Why Every Overlander and Off Roader in America Should Have A GMRS Radio

well here we are today i'm back in the garage working on the forerunner um no there's nothing wrong with it i'm actually installing a radio head unit that was sent to us to review so that'll be in an upcoming video you don't need to know that i'm wasting your time with that right now because you're here to talk about gmrs radios and i'm here to talk about them too we recently sent out an mxt 115 vp3 unit from midland you might have seen the video of us installing it i've taken a couple trips with it i've used it i've interacted with it and i really enjoy it and got back here and i was all ready to go shoot some video this last week to kind of talk about it give my impression fulfill what kind of i had discussed with midland as part of the reason they sent me a radio out and lo and behold after a day's worth of shooting some promotional content at the wife's salon we forgot to lock the car or take all the rest of the stuff out so the following morning when me and the kid came out to get in and go to a boy scout function i shortly discovered that my radio was missing along with my camera tripod my green screen my camping stove and my prescription sunglasses the radio really hurts because not only was it something that i really really really enjoy it was the first thing anybody ever sent to me for free as a youtuber to review or to do a product demonstration with so it was like a mark of accomplishment for me to have gotten this thing and not paid anything for it and then somebody stole it and took it from me so it kind of hurts and i've kind of been stewing on that for the last couple of days what i will say is i enjoy that unit so much that because this one got stolen i didn't just buy one to replace it we bought two part of that pitch that i made with midland though was to make an informative video about gmrs and its benefits for people in the outdoors and overland community and i kind of see it as as a goldilocks product and what i mean is that it sits kind of in the middle between the old school free-for-all wild west low-powered world of cb radio and the high-end very very technical world of amateur or ham radio what it basically does is it gives you the ability to have some of the power and features of ham radio but with the lower cost and barriers of entry like a cb now what is gmrs gmrs is the general mobile radio service it is a series of uhf frequencies that have been designated by the federal communications commission to be used by private citizens like you and me for two-way short distance voice communication why is gmrs better than citizens band or cb radio well if you're not a trucker you probably don't use cb radio anymore if you grew up in my era you grew up on movies like convoy and smokey and the bandit so you understand what the popularity of citizen band radio used to be everybody had one they were wildly popular now over the years with the advent of cell phones and everything else they've kind of fallen out of vogue except the only industry that really uses them is transportation and i don't know if you've ever driven by a truck stop on channel 19 but you'll only do it once before you realize that this might not be the thing for you unless you absolutely need to find low rent prostitutes i'm in the first house cb's also limited because it's just not as powerful it has a wattage limit that is a lot lower than things that you're going to find in amateur radio or in gmrs and the signal quality is just not as good it's simplex communication it's just radio to radio on the same frequency whereas gmrs can use things like repeaters what are repeaters well they're the coolest part about this whole thing and the thing that got me the most excited about getting into gmrs so stick around to the end to find out what they are how is gmrs a better alternative for people like you and me than traditional amateur or ham radio well it's just not as complex it's not as technical ham radio you need to get some education so that you can go somewhere and sit down and pass a proctored test and then the federal government will give you a license that says you are able to communicate at these different levels and i should note it's these different levels because there are three different tiers of amateur radio licensing that you work your way up to where it differs from ham is that instead of having a wide wide wide wide range of frequencies that you have to figure out and make sure that you're operating on the right frequency at the correct time and you're not stepping on anybody else's toes gmrs is a set of dedicated frequencies that are locked into channel numbers by the fcc and if you have a radio which is part 95 compliant which is what you're going to look for when you're buying your first gmrs radio it means you're never going to have to worry about stepping outside of those boundaries and stepping on any ham radio operators which is another reason why you don't want to be in the ham world and if you want any more anecdotal evidence of why being in the ham radio world is uh it's kind of dirty just go watch not a rubicon he talks about that all the time gmrs because it's locked into a certain set of frequencies means that there is only a certain set of frequencies that you have to worry about trying to get somebody found on meaning