Prep Comms - Gmrs 3 Field Reports Real World Lessons

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

This week, we're hearing from you — real operators in real situations. From Hurricane Helene reports to mountain-range tests and home-built towers, listeners across the country are proving what GMRS can actually do. Caleb Nelson (K4CDN | WRBR 237) shares lessons from YouTube and podcast feedback, covering antenna height, coax loss, repeater etiquette, and why practice still beats theory. Mentioned in this episode: • Free GMRS License Express Guide → https://www.familyconnectsystem.com/gmrs-license-express-funnel • @TerminalElement on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@TerminalElement • UHF Yagi Directional Antenna (Prep Comms Store) → https://amzn.to/48Weco0 Stay Connected: Live Family Connect Webinar → Thurs 7 PM ET | Replay Fri–Mon → https://www.familyconnectsystem.com All episodes → https://www.prepcomms.com   73 y'all & God Bless — Caleb Nelson | K4CDN | WRBR 237

Welcome in to the prepcoms podcast. I'm your host Caleb Nelson, and we are in the midst of the GMRS radio service series. Yeah, are you listening to on a podcast player. Some of you probably are. And I bet some of you are listening, air quote, on YouTube. Yeah, I had a listener of viewer, whatever you want to call it, tell me that, hey, YouTube is for video stuff. I get it. I totally do.

That's why I was so, uh, I didn't get into her. to get on YouTube with this program. And because it is video. I understand that completely. But at the same time, there's a huge number of people who listen to this show on YouTube. So that's why it's here. But thank you for reminding me of that. Hey, speaking of reminders, you can go back and look in my Instagram feed and you can look at some of my stuff.

And you'll see that for months, I've been encouraging people to check out a guy on YouTube, Terminal Element. And he's on Instagram as well. It doesn't do a whole lot there. But on YouTube, he makes some great things. videos. He's a fire medic out in the Great Northwest somewhere. And he talks, what really caught me was he creates these videos where he's building a system to be able to utilize his amateur radio license and other things to communicate with his family when he's out on a remote fire. So out in the middle of nowhere in the high mountains, I think it's probably Washington or Oregon, somewhere out there.

And he's, he's a fire medic. So he's getting, he's in an ambulance, but like a, you know, an all-wheel drive, four-wheel drive kind of forest fire fighting ambulance. And he goes out and he talks about how he's able to communicate with home base. His wife and kids is really cool. So if that's something that interests you, you really should be checking Terminal Element out. Now, my show is not about Terminal Element, but I have found that he did not realize I was also on YouTube. Of course, it's not a video that you're watching, but he's listening. And he said he's been telling people that need to know, hey, go check out the prepcoms podcast, sharing my show with the podcast player, and he just realized I'm on YouTube. So just a shout out, man. Thank you

very much. And again, if you haven't watched this stuff, I want to encourage you to. It's really, really good. So why do I even mention that here? Well, I didn't realize, I didn't anticipate the feedback that I would get into this GMRS series. Now, I knew that it was necessary. I knew there were a lot of people asking for this series and have been since I started back talking, you know, AMFM radios a year or so ago. But here we are. We're into GMRS. And all of a sudden, the second show just blew up with comments on YouTube. And I get time to time. There's comments on a podcast episode, but those are harder to do. I understand that YouTube's easy for everybody to comment on and a lot of folks have. So thank you all, whether you're listening to a podcast or you're

watching this blank video on YouTube. Now, so what I did, I decided to pause my outline here and give you some real world field reports and lessons from folks who were out there in YouTube land that shared with me what they've got going on. So I'm just going to go through. And if I get your, if I get your sign, your name, identify or wrong, I'm going to do the best I can because some of these names. They just run together and ADHD is real. Forgiven dash C5 Hotel. I believe he's up in Western North Carolina. We've talked quite often in YouTube in the comments and he's always got a lot of great stuff to say. But one of the things I wanted to mention here because of his comment is great. He said if he had had GMRS during the Hurricane Helene, he would have felt a lot more substantial

with his understanding of what was going on locally. Because he's been told that the repeaters in his area were discussing road closures, gas stations that had gas, which one's only taking cash. And he kind of just, he's lamenting he didn't have it then, but now he's ready to go because he does have it. Adam, oh man, Adam, how do you say your last name by Cheldar? 4121? He uses GMRS quite frequently in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountain Range in California.

