This episode unpacks the necessity for a wide array of radios, tailored to your distinct communication demands. It's a new year, and time for a new focus on radio communications, from cheap FRS radios and simple plans for your local neighborhoods, to encrypted business band HTs for your more trusted circle, and the need for longer-range amateur HF networks that cover multiple states.
Radios Mentioned:
Yaesu VX-6
Hytera 70 series
Anytone 878
Additional Resources:
youtube.com/@TheTechPrepper
youtube.com/@OH8STN
This episode unpacks the necessity for a wide array of radios, tailored to your distinct communication demands. It's a new year, and time for a new focus on radio communications, from cheap FRS radios and simple plans for your local neighborhoods, to encrypted business band HTs for your more trusted circle, and the need for longer-range amateur HF networks that cover multiple states.
Radios Mentioned:
Yaesu VX-6
Hytera 70 series
Anytone 878
Additional Resources:
youtube.com/@TheTechPrepper
youtube.com/@OH8STN
Here on the podcast, we talked about a number of pieces of equipment and hard skills that you should personally be developing, and among those is the ability to communicate, but have you ever considered that you don't need a radio? Welcome back to the T-Rex Talk podcast. And, of course, that intro is clickbait. I should have more heavily emphasized the word A. You don't need a radio because you perhaps need many radios and you may have already come to this conclusion as well because there are many different radio bands that you might want to talk on and there are different radios that have different strengths and weaknesses that you might need to have for different jobs. And you probably already know this, because, if you are like 99% of people, you're listening to this podcast on your phone. Your phone already has at least three radios inside. You got your Wi-Fi radio for when you're at home. You got your cell phone radios for talking to the towers, and then probably a Bluetooth radio as well, definitely a GPS radio for receiving GPS signals and then possibly even an NFC radio. So several radios are built into your phone that you're listening to this podcast on because, yeah, sometimes that's necessary. Now, obviously, all of those are in one device and there's a bunch of radios that have multiple capabilities inside of one device to talk on multiple bands. For example, I really like the little Yezoo VX6, and it is a tri-band radio all in one very small, pocketable package.
Speaker 1:But let's back up a little bit. Instead of talking about the individual devices, let's talk about the jobs. We should work backwards from what we're actually trying to accomplish With our radios. We're trying to communicate with people, and there is an idea that I think is a fantastic idea that we have adopted from the ham radio community, which is one of the things that a radio lets you do is talk to strangers, and certain radios are going to be better at that than others. Strangers who are far away are only going to be able to hear you if you use HF radio. Something that can skip hundreds of miles and something that movies and video games have taught us is that we want radios to talk to our team of highly efficient combat commando type guys, and we're going to talk to each other in whispers as we go around doing room clearing and stuff, and that's obviously a much shorter range radio with a different set of requirements to it, and one of the things that you've probably picked up on already is that there is no one size fits all radio. But something that I've been thinking about recently is even for relatively similar jobs, talking to people at relatively similar distances using relatively similar frequency but there's actually more jobs and more division than just that.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about this as I've been thinking about different groups of people. Even if you have your small group of guys who have coordinated with ahead of time You've set up your encrypted comms, you have all your channels and you understand exactly what the different tack nets are used for You're also potentially going to want to get radios to other people, talk to other folks who are nearby and on the same types of frequencies, in the same bands, and I sort of tested this, this theory, on Instagram by posting a couple of different radios. That's VX6. Yes, you radio, which is a fantastic amateur radio for talking to people that you haven't already coordinated with, and something like a high-terra, a business band radio with encryption, and that's something that you want to talk to people that you've already coordinated with. So let's get back to the title of this episode you don't need a radio.
Speaker 1:You might need multiple radios, but the other thing that I want to talk about is you don't need a radio. A bunch of people in your community need radios. It could be that your responsibility as the RTO for your group is to not just have the perfect, one-size-fits-all whizbang radio that fits you in your kit, but to actually collect a bunch of radios for other people your neighborhood watch type people, your search and rescue type people, the friends that you do stuff with at the range. You might have multiple groups of people that you want to get radios for, because they probably aren't going to get radios for themselves. They're gonna pay for the radios. They want you to set those radios up. And maybe you aren't the radio technician in your group and you should send this episode to whoever that is. And maybe you don't have a group, and if you don't have a group then you don't have quite the same radio requirements as a group. These all should be pretty obvious once you start thinking about what it is that you're trying to accomplish and with who. But the idea that there is some magical radio that I can just tell you to buy and some magical frequency that I can just tell you to tune into is kind of like saying just tell me what car to buy and just tell me what direction to drive it. Obviously, moving around is not that simple and communicating is not that simple either. That's why I've been talking a little bit more about Balfang radios recently.