that you're more likely to have somebody monitoring one of those certain sets of frequencies if you're going to need to get out and get a signal out it also makes it really easy and standardized when you go to meet up with people that you've never been on a ride with before or anything else you just say i'm on gmrs20 and that's the channel that we use and everybody puts their radio onto gm rs20 and it's easy peasy nothing having to do with like well i'm on 462.752 right or 725. you don't have to worry about that just channel 20. there you go gmrs doesn't require you to take a test or to have to go through different tiers of licensing but it does require you to get a license and what that means is you got to go to the fcc's website you got to jump through a couple of hoops fill out an application pay a fee which at the time i'm recording this is 70 dollars for a 10-year license now they are in the process of making that 35 for a 10-year license and up until very very recently they have just said it's going to be sometime in 2021 but in the last couple of weeks they did release that i believe it's going to be at the end of april i think or may so it's very close around the corner that that rate that 70 is going to be cut in half for a 10-year gmrs license and that license covers an entire family household so i have my radio call sign and that covers me my wife and my son and the dog if she can ever figure out how to work a radio it doesn't just cover us on one radio it covers us on every radio and every member of the family so we're gonna have multiple radios in two different vehicles but we're only going to be operating off of one fcc call sign and that's perfectly fine what are repeaters well repeaters are a way of extending range basically somebody will put a radio tower up on top of a mountain or a high place because that is the most advantageous thing to gain range is adding elevation to any antenna you know because the world's round so if you get up higher you can see over more curves if you're flat earther just go ahead and click off right now with that radio in a high point that allows me on the east side of the mountain to talk to somebody on the west side of the mountain that if we were using just straight radio to radio communication the mountain would not allow us to talk through no matter what the wattage in our radios were it's just not going to penetrate that mountain but if you put a repeater up here on top of it then my signal will go up to the repeater the repeater will then broadcast it back out over the whole area and somebody over on the other side will hear it and be able to shoot me a message back vice versa and what that works through is a process called duplex communication so when you turn to a repeater and you change your channels from simplex mode to repeater mode what's going to happen is that your channel let's say we're using channel 16 on gmrs if we're going to use repeater 16 what's going to happen is is that our radio will continue to monitor channel 16 but it will transmit onto another set of frequencies and that set of frequencies is what the repeater at the top of the mountain is monitoring now there is a tone that's required that will key up as soon as you keep your microphone and you broadcast the right tone that's the repeater's queue to go okay this is the one i'm going to listen to and repeat so what it does is it hears you on that side channel and then it outputs what you're saying because your tone was valid out on channel 16 to everybody in the world and that's what's called duplex communication you're transmitting in one frequency and receiving in another because that repeater can't hear and transmit at the same time it would be given itself the effect of a jimi hendrix solo repeaters are independently owned and operated usually well i mean they are for our intensive purposes they're privately owned entities and they're either owned by an individual person or there are a lot of radio clubs that own these repeaters and for the most part a lot of people choose to allow their repeaters to be used by the public some people do keep them private and they do not publish their privacy codes so that you don't have access to their repeater to be able to transmit your signal out like i said there are a lot of people though that like to share that and they see the value in sharing that as a tool for emergencies you know there are a lot of areas where you don't have cell phone service but you can put a repeater up on top of a mountain and cover a local area there are communities like crown king here in arizona which we were up wheeling at a few weeks ago when i was testing out these radios and there are actually two gmrs repeaters in the area one's a local one that the local residents use for local communications and actually i can hear those repeaters from crown king down here in phoenix no problem which is really cool because i can also reach them and transmit out all over the area and i'm well over 30 40 miles away from this antenna now the second tower up there is one that's really really interesting to me because it's part of a network of repeaters and what that means is literally what it says there are i don't know let's say 10 or 15. i don't know an exact number maybe i'll go look it up and tell you but there is a southwest repeater network and they have repeaters that