Now, I've been out in that area. It's amazing. He didn't think it was so great. But, I mean, of course, I was visiting. You know, 8,000,000 feet above sea level is fantastic when you're living at 528 over here in South Carolina. But he want to let me know that he has several peters that he uses in that area. And they can talk. This is GMRS.

These are repeaters that are up at these extreme elevations compared to my 528, right? And they're getting 75 to 100 miles range with their repeaters. and two of the guys I guess out there, he's been, you know, having conversations with or whatever, they're getting up to 50 miles simplex. Now what that means is there's no repeater between those, but let's say one guy's on a peak and another guy's on a peak. And they're talking 50 miles away from each other. And he's like, his comment is, I can see what you mean by antennas and terrain being a major influencer. and they are. So if you have that range, if you have that height, if you have those antennas in place,

you can do that. People like me, man, we have to put up towers, we have to get over humps. It's not a lot of fun. So depending on where you live, it's going to affect your radio service. These are real world examples. And thank you, Adam. I appreciate that. Film 695 says here in eastern Tennessee, we had the best GMRS repeater network anyone could ask for. It's open and has a huge coverage area. So he didn't say where in East Tennessee he is. But I'm guessing probably Knoxville, maybe Gatlinburg, Severeville, somewhere in there. Okay, so if you're out here on the East Coast and you're going to check out the Christmas lights at Dollywood this year,

take your GMRS radio, look it up and repeat or find her and see what you can come up with. You may find film 695. James Brown Miller 808, this is a huge comment. and you can find all this in the second episode of the GMRS show in the YouTube comments on the YouTube channel. And these are just real world examples. I want to share with you because, you know, it's one thing for me to come on and say, hey, man, GMRS is great for you and your family. You should check it out. It works really good.

These are real examples of things that folks are doing. So this is a little different, not necessarily GMRS, but I wanted to share it with you anyway because this, again, goes back to Adam. and his comments about height above average terrain. So the short version of this is James Brown Miller is a member of the Civil Air Patrol. He's also a former Marine. Are you ever a former Marine? I don't think so, but thank you for your service. So he's in the CAP, and he tells a story.

It's in the YouTube note, so you should go back and read it, where the Civil Air Patrol put a repeater up in an airplane at 10,000 feet, and it works so well, they asked them to take it down because it was interfering with other relief operations after a flood that they had in Texas, 550 miles away. Okay. So the repeaters at 10,000 feet, and it's got a 550 mile radius. Okay, did you hear what I say? 10,000 feet is like the godlike view, so it's an airplane. It's elevated. There's nothing in the way. It's looking down. and it's got a 500-mile radius. That's what height above average terrain will do.

It's not every 10,000 repeater is going to talk for 500 miles, but when it's like the space station and looking down on the earth, there's nothing between except clouds and atmosphere that you have to get through so it makes a difference. Again, we're talking about real-life experiences, and we're talking about this is real. This is how this stuff works. Radio is magic.

Totally get it. Don't let it confuse you. It's not about bragging. Okay. We're just talking about real life experiences here. Jeff Skidmore, 64. He came in with a huge point for a future show, but I'm going to drop it in here now. He's talking about the difference that coax cable makes.

It's a maker or a breaker. It's because it's part of your antenna system. So here's the deal. The coax cable goes from your radio to the antenna. And you can buy coax cable in all kind of flavors. I mean, you can buy cheap, you can buy mid-range, and you can buy expensive. And a lot of times, the cheap just won't get it done in the GMRS frequency range. So you want to spend some money here.

Matter of fact, you should probably spend more on the coax than you do, your antenna. And that freaks people out when you tell them that, because they're thinking, but the antenna's $150 bucks or the antenna's $100, a $75. I've got a $30 antenna for the $220, $2, $220,000. megahertz ham radio band and I spent $75 on the coax cable. So sometimes it takes that. You have to the signal has to be able to pass through the cable effectively to get out of the antenna. If you operate with a very low cost high, high loss coax cable, your signal's going to get lost in the, in the wire and it's not going to be able to get out of the antenna. And vice versa.