Speaker 1:Balfang radios are either the boon of all of the tactical bros because it's $24, and it's really easily programmed and it looks kind of cool and tactical and it goes inside kit, and so Instagram is just littered. It's laden with pictures of Balfangs inside of chest rigs and plate carriers. But on the other hand, ham radio guys hate Balfangs because they're really cheap and nasty and they have spurious emissions and they've gotten a whole bunch of losers into those precious ham bands talking about all kinds of ridiculous boog-boy nonsense. Balfang users as well as Balfangs themselves kind of glow in more ways than one. But there's no getting away from the fact that Balfangs are really really cheap and they actually do work most of the time. If you don't have a lemon and it doesn't break all by itself, it's actually incredibly good value for money, which means that a box of Balfangs is actually a pretty good value for money, especially if you want to have radios that you can program and hand out to people who have never used radios before you don't really want to give them expensive stuff. But on the other hand, if you have people who you do in fact trust and you have the time to teach them some stuff and you want to give them a better radio, there are gonna be different radios for that. So when I posted on Instagram these two radios side by side the extremely expensive Hi-Terra with its full AES 256 encryption but no cool buttons and no fancy tactical screen, right next to the AC radio, which is, you know, I think it's actually relatively affordable, like it's under $200 and it's waterproof and it's tri-band and it's extremely cool, but it's not a $24 Balfang I had people kind of arguing with my premise on both sides.
Speaker 1:Yes, the AESU is a fantastic ham radio. It's great for FM analog transmissions, it's great for listening in on stuff, it's great for making contact with people that we previously have not coordinated with, and the Hi-Terra is the exact opposite of that. It is great since it has no front panel programmable capability, it has no screen to break, no buttons to accidentally press. It is a great radio to hand to members of your team who you trust, with an encrypted radio, but not necessarily with a bunch of buttons that they can monkey with that radio is a completely different radio. That radio excels in not being able to communicate with the wrong people and not being listened to by the wrong people. It is an entirely different way to think about communication for an entirely different group of people and an entirely different use case.
Speaker 1:And, generally speaking, I got pretty good feedback from that particular post, a lot of people saying, yes, this is a good way to divide up these different jobs. But I also got pushed back from people who said, hey, there is in fact a radio that does both, because there are a bunch of radios like the Anytones and there's a bunch of different DMR radios that are in fact, very capable analog radios as well as being good digital DMR radios. But the problem is we're still trying to put both of those jobs in sort of one person, even though I am theoretically a radio nerd. I mean, I'm definitely a nerd and I've studied radio a bit Even though I'm theoretically a radio nerd, and I would be best served by having all of those features set to a single device. That doesn't really solve all of my other problems.
Speaker 1:If I'm the RTO for a group, I still want not a radio but a box of radios, and I'm still not thinking about what I need, but a larger group of people and what they need. So if I'm the ham radio guy who's making contact with a whole bunch of people that we previously haven't coordinated with, I still kind of want something really really simple and easy to use like that. Yasu, maybe I want a scanner instead, an SDR, so that I can see large swaths of spectrum. Maybe that's the thing that I'm gonna use to listen in on other people's stuff. And then, again, if I have a group of people who are not radio nerds and I want to give them encrypted radios so that they can do stuff without fiddling with the radio, yeah, that's another handset and it's probably going to be a very different handset.
Speaker 1:I realize that this is not a new concept by any means, but it's just another reminder that we should go back to what we're trying to accomplish and then work backwards from there. Are we building out our radio equipment wish lists and our radio plans based on stuff that we've seen in the movies or stuff that we've experienced inside of military settings, things that are not really applicable in real life or in non-military settings or are we really working backwards from what we have as human resources much as I hate that phrase rather than radio resources and working backwards from the goals that we want to accomplish and the situations that we might find ourselves in. Signals intelligence guys are going to need different equipment from other folks. If I need to give my elderly next door neighbors something so that they can call me when the cell phone towers are down, that's a completely different type of radio. If I want to send short encrypted or unencrypted text messages to people on the other side of the country, that's a totally different radio and antenna setup. And all of these things are things that I've got to think of ahead of time. I've got to have set up some kind of coordinated effort to talk to people on the other side of the country. Before I want to talk to them in an emergency, I have to have given some kind of bauphang radio to my elderly next door neighbor before the cell phone towers go out or, you know, at the very least have bought that radio and have it charged and handy in my home so that I can take it over to his.
Speaker 1:So again, you don't need a radio. Your community probably needs several and you probably need a few. A radio is not a piece of tactical bling that you attach to your kit. It is a tool, and every radio is a slightly different tool for slightly different job. This is kind of a dumb episode, because if you already know radios, you already know this, and if you don't know radios, you probably don't want to get into the entire toolbox. Our cell phones have spoiled us into assuming that you can have one device that can do all things. One device can talk to Wi-Fi at home, it can talk to cell phone towers around the country, it can talk to the Bluetooth headset that is in my ear. All this stuff is just going to happen magically and automatically without me having to think about it. And why can't I have a bulletproof, waterproof tactical radio that does all those things too, with exactly the same level of ignorance on my part?