stretch all the way from albuquerque new mexico to sierra vista in arizona and these repeaters are all networked through the internet so that when you are able to key up and transmit on one of the repeaters it transmits on all of them which is totally cool because you just basically covered six or seven hundred miles with a 15 watt radio like just think about that i could sit in sierra vista arizona right on the border of mexico key up a little 15 watt radio in the dash of my car and be able to talk to someone in albuquerque new mexico or actually further than that probably all the way to the colorado state line now they do this by networking through the internet and there is a cost and people usually join these clubs and that's what their membership use go towards is paying this stuff out but a lot of these clubs again see the value of emergency use and they will give the general public access to those repeaters so that you ever have a problem you're going to reach somebody if that radio is transmitting clear across the southwest somebody's going to hear that and be able to come find you if you can get to a repeater and key up on it the other cool thing this particular one and a lot of them do it they link in through zello so i can key up any of those repeaters in that whole network right now from my cellular phone which is totally cool you can sit on here and be anywhere in the world and have access to those repeaters over that networked area i never even imagined you could do that like i could literally be on the other side of the world i could give this app access to like well my buddy max in cape town south africa and he could key up and start talking to people here in arizona i don't know about the legalities of that because that's an international thing in the fcc whatever but i mean in theory it could probably happen right and that's just a network that everyday people own it it wasn't a big piece of infrastructure that was built by a major corporation or anything else it was just people that wanted to get together and they built their own radio network they talk all over on it which just blows my mind to find these repeaters in that tone oh i want my repeater right there did you hear it a great place to find a repeater to use is a website called mygmrsmap.com basically my gmrs map is like a google map overlay with a bunch of repeaters on it all over the country and you can go and click on those individual repeaters and it in many cases will just give you the tones that you need to access that repeater because those private individuals that own those repeaters just say okay go ahead and use them sometimes they will require that you ask and then they will email you the correct information access to repeater or some just in general do not want their things to be public and they'll either require you to become a member or they just won't allow you to use it then it's their private thing anyway most of the ones that are on my gmrs map are ones that you can access so it's definitely worth looking into and then the other thing is if you know there are some gmrs repeater clubs in areas that you live in like here in phoenix we have a local one you could go to their website and either get short-term access by asking or just go ahead and become a member and get permanent access now as far as how well that particular radio that we had worked out well i really enjoyed it i enjoyed it so much that we have gone ahead and ordered two to replace the one that got stolen we're gonna have one in both vehicles that's how good of a value i feel that they are with pricing for repeater capable midland radios which the base mxt 115 that comes with just a regular magnet mounted antenna that's what it retails for is 149.99 or 150 dollars you get the same capabilities as the vp three pack that i got with the ghost antenna for 50 bucks less as far as i had my apprehensions about a 50 a 15 watt radio going into it but after spending a weekend with some jeeping friends from tucson all the way up in the snows of crown king i discovered that that 15 watts was more than ample to send a signal a couple miles through the trees i think it was such a valuable piece of gear that again we're going to go out and buy two more with our own money and feel totally confident about it why i feel like midland was a good choice well their build quality is a lot better than just about anything else that you're going to find in a specific gmr's radio there are some other imported brands out there that just aren't built to the same quality level the other thing that you're going to find with some of them is they may or may not have the appropriate approvals for part 95 certification with the fcc radio wr so i hear you thank you for checking out my buddy copy have a good day so i just communicated with a guy i don't even know where he's at somewhere in the southwest with my cell phone and a thingy that was crazy i'm gonna go ahead and pop out of there so why i thought the midland was a good value well the build quality is a lot better than a lot of the things that you're going to find out there they're also compliant to the fcc part 95 regulation for gmrs radios which means they're not going to do anything that's not permissible that's going to land you in hot water with the gmrs police or the pam radio police or the actual radio police the fcc