Prep Comms - AM/FM Transistor Radios

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

In this episode of the Prep Comms podcast, Caleb (K4CDN) discusses the absolute importance of the AM/FM Transistor Radio in your Preparedness Communications Plan. This often overlooked and underused device holds a great deal of potential for preppers. Gather localized intelligence, source entertainment and even hear distant stations with your AM/FM Transistor Radio.  Mentioned Radio: AM/FM/NOAA Radio Show Sponsor: Hub City Mercantile Site Link: www.prepcomms.com Blog Post: AM Radio for Emergencies eBook: Communications for the Prepared

it's the prep comms podcast welcome back i'm Cale Nelson, K4CDN. I'm also Caleb Nelson. So, born Caleb, known as Cale for 40-some-odd years of his life. Then his wife says, you should be Caleb. And so I'm still dealing with that multiple personality thing there. Not making fun of that, guys. I'm just saying, you've been been known as one thing and now you're expected to be somebody else's i would have much rather just had like a you know a nice hot rod car or something instead of a midlife crisis name change oh my goodness anyway welcome back into prep comms brought to you by hub city mercantile it is our brick and mortar store in the upstate of south carolina we sell British Birkfeld water filter systems. We're an authorized dealer.

We also have communication solutions and all sorts of stuff. If you can check us out, feel free. Hubcitymercantile.com. And this is the Prep Comms podcast. I did, for four years, create a program called Ham Radio 364. Specifically, the amateur radio community. It was a massive success. We had so much fun with that program listeners from all over the world.

And I said every time, and I'll say again, they were the best audience. One man could ever hope to have in the podcasting sphere. So if you're coming in from a three 60 listener, if that's what you were in the past and you're just giving this a shot, thank you so much. I appreciate you. You you're awesome. And man, I'm telling you, we had some great times. If you've never listened to the program, there's links on our website, prepcoms.com, and you can go check out the Ham Radio 360 show if you're interested in the hobby. Well, you may not even be interested in the Ham Radio hobby yet, but you may find something there that really tickles your fancy. So make sure you check it out. Ham radio, three 60.com. All right. The last time we talked some

mindset, we talked about some mind renewal. We talked about failure of communications and how our phones, desktops, and laptops are really just kind of running our lives. And we, they are taking advantage of us and we're letting them take advantage of us. And we've gotten to the point as a society where we feel like we can't do anything without them. And if they were to fail, go away, quit, or just blip, we might get to the point where we're freaking out and we don't need to be there because we're all grownups

and we're trying to make good decisions. We also talked about how preparedness is more than stuff. Preparedness at its core is a mindset. So again, preparedness is a mindset. It's not a list of things to buy. It's not a closet full of gear. It is simply changing the way you think about your tomorrow. Okay.

And that's what we're going to do here today. So I said, I had some solutions and I want to begin at the very, very beginning. I mean, I want to get down to the, the most elementary level things. And I want to talk about those elementary level things for the next couple of programs. And these are things that I have written about in my communications for the prepared ebook. You can find that on Kindle and there's a link in the show notes as well. But I wrote a book and it's like a 5,000 mile view of communications for people who are in preparedness or they're now they've just woken up to what preparedness is or why it is. And they're looking to make some positive changes in their lives and then their preparedness.

And I didn't start the book here, but I really wish that I had, because I think I missed a great opportunity to talk about what I feel like every household should have. Matter of fact, I would go almost as, I would go almost as far to say, you should have one of these, at least one in your household. You should, I'm stretching here, but you should have one in your vehicle, like not made into your vehicle, but in the glove box of your vehicle. Um, I think that this item is something that is desperately needed and it has been so, um, so forgotten if you will, in today's society. And I mean, this is like the, the, the bare bottom of the barrel right here. And that is an AM FM

transistor radio. And I know that that's like the least sexy and most boring item I could have brought to the table today. But I am firmly convinced that number one, we as citizens in this country and probably, well, maybe not around the world as much as they are here in the US, maybe in the UK and Canada, we have forgotten the power of a transistor radio. Now, I'm not talking about a $28 walkie-talkie from Amazon. I'm not talking about a $350 Grundig shortwave radio. I'm talking about the simple half the size of a paperback book AM FM transistor radio. And they range anywhere online from say 12 to $22, depending on what you buy. I've got one actually in my store now that I love. I'm going to tell you about it just a

little bit later. Um, but you can get them just about anywhere, especially online. They're cheap as nuts to get nowadays. And I believe that you need one. And you may need more than one. And we're going to talk about some of that today. So we're going to talk about AM FM transistor radios and the power that they hold for us as preppers. And it may be something you've never thought about. It could be something you've already taken care of. You may just be scratching your head and the release of the transistor radio. And I'm not going to get down here in the weeds of all the technicalities and the theories.

