Prep Comms - Gmrs 4 Now That Youve Got The Radios

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

This week's Prep Comms Podcast digs into the real part of GMRS—how to use it day-to-day. No hype, no theory. Just what works. Caleb Nelson (K4CDN / WRBR 237) walks through: Teaching your family how to power on, adjust volume, and find the right channel Labeling radios so anyone can grab one and talk What privacy tones really do (and what they don't) How GMRS repeaters extend your range — and the simple steps to use them correctly Why practice matters more than equipment You'll also hear about the new BTech GMRS-50 Pro, the PeliComms ¼-Wave Base Antenna now in stock at PrepComms.shop, and the launch of the Prep Comms Network — a private members-only group for real-world radio users who want to keep learning together, solve problems, and stay connected without the noise of social media. Gotta Have Info: www.myGMRS.com    Show Links & Resources Get your GMRS license the easy way: FamilyConnectSystem.com/GMRSLicenseExpress Find local GMRS repeaters: MyGMRS.com BTech GMRS-50 Pro Base Station: Amazon Listing Retevis RA86 GMRS Mobile Radio: Amazon Listing Retevis GMRS Base Antenna (7.2 dBi Gain): Amazon Listing Nagoya UT-72G Mag-Mount Antenna: Amazon Listing PeliComms GMRS ¼-Wave Base Antenna (Made in USA): Shop at Hub City Mercantile ZBM2 QP Whip Antenna (use code PREPCOMMS): Product Link WilComs Roll-Up J-Pole (MURS/GMRS): Shop Here  

Welcome back into the prepcoms podcast. I'm your host Caleb Nelson, K4 CDN. We're in the midst of the GMRS radio series. And man, it has been a busy week. I've got a ball's here for a second. Totally crazy busy week. My wife turned 26 years old again this week. It's amazing.

She's so fabulous. I can't wait for you guys to get to know her better if you don't. And so her birthday was this week. It also kicked off the month of November, which is like my favorite time of the year. I'm a fall and winter spring kind of guy. I'm a South Carolina, and so we all hate the summer down here, some of us.

I got a brand new radio in the mail, and it's not even my birthday. It was Carla's birthday, but it wasn't for her. It was for me. My birthday's in December, by the way, note, and I'm good on QRZ. I got a brand new antenna for the brand new radio, and we have those listed in the store,

talk about it later, and, of all things, we launched something brand, new that I'm going to talk about in a couple of minutes. So I know what are you talking about. The brand new radio is what everybody wants to hear about. It's the BTEC GMRS 50 Pro. Now this is their latest GMRS offering. It's a full power mobile radio. Now when I say mobile means that it's built to go in your car, but it can also go in your house. It can also go in the living room. You can also mount it to a plastic or whatever.

cutting board and put it in your car when you're driving to work and then disconnect it when you get home in the evening and take it in the house and plug it in and use it there so it's a full power output it's a full on legal radio now there's no way to like get inside this thing and make it work on ham or make it work on merr or repeat or anything there's none of that i mean it's a full-on legal rig mine's doing about 40 plus watts out right at 42 watts on the meter that i have and it's an old analog cross needle. I mean, it's probably 45-year-old. It's almost as old as me, the meter that I have.

But anyway, it's working great. I've made contacts with it. The really neat thing about the GMRS 50 Pro besides the 50 watt output or up to 50 watt output is the microphone holds all of your information. So you can take the box of the radio and mount it under the seat and mount it beside the dash. Just put it out of the way somewhere. and the whole radio is in the microphone. And if that's not good enough, if you have a smartphone, either one of the flavors,

the app that they have allows you to have your radio inside your app. So you can even lay the microphone down over there in the seat beside you in the car and use your tablet or your phone to control the radio, the programming, the channel, the scanning, the GPS, all of those things are wide open and programmable in the telephone app. It's basically the UV Pro that if you're on Instagram, you've seen me brag on this thing since August of last year. It's one of my favorite radios. And this is what that is, except it's GMRS only, and it's up to 50 watts output. It's a banger.

So I love it. You can put it out of the way. It's a tiny little box to begin with. It's full of features. I've had a lot of fun making contacts with it here in the shack. That's where I've been running. It is in my shack. and the goal here is to put it in mobile and go down the road and talk back to the farm.

Now, my topography is different than yours, but the goal here is that my son and I have decided we want to run a range test between some GMRS-only handy talkies. So we've got the V2, the GMRS V2 from BTEC. We want to run those. We're going to test the range there for you. I mean, we've done this, but we want to get some like real results and present them to you. And then we're going to put the 50 watt mobile in the car and see what happened. So that's coming.

That's coming probably between now and Christmas or now in New Year. So we're going to work on that test for the range just to get it out there so you guys can know what it looks like and works like around our where we're at. So it's a great rig. And I'm not trying to sell you one of these, my coffee cup. I'm not trying to sell you one of these. but if you're looking for something that's really cool, 50 watts output, and everything's there, it's there. This is a GMRS show, by the way, right?

Also, in the store, I've added a GMRS quarter wave base antenna. This is a little small base antenna. You can mount outside your window. You can put it on your television antenna post. Maybe you have an old direct TV mount still up on your house. You can take the dish off and put this little guy up there. It'll surprise you what your handy talk you will do with a real antenna. We've talked about that a million times.

Oh, and they're in the store. All right, so prepcoms. Dot shop. We're going to talk about the prepcoms network in a couple of minutes. It's an online training group I've built and released it this week. Man, it's been so busy. But we'll talk about that in a couple of minutes. So one of the things that I've gotten, I still get these questions all the time and I love them,

so please don't stop. But the questions go like this. All right, man, I've got my license. I've got my radios. Now what do I do? So let's start kind of simple. And this being a family-centric program or a prepper program, when you think preppers, you're thinking, oh, these guys, they've got a prepper group or they're prepping with their family.

So let's talk down that road, all right. Here's some things you've got to do. You've got to put these things in front of your people. Now, if your people are your neighbors, well, then you need to have a little neighbor meeting. If your people are your family, you can't turn this into a dad. a dad discussion, a dad talk