Speaker 1:Well, the good news is there is a lot of room for tactical radios to get smarter. I've been researching something called ALE, which is automatic link establishment. It's something that is installed on a lot of military and commercial HF radios, but it isn't available on cheap, affordable, amateur HF rigs A radio that is smart enough to figure out what sort of conditions it is operating in and automatically tune itself to the sort of antenna that it is using and the sort of conditions that it's transmitting on and the sort of bands that are available to it and the sort of people that it's trying to reach out to is possible, and I think that that is probably coming. There are some nice open source ALE variants that are popping up on various computer platforms, and it's only a matter of time before they find themselves into HF radios, because HF radios are increasingly turning into little computers themselves. So there is tons of room for improvement when it comes to cognitive radios, radios that are smart enough to figure out what you are trying to do and then help you actually do it.
Speaker 1:But the bad news is that some of the jobs that you're trying to accomplish with radios, you want the opposite of that. You don't want a radio that automatically figures out where other radios are and then talks to them. You want a radio that is completely locked down and secure. You want a radio that is really really hard to program because you don't want anyone to mess it up. You want a radio that is pretty hard to load cryptographic keys onto and almost impossible to get cryptographic keys off of, because you know security. Security and convenience are almost always diametrically opposed to each other, which is why I had a number of frustrating conversations with people who want an incredibly secure military grade radio that does everything automatically for everybody, and these just can't really coexist.
Speaker 1:Now, at this point, everybody who knows anything about radios will be chiming in in the comments if this particular podcast had comments saying wait a minute, you can't do encryption on amateur radio bands. This is a good point and I think that YouTube has taught everybody that knows anything whatsoever about radios that that's a thing that you say on every piece of content that is about radios. But there are ways around this. You don't have to use the amateur bands for your communication. For $170 you can buy a business band license that will allow you to transmit on itinerant business frequencies and once you do that, you are allowed to use encryption. You can use the cheap and nasty 40-bit encryption that is built into most of the Chinese DMR radios, or you can buy proper DMR radios or P25 radios and you can use proper AES 256-bit encryption, which is still pretty strong.
Speaker 1:And at this point somebody always chimes in and says hang on, doesn't the NSA have incredibly powerful magical secret quantum computers that can break that 256-bit encryption in the blink of an eye? And the answer is probably. But if you're planning on being attacked by the NSA's magical quantum computers, you probably shouldn't be using the $170 business band license anyway. There's a whole bunch of different threat models that are out there, and if the main thing that you want is people not to listen into your conversations about random range stuff, 40-bit encryption might be sufficient for that level of security. 256-bit encryption almost certainly is.
Speaker 1:And while you have to do some paperwork and pay the money for that business license, you now get to give business band radios to all of the people who are a part of that business, depending on the size of your group. That's going to be a lot easier than getting everybody involved to get their ham license or their MERS or their GMRS or whatever other licensing scheme you guys are going to inter-operate around. So I think that a lot of the people listening to this podcast and a lot of people in our community should pay a little bit more attention to that business band license opportunity. It gives you a bunch of different capabilities, but the main one is the ability to run encrypted traffic with a large group of people who don't have to get their own personal licenses. If you are an RTO and you've realized that you don't need a radio you need a bunch of radios for a bunch of people that license is going to be a pretty helpful and simple thing and that $170 is not much compared to the costs of, you know, potentially all those radios. Now you actually have a much simpler way of setting things up, where you get the paperwork in order, you get a bunch of radios, you program them for the people and you hand them out and they don't have to worry about it. This is what most people actually want, apparently.
Speaker 1:So here's a couple of obvious homework assignments for you. First of all, work backwards from your actual situation and your actual needs to determine what radios plural you need to accomplish those goals and how many people are actually going to need radios in your group. Do a little research on that business band licensing scheme. I'll put some links in the video down below so you can read up on it and figure out if that is the best way to get a bunch of people in your area secure-ish comms. Figure out how many Balfang radios you should have set up as giveaways the next time you have major power outages, floods, hurricanes or tornadoes, figure out who you would actually want to give them to in such a way that they would actually be beneficial and helpful, and set up some kind of communications plan. I forget who came up with this one Sentinel Society perhaps but every three hours you turn on your radio for three minutes on channel three, and any news that needs to be inside of your community will be transmitted at that time. That way people are not just leaving their radios on, constantly forgetting which channel, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:If everybody has a wristwatch and a radio and they remember 333, then you have the basis for a communications network that lasts for a super long time. And obviously there are situations where you might want to do that a little differently. Maybe you want to do everything at the top of the hour, on the hour. Maybe you want to do stuff over a longer period of time, maybe you want to do certain things for different groups of people so that you can keep track of them at different times. So remember, the radios exist to solve specific problems and you set up the radio equipment and the radio plans ahead of time.
Speaker 1:If you have to do it in the midst of the issue, you run into some significant, significant hurdles that you have to overcome. Far better to do those ahead of time, especially once you get into HF radio. There is no more frustrating thing than trying to talk to somebody over HF radio when you don't have the internet. Just quickly text them and double check your settings. So do your research now, build your communication plans now, assemble your equipment now and figure out which radios your people need now, before that power outage, hurricane, et cetera. There's going to be a lot more radio content on T-Rex Arms this coming year and hopefully that is information that is extremely helpful to you. But as you get involved in radios, it is going to mean that you're going to be doing more work, not less.