That's not what this program's for. But what happened was they made the components small enough to put in a little plastic box, or even some were metal. Some had leather on them. They're really cool. And they were able to tune radio frequencies and play those through a speaker that's all encapsulated like a one-piece deal here that would operate on a battery. And you could slide it almost in your pocket. If you couldn't put it in your pocket, you could put it in the basket on your motorcycle or drop it in your bag as you headed down to the beach. And this really revolutionized radio for consumers because it had been the big Philco's in the corner. It had been the big Panasonic's over on the shelf,

the big Curtis Mathis, you know, huge turntables and tuners that sat in the living room floor, even the vehicle car radios, the old AM radios built in the cars, that was where you were able to kind of take the music portable. But the transistor radio allowed us to take it everywhere. Much like in the 80s, we had big computers stuck everywhere. We had them in the corners. We had them in the spare bedroom. We had them on the counter. We had them in the spare bedroom. We had them on the counter at work. And then the laptop revolution began. And here we are, you know, 30, 40 plus years later, and we now have more power, computing power in our back pocket through our smartphone than they did when they, you know, did Apollo space rocket launches. So everything changes. And of course, that's what happened. So we had these

huge transistors or these huge radios and transmitters that were broadcasting music and talk and whatever, even what we would call serialized programs back then. But it was all the time in the air and you could listen to it at home. You could sometimes listen to it in your car, but now you could take this with you. Much like we take our computers with us now, back in the day, it was people taking their transistor radios and very small, usually pretty efficient when it came to their power, as long as you remember to turn it all the way off to the switch, made a clicking sound. And they could hear a lot of different things, especially if you didn't break off the telescoping antenna. Now that's the fifties, the sixties, but we're in the 2020s, right? So why in

the world do we want to even think about having what was cool back in those days to be a part of what we're doing today? And I'm going to tell you, of course, this is my program, all my opinions, all my experiences, all my expertise is what you're going to get. I believe you need one of these. And you don't have to spend gobs of money to get one. I mean, ours in the store is less than $25. I love it. I'm going to explain why in a few minutes.

But here's the thing. Just like we can carry and look at the world on our phone, the transistor radio opens that up to you, even if it's on a more localized playing field, but you can still gather all sorts of information from a transistor radio in the event that some of the other devices quit. Maybe some of the other infrastructure things quit.

The transistor radio can still receive and play back for you all sorts of information. Now, it may be some romanticized view that I have of growing up with radios and listening to music and cassette tapes and this and that, but I feel very confident in telling you that an AM-FM transistor radio is where you need to start. If you haven't done anything in regards to your communications preparedness building there, you need to start with no less than one AM-FM transistor radio. This is going to give you the ability to have entertainment. You can listen to music. You can listen to programming. You can get updates from the news and emergency folks in that regard. If there's something bad that happens, I mean, not everything's a dystopian novel. I think I've said that before, but there are times when you really need to know what's

going on. And if your phone's not working, or if you're somewhere that you, you know, goodness gracious, don't have phone service, imagine how hard that would be to get some information. So you can have that accessibility in your hand with an AM FM transistor radio. Again, you don't have to spend a load of money. You can buy them as cheap as, you know, four or five bucks from China. You might get it in a month or so. You might not ever get it, but they're not expensive. I love the one we have in our store. And here's the reason why. In addition to being just a great sounding little AMFM radio, it's about the size of a paperback book, has a telescoping antenna. So you don't have to have an antenna stuck up all the time.

It also has a VHF ability to listen to the National Weather Service weather radio frequencies. We'll talk about a weather radio probably in our next episode. But this time through, there's a lot of great stuff in this one little box. So you get all the AM channels and frequencies that you can listen to at home, as well as all the FM. But in addition to that, you also get the VHF transmitter received, it receives on those frequencies, the National Weather Service bulletins. Now, it's just a guess of mine that if it ever got really, really, really, really bad, that they would probably go from transmitting weather updates to some sort of governmental updates or whatnot.

I mean, you can just go as far as you want to with your imagination, but those are official government frequencies. And it's just my guess that if need be, they would turn into more than that if necessary. So that's why I like the one we have. It's just a little silver guy, you know, it's less than 25 bucks and it does AM, FM and weather. It doesn't do the alerts, but you can monitor those frequencies. So if you're curious what the weather's doing or going to do tomorrow, you simply flip it up into the weather mode. You tune to your local weather frequency. Mine here is 162.55 megahertz. And I just turned the knob all the way over there. And I can listen to the forecast. I can listen to the current

conditions. If there's severe weather, the spotters are actually calling in reports to the weather service and they're putting those reports on that frequency. So it's a very powerful device. It's not going to tell you what the LIDO numbers are. It's not going to read you your horoscope. It's not going to give you the latest TikTok dance phase, none of that, but it can keep you informed in a case of an emergency. In addition to that, guys, sometimes you just need to kind of unplug from everything around you. And maybe you can scroll on back up to the lower frequencies on the FM band and find one of those nice stations that's just playing classical music through the day and just give your mind a break. Yes, I do find myself from time to time doing that. And that's just another bonus of those. It's not, again, sexy. It's not so exciting to spend 20

