We live in a hurricane zone and have weathered many storms without evacuating. Can typical 2-way radios function in a 20–30-mile range if we were hit by a storm or do we need something very expensive.
How difficult would it be to connect with a family member with an off the shelf set.
You need a big booster,they have nowhere near that range.
Do you have experience with the radios that claim to have 40-50mile range? I know some at the sporting goods suppliers will reach those distances in the wilderness but curious about in a crowded area.
This should tell you all you want.
https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/search/?q=Radio&type=link&cId=8b539573-e5fa-424f-a668-e8855f427bb5&iId=39c460cb-50f6-42fc-afc0-8c9de869ee7a
I did some digging here and there is no simple handheld solution. The family members know they need to come to our house since we have hurricane supplies, but we were hoping to communicate. Thanks for the link.
That would be hilltop to hilltop ...
I,follow a you tube channel that uses these things and talks about them a lot. I don't belive their are any small cheep units with that kind of range. These things are line of sight,you would need a tall antenna.
I'm not expert i just kind of casually follow this stuff.
You would need the make and model they say have that kind of range,and do some research. Or look on the prepper boards. I do know you would need a ham radio license to use anything with range,and the ham radio community is pretty F- ed up.
How is the ham radio community “pretty F- ed up”?
They listen for people breaking the rules and rat them out and such,from what I heard.
I've heard several people repeat that they are very very strange and not friendly like you would expect.
We are vey protective of the frequencies we are allocated, they are constantly being used by unauthorized people and are continuously attempted to be allocated to corporate users for commercial use. Some frequencies have world-wide propagation and can interfere with legitimate users many hundreds or thousands of miles away. We are licensed and learn about the regulations governing the use of our equipment and frequency bands. Take CB for instance, the radios are limited in power for a reason. The 11 meter band can propagate world-wide under certain conditions and adding an amplifier can interfere with communications far away, to say nothing of the havoc caused by a lack of understanding of basic electrical principals.
Licensing is dead easy, no more Morse code and a few hours of reading a prep manual for a multiple-choise test and you’re on your way.
As far as unfriendly, keying up a repeater without a license can lead to being busted for that, so can unauthorized use of public service frequencies and those users can send you to prison. Part of what you learn is proper procedure in the ham bands and where in the RF spectrum you can operate. Also, in a population of around 750,000, there are bound to be a few assholes, but that is so in every walk of life.
If you are really interested, check out a local club meeting. If not, use your FRS, GMRS or CB within the rules for those services and enjoy.
Oh no! A community that self-enforces its rules! The horror! 🙄
You guys should work on your reputation more i guess. Preppers and others that just want to use these and are not enthusiasts have had bad expirances with your community. If I had more time I would learn more....
Got curious and found this. https://hamradioprep.com/ham-radio-range/
Good link.
Thanks for the link.
I think the hand held ones only have a 5 mile limit on flat ground. If you know a ham radio guy/gal they might be able to help you if there is another ham on the other end.
50w vhf might do it.
Depends on the frequency.
Most handheld "walkie talkie" style radios are in the VHF band (i.e. 30 - 300 MHz). VHF and UHF (300 MHz to 3 GHz). These waves travel line-of-sight only and do not bounce off the ionosphere. If you are on top of a mountain then ya you can get out. But the higher you go in frequency the more the waves are absorbed by vegetation, too. So, that kind of radio is not useful for what you're after.
More expensive HF band radios (3 - 30 MHz) are used by radio amateurs mostly to make long distance contacts. In that frequency, the waves will bounce off the ionosphere. Radio amateurs normally put their antennas as high as they can, to get radio waves to go more or less horizontally towards the horizon, so they can bounce very long distances.
But if you deploy the antenna quite low, 10 feet down to knee height even, the radio waves go more or less straight up and back down again in a more localized area. This is called "near vertical incident skywave" or NVIS. Check out this link: https://oh8stn.org/blog/2018/11/05/ham-radio-nvis-for-regional-communications/ From that link:
That whole blog is all about the technology required for grid-down comms. His emphasis is on digital modes such as "Winlink" (email over radio) and "JS8Call" (keyboard to keyboard chat over radio) as these can be heard and decoded below the noise floor whereas voice needs to be significantly above the noise floor to be intelligible.
Another good outfit is the American Redoubt Radio Operators' Network (AmRRON). https://amrron.com/ They are a radio club based in the western USA (but with members all over) who practice this sort of thing regularly and have a lot of good learning information on their site. I'm not a member, but I read their webpage regularly.
They, too, favour digital modes, but they also have an emphasis on CB, FRS, and GMRS radio which most normal amateur clubs don't cover. The beauty of those is that no licence is required (well, GMRS does but the requirement is light). FRS and GMRS are VHF radios and suffer from the same low range.
CB is just under the top end of the HF band, and often bounces off the ionosphere ("skip shooting") and thus has much of the usefulness of HF radio, without a lot of the technical complications of amateur radio (multiple antennas and antenna "tuners" and so forth) and the requirement for the government to know you have a license. It's supposed to be all-voice on CB, but I have heard people using Morse Code (which is pretty intelligible close to the noise floor). No doubt some people are sneaking-in with digital, too. Talking on CB is sometimes like trying to have a conversation in a noisy restaurant with lots of other conversations going on around you: with only 40 channels to choose from, you are almost always talking over someone else.
The key to radio being USEFUL in a disaster is that there is more to it than just having a radio. You have to have people to talk to, people you trust. No point in just talking into the wind! AmRRON is good because they have a set group of frequencies and modes that they use so they can always find each other.
Find a group like AmRRON (or just have a small group of friends or a church group or something) then decide what frequencies and modes you will use, and practice with your group regularly in battery-only grid-down mock scenarios. Then you will know you have a system that would be workable in a disaster.
The old Nextels were two way radio werent they? I used these in my company for a couple years in the 90s. They had great range and the audio was near perfect.
Not familiar with those; a quick internet search just turned up "a former telephone company". Would be interested in details (frequency, power, type e.g. handheld vs. mobile etc.). If they were good, one might be able to get some on the used market!
We used Nextel before the widespread usage of cell phones. It was probably the network that made them useful.
Thanks for the informative post. Looks like I will be spending the next few days learning about this.
I have used these radios a lot. Elevation makes a difference. Like someone mentioned mountain top to mountain top. Otherwise the signal degrades and you would need a booster. Problem is a booster needs power. And that would only work until the car battery runs out. I am looking into satellite radio. However I may learn something from this thread I didn’t know.
Check out Rapid Radios. They use LTE network so you can talk up to like 1400 miles away. No subscription or monthly fees
They still need to be in range of a cell tower. If you don't have cell service they won't work. Also read the fine print, the first year the subscription is free, after that it's $50 a year. Cheap but still you need to have a cell signal. If your phone doesn't have service neither will the RRs.
Download VOXER app to your phone. Phone has walkie talkie capability