So it works on the receive as well. So. rule of thumb here. If you're putting up anything beyond, say, 25 feet of coax cable from your radio to the antenna, find yourself an LMR 400 equivalent cable. Okay, LMR, Lima Mike Romeo, dash 400, and that's the baseline you should start with when feeding a base station antenna with GMRS frequencies. Okay, got it. Um, man, Timothy, Stockman, 7533, wrote a dissertation for us in the comments to the point that I'll probably do an episode just on Timothy Stockman 7533's comments, and I appreciate it so much. It's just too much to cover here. He broke down some really great points. He talks about the channelization of the

FRS and the GMRS frequencies and what frequencies are good for repeaters and where you can use the 50 watts and where you have to use the half watt. He reminds us that the license covers your whole household, and you have to be responsible for whomever uses it underneath you. If you want some information, some great info, this written really well and makes a lot of sense. Check out the comments in the GMRS Part 2 from Timothy Stockman, 7533. Thank you for sharing that with us, sir.

Up next, Ken Adamson, 4535, is in Bervard, North Carolina, which happens to be the place where I have some of the best memories of camping as a child at the Davidson River Campground before they had electricity on any of their sites. And it was just the best, the best times ever. If you're out this way and you're looking for a great campground, you cannot beat Davidson River in Bervard, North Carolina. So he asks about, you know, he's got some antennas and he's got some questions and he's trying to figure out what would work best from his home as well as in his car.

And he's about 18 to 20 miles away from the local repeaters. And he's having some issues, you know, getting in clear and clean all the time. And the guts of it is he's asking, should I put up a directional antenna? And in South Carolina, we call that a yaggy. And probably my friends out west would probably call it a yaggy. Either way, it's a directional antenna. It looks kind of like a small miniature version of the old school TV antennas we used to have on our chimneys back in the day. And it focuses the energy from your radio and the energy that your radio receives in a specific direction instead of an omnidirectional pattern.

These things can be had for like 38 to 45 bucks on eBay, Amazon, whatever. I'll try to remember to put a link in the show notes. Should you do that? Well, that's depending if you want to put that up there and leave it. pointed in the same direction. Now, you can put a tit. These things are small enough. You can use a television style antenna rotator. Those aren't cheap anymore, by the way, but you can still do that and turn it around and aim it in different directions if you're wanting to talk a certain way. He asked about different antennas. My favorite, my pick, is my friend, and one that we stock,

and that is the ZBM2 Industries. Derek makes those handheld antennas. He also makes vehicular antennas and they're hard to beat in a lot of different ways. I mean, they're tough as nails, plus they work great. That's why I stock them. I run them on everything that I own, as well as we have in our store. Now, we have a roll-up GMRS slash M-U-R-S roll-up J-Pol that works with your handies or works in the HOA, whatever. So I'm not trying to sell you either of those, but for me, I'm putting a ZBM-2 Industries whip antenna on every handy talkie I own. The end.

And if you're, if you need something to put in your backpack and you want something on these frequencies, we have those far as in our GMRS M-U-R-S roll-up. So you can check that out at prepcoms. Dot shop. I'm going to keep going here. I'm just trying to get through these

because there's so much good stuff here. And here, Stephen Alds. He has a great question that could really be a whole show into itself. And I think we're probably going to do a show on this, Stephen coming up. Stephen asked, hey man, good stuff here. Thank you for posting, but I've got a question. I want to put an antenna on my roof and be able to use my GMRS radio throughout the house. Is there maybe a transmitter that I can plug the antenna to to make this happen? Yes. And we're going to

figure out the best way to do that for you. I know how most people are going to do this. And it's not, it doesn't meet the rules. But this is how most people will tell you how to do this. I'm not telling you how to do this. This is how most people would choose to do this, because we've already talked about this in our MERS shows in the comments here on YouTube. So most guys will take a MERS radio, or they'll take a dual band VHF, UHF, Chinese mobile radio that will do what they call cross-band repeat. You can even do this with some handy talk if you get one that has a cross-band repeater built into it. And what that does, it allows you to use, let's say, a VHF walkie-talkie in your bedroom.

And it transmits to a radio listening on a VHF frequency. And in its internals, it then spits that out like a repeater does at the same time, at the speed of light, out on a UHF signal, which goes out of the antenna to the local repeater. And nobody on the other end really knows that you're doing that. and it's against the rules to use M-U-R-S in that fashion. That's how a lot of people are doing it. Are there other ways to do it? Can you put a small repeater on your property?