bucks on a little radio the size of a paperback book that only can hear local radio stations, if you will. But there's power in knowing what's going on in your locality. We've gotten so distracted by nationwide news. Now, it does affect us, don't misunderstand me, but does it really matter that I know that right now there's a tornado going through Nebraska and I'm in South Carolina outside of praying for those folks. Not really. I could read that on the internet or the newspaper tomorrow, but I need to know if there's a severe storm coming towards my farm or, uh, what's

happening locally here this weekend. Is there a big, there's a big spring fling in, in my, my city, the city that we reside outside of. So I know that there's going to be road closures and whatnot. I don't want to go up there and get in the mix of all those people. So if I know that that's going on, I'm going to do better off just to stay here at the farm and enjoy the country. But it's a great source of localized information. Another thing you may not realize about AM radio, because everyone's forgotten AM radio. Since Rush Limbaugh passed, nobody's thinking about AM radio anymore, to the point

that a lot of car manufacturers are trying to get out of putting AM receivers into their cars nowadays because of the shielding they need to do on other components to protect the receiver. But back in the day, in the midst of the Cold War, AM radio was known as what would save our bacon and how we would communicate with each other in case of fallout, in case of a nuclear attack. All these things, everything was based on AM. And I understand that technology's changed all that. But when I speak to people who are in the know, who work for the state and federal governments and work inside the EM emergency management sphere, they're telling me, a lot of them are still telling me that they will plan to rely a lot

on AM transmissions, high power AM transmissions. And speaking of high power AM transmissions, some of those all through the Midwest, if you take your AM transistor radio, your AM FM transistor radio outside one evening and tune it to AM stations and just scroll through the frequencies there, you'll be shocked at what you can hear. Now, it all depends on where you live and what sort of interference you may have around you. But there's a lot of frequencies that go long at night, meaning that I have laid in bed and listened to stations from all over the Midwest here in South Carolina late into the evening, into the morning. And there are overnight talk programs.

It's awesome. Maybe I'm just the only. Um, and their overnight talk programs. It's awesome. Um, maybe I'm just the only one that enjoys geeky stuff like that, but you can get long distance transmissions. You can receive those from other AM stations, sometimes around the country, depending on the ionosphere and whatnot. Uh, and that that's another great way to gather information, especially in times of an emergency. So the one that we carry and that, that's another great way to gather information, especially in times of an emergency. So the one that we carry and the one that I recommend, uh, not that you have to, can't use a different type. I like this one because not only does it do AM FM radio, it also does the VHF weather.

Uh, so that gives you a third band of listening. And I believe again, if something were to ever go sideways, those frequencies would definitely stop talking about the weather and they would probably start talking about things that Uncle Sugar wants you to be aware of. So that's why I recommend that one. But the AM FM radio, again, has been forgotten. It has been forgotten for a lot of different reasons. I mean, let's just face it.

Music in 2024 is terrible unless you're listening to a classic station. And I always thought that was my dad just being an old man back in the day, but man, music has not been good for a long time now. So there's a lot of information to be gathered locally, regionally through an AM FM radio. I do believe that it is the place for someone to start. If you're just getting into this, or maybe you've been in this 10 years and you've never thought about this, give it some serious thought. I believe that it is money well spent that you will never regret having in your hand a way to access information. And honestly, they're cheap enough to buy a couple, put some away, have one that you can access,

that you can play with. You can get out, learn how to use it, find your weather frequency that matches your location, and just see what this 20 bucks can do for you. No, you can't talk to your neighbor. You can't talk to the next state over. You can't talk with this thing at all, but it can talk to you. And what you'll learn, at least through this program, in my perspective, that in the preparedness world, we need to be a lot more like our bodies. And we have two ears and one mouth. We need to learn to listen and understand that in the case of an emergency, unless you're just in peril, you need to be listening more than you need to be talking. Now, my wife and I have hosted a marriage program in the past, and I might have learned that there, but we do need to spend more time listening than talking, especially in regards

to preparedness. So listening devices is what we're going to really be covering on the front end of this thing, because I want you guys to get an understanding of what's available and how to use it. So pick you up a nice AM FM transistor radio. You can get one from us at Hub City Mercantile. That's great. They're amazing. They can help you understand what's going on around you.

And as we talk further through this, it'll make more sense of why I start here. I mean, this is, I don't think there's a whole lot, anything else out there that's any more simple than that, that is probably overlooked more than most everything outside of water. And of course that's where I start, right? So the AM FM transistor radio to me is the place you need to start. If you have any questions, if you have any comments, if you have any comments, if you'd like to check out what we have in our store, visit prepcoms.com. All the links are

there. We'd love to hear from you. We've got a private Facebook group. If you'd like to check it out, you can find us online at prepcoms. What is it? Facebook forward slash prepcoms or whatever we're on there. You can find us. We'd love to connect with you there. We're also on Instagram and we'll probably have some stuff on YouTube as time progresses. With all of that said, thank you for the opportunity to chat with you again. I hope you've enjoyed this program. I'll be back next time. We'll continue talking about the bare bones, basic minimums for preparedness communications. God bless you guys. Thanks again for listening. 73, y'all.