in case the group i'm with that's all they have last device i want to talk about is satellite and satellite communications has really come a long way in the last couple years you can get a satellite phone but satellite phones are pretty expensive and unless you have that thing on all the time you're not going to receive calls and it just doesn't make sense to talk on a satellite phone if you're with a group especially if you have these kind of ranges with these kind of communication devices but to be able to communicate with my wife when i'm back home when i'm off the grid something like this little garment inreach is perfect because this syncs up with my phone and i can text her through satellite and she can text me back real time well it's almost real time usually there's about a one or two minute delay there but it's very nice plus she's able to see where i'm at all the time so i wanted to include this into the communication conversation because this is an important tool i have a ham radio everywhere i go i always take this with me and i do carry gmrs and cb radios because i never know when i'm going to need one or the other and that's the important thing about choosing the right communication device you know we've talked a lot about stuff here and you have to decide do i want to get a license do i not want to get a license do i want to do a hard mounted one or do i just want to keep it simple and go with a handheld there's a lot of options here but one of the important factors is what are the people using that you're going to be going out with what's the local area in your area what are they communicating with because that's probably what you need to gravitate more towards you know i mentioned when i joined the san diego jeep club it was cvs we all did cbs but now they're all on gmrs and me and most of my friends are on ham radio so i've got to make sure that i can communicate when i'm with both of those situations you're going to have to do the same kind of thing i would say gmrs is probably a great place to start go online get your license and check it out and go grab yourself a handheld and start using it and just get familiar with with communications in general all right that's it i'm sure there'll be a ton of comments especially from some of the avid communication hobbyists hopefully i didn't uh hopefully i didn't stumble too much on that but i enjoy talking about communications and i wanted to have this conversation with you all because i get a lot of questions so i hope this was informative and somewhat helpful all right thanks for hanging out in the garage guys until next time we'll see out on the trails

Channel: TrailRecon

Views: 143,717

Keywords: offroad communication, communication, communication devices, cb radio, frs radio, GMRS radio, ham radio, satellite radio, off grid commuincation, overland communication, jeep communication, jeep wrangler, trailrecon, midland, motorola, Boefang, Garmin in reach

Id: m2g7LjkVEY0

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021