Absolutely, man. You can build those things out of little mobile radios. You can build them out of walkie-talkies. A lot of different ways to skin that cat. And again, it may not be the next show. But in this series, I believe we're probably going to talk about it because I can see that being an issue. I have lived that problem back in the day as an, you know, early in my ham, whatever you'd call that. we had a local repeater here that was in a different location than it is now and really hard to get

into from my house. So I had a radio in my E350 van, the Millennium Falcon. It was silver. And that radio had a cross-band repeater in it. And I would transmit on one frequency and it would repeat it on a different band and I could get in the repeater free and clear. That would allow me to just leave the radio in the truck on all the time with a high-gain antenna connected to that. You could do this as a base station as well. But it was just mounted. than my truck. It was a Kenwood TMV 71 Alpha, if anybody cares. It was one of the greatest radios I've ever owned. I had to sell them when Carla got sick, and I'm still sick about having to sell them. But they're great radios if you can find one cheap. Anyway, this thing had

a crossband repeater in it, and I could go anywhere on my property with these little bitty UHF handy talkies and transmit from it, and it'd go to the van. And from the van, it would go out the antenna, from the antenna, it would go to the local repeater and go out on that frequency. and I could talk all over the place. It was so convenient until I would forget to turn the automatic timer on off, and I would come out, my van would be dead, so my radio would actually kill the battery. That's more than you wanted to know, wasn't it?

Thank you so much for Zulu 7, Delta 3, November Romeo 4. I don't know what that means, but his comment was, thank you for helping me understand the basics of radio usage. Now, this may be one of the most, I don't know, humbling or whatever you want to call it. The guts of my response to that comment is this. The reason I sit here and record these programs and write these blog posts and have these websites and have podcasts and create content, that's why. That's why. You see, it's my goal to help people who don't know how to do these things.

how to do them. It might even be that you know how to do it, but you just really don't want to spend the time to do it. I can help you with that too. So the whole thing is thank you for allowing me to help you understand the basics of radio usage. That is why we started at how to listen to an FM radio. That's why we started at here's a shortwave radio. What is it even far? Why do we have a weather radio? It wasn't because I thought everybody listening was just a dummy. I'm trying to build a repertoire of information here that when you get to a point in your communications journey and you're wanting to learn more, that's what the prepcom's podcast is for. So like Terminal Element tells people, hey, if you're curious, go check this guy out. That's why I'm doing this to help people

build that knowledge. And if, again, if it's not, if you're not here to learn, you just need somebody to help you do it or do it for you. I'm your guy. Let me know. We can talk about that down the road. Harambe 4628. I said that wrong, probably. And I think that's like a meme from back in the day that I never really, I had two, my kids were too small to get into that meme. I don't remember that one much, but maybe a gorilla. I don't know. Either way, he says, this is the most accurate video out there. What?

Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. I mean, I hope that I'm creating great content here for you. And that just makes me feel fantastic. Thank you so much. Guest pass, who. decides to use a five instead of the letter S commented.

He's got the license and he's connected with the local guy who has the repeater. He's registered and he can get on there. He's not used it yet, but he just wanted to let me know that he could if he needed to. And he appreciated the content. Thanks, man. Michael Franchetti, 3,900, he's been a ham for about 20 years. He typically only uses the VHF and UHF bands primarily on handy. talkies. And one of the things he says here, the most difficult thing about amateur radio.

Now, this is GMRS. Don't go anywhere, guys. This is a ham talking to another ham. He said, the hardest thing for him to do is to convince his friends and families to get licensed so that he could actually have somebody he'd want to talk to, somebody that he cares about. I get that. And because of that, he says, I've been looking heavily into GMRS, also CB and MURS as an alternative to bring his friends in. And I'll tell you as a dude, there's nothing like having a buddy or 10 on the radio to talk to. Now, we have a great ham population here where I live. And I get along with everybody.

But there are some folks who are my friends. I mean, I'm friends with everybody, but you got buddies, right? And I love hearing my buddy on the radio. I love talking to my buddies on the radio. My friends, if you don't like the word buddy. But either way, I get exactly what you're saying, sir. and thank you for your comment. GMRS is great.