they're also like going back to that build quality thing they're a vendor who's around and they're known and they're active in the community i'm sure that you have seen plenty of midland ads on your social media feeds they're a big company they they make real radios they've been around for a long time they're respected in the industry you're going to get a good product from a company that's going to stand behind it and be there for a while they're versatile i mean you can you can connect to many different repeaters and and and have a lot of versatility but they're also very very simple like they're the one radio system in the gmrs world that and i hope she's not watching but they're the one that my my wife would be able to figure it out fairly easy maybe not so much with the repeater into things but i'm pretty sure that i can say honey put it on channel 20 and she'll be able to figure that out and then we'll be able to talk and that to me is worth it so you know you've got to balance the quality simplicity ease of use there are some other radios out there that have a lot more features and capabilities but for your basic need of just being able to get out and communicate with other people as you're traveling around or be able to reach repeaters or you know have that that security blanket of being able to reach out and touch someone and off the grid areas if there's a repeater available they're totally worth it and if you can find one used at a good price do it you're just not going to find it like literally go go look i'll wait how'd that go for you i took a pretty good nap did you find one yet yeah i didn't think so anyway if you want to get one and i do recommend if you're going to get a gmrs radio do get one from midland check out the link in the description below we are an affiliate too so they will cut us a little bit of a taste of that purchase that'll help fund this channel a little bit more too so it was something you were already gonna buy buy it through one of my links so you're gonna help fund the channel doing something you were already gonna do some considerations just just some thoughts that you may want to consider because they are so simple there are other radios out there in the world that are a little bit more advanced and i assume if you're ready for a more advanced radio number one you're probably not watching this video anyway you've already clicked off and gone to somebody else's video who was going to be talking about all the advanced features of advanced radios more advanced units out there you can program channels so that you're looking for a specific repeater and a specific tone you can program that in so that when you go driving down the road you can hit that repeater that's on channel 16 with tone whatever and then go to another place and hit channel 16 with a different tone but just have a so you could turn a dial and go in between them instead of having to actually get in there and program the tone over and over like you have to do with the midland again there are certain radios out there that might have those features and be a little cheaper but the build quality is crap trust me uh the other limitation which is i mean it's just a hard limitation the midland radios don't do what's called split toning and what split toning is is that they use a separate privacy code for both transmit and receive i don't know why that is but there are a few ray repeater sets around and one of them is the local phoenix metro repeater club here in phoenix so i'm not going to become a member of them because they don't split tone now it's kind of weird to me to want a split tone because the number one manufacturer of gm rs radios or widest distributed ones don't have that ability too there's very few of them so it's just kind of an elitist thing really to tell you the truth and whatever anyway the midland radio can't split tone it's a very rare occurrence you're probably not going to run into it but if you do need to use a repeater that has split tones you're going to want to look at somewhere else to find your radio until midland does come out with one that is capable of split toning beyond that like i said can't wait till my new ones to get here because i gotta go out tomorrow and do a trail run with some friends and instead of my nice mobile mounted radio that was powerful and clear i gotta use the little rinky-dink battery-powered ones which don't get me wrong if that's all you can afford that's all you can afford and they're a lot better than two campbell's cans and a piece of fishing line but i kind of missed that radio man it was really nice so anyway as always i'm matt kester you can find me on instagram at frugal explorer dad check out the channel at secondhandoverland on instagram and until next time be good

Channel: Matt Kester

Views: 41,438

Keywords: cb radio, ham radio, amateur radio, best radio for overlanding, overlanding communications, off road, gmrs radio, mobile radio, civilian band, two way radio, how to choose a radio, overlanding radio, cb radios, rugged radios, midland radio, cb antenna, cb radio talk, cb radio basics, gmrs radio repeater, gmrs radio range, gmrs radio install, gmrs radio license, gmrs radio antenna, gmrs radio use, gmrs radio for beginners, gmrs radio basics, two way radios long range

Id: PW5gCO5kPNk

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021