It's real easy. It costs $35 bucks. You fill out a forum on the FCC website and you're good. You can even share with them, and this will be in the show notes, Michael. You can share with them my GMRS how to. It's a very simple series of prompts that you can utilize with AI. So if you're using Claude or if you're using GPT, you take these prompts one at a time. and you open up the FCC website, and it walks you through every single step, where to click,

what to put there, what to put in that box. And it takes this mystery out of the FCC website, which is a stinker, by the way. I think they built it in 95, and I don't think they've changed it. It still looks like it's running on XP. That's all I've got to say. They're closed right now anyway, but I'm betting they'll be open by Monday, is my guess. Larry Jansen, 4011. I love this guy's comment.

Thank you, by the way, Larry, for commenting and listening here. Guys, take this in. So you've heard me talk about using a top rail post for a chain link fence to elevate your antennas. Now, I normally do this with one single piece. It's about 10 or 15 feet long. I think it's 10 feet. And I'll use that as a mast. It's a really expensive mast.

I think it's a little heavier duty than the old TV antenna mask that we used to sell at Radio Shack. It feels heavier. maybe I'm just gotten older and it's literally heavier. But either way, Larry wants to put up a 50-foot mast built out of these 10-foot sections of the top rail from chain link fence. And he has a great idea. I want you to go check the comments out in the second episode, which will be linked here in these show notes. But he's talking about using them, cutting them down one-third and two-third lengths to have less stress on the overall. overall mass. And I want to say, Larry, there's people listen like, this guy's crazy.

That's never going to work. It's too flimsy. He's talking about putting it in on the concrete base and, you know, grounding it properly and whatever. And he wants to, he's going to, he's going to guy it as well. But here's the thing. So you guys are like, man, there's no way it's going to work. I've got a friend, a buddy. And Doc is his name. N4II is his call. NN4AI sorry November November 4 India India is his hand radio call sign and Doc has 60 feet of fiberglass military mast up with a really nice dual band vertical on the top of the mast and you're like okay so what well he's got it guide all right and it works really really good he's at a really high point in our county maybe one of the higher points in the county he can talk all over the place Simplex radio to radio he's on his base station at home and his wife can be at the grocery store he can be at the grocery store he can be at the call her through that base station into her walkie talkie and her pocketbook. And she, I mean, they don't hardly ever use a cell phone because of the elevation and the way they're able to do this. Here's the thing.

You're like, oh, I'm not impressed. Well, you would be impressed if you saw the tornado that went past Doc's house about three to five years ago within, I don't know, maybe a quarter of a mile. It destroyed so much. It's incredible what it destroyed. And his mast still stands. it's amazing. Like we, everybody knew, one, that Doc was probably dead and two, his antenna would be down.

Neither happened. And it's still up and working like a champ. So, yes, Larry Jansen, when you get this thing up, man, we want to know about it. And send us some pictures. We'll put them up on the website. All right. So here's the deal. Kay Chaney 56, he reminded me that, again, YouTube is a video site and this is an audio-only podcast.

Yes. And I appreciate you coming about. back and listen to this program too. Seriously, I have a face made for radio. And this is my audio podcast that we put up here, and I appreciate your listening. Don't forget, if you want to get your GMRS license, they're linking to show notes here for the Express, GMRS Express. And again, it's prompts that get you through the FCC website. Even if it's not open, they're still allowing you to apply. And by doing so, when they do open back, up you'll be in the queue and have your license as soon as they get around to that, I guess.

Thursday night, 7 p.m. If you want to know more about how to apply GMRS, FRS, MURS, Scanner, shortwaves, all these different types of radios into your family communications plan, I do a webinar live on Facebook Thursday night, 7 p.m. Eastern FamilyConnectSystem.com. That's the show sponsor. It's my personal business here. It's a way it's a system. It's built for you and your family to integrate and how.

have a communication systems at the phone quit working. Now, if that's more than you want to do, again, you let me know. We can talk directly and I can help you build something out that direction. Anyway, remember, you need to have these things in place before something were to happen, and that's why you're listening to this program. If we can help you in any way, please let us know. Remember, you can find us online at prepcoms.com. And until next time, again, thank you for all of this great feedback. We'll be back next time as we can. Continue the conversation on GMRS radio. But until then, 73, y'all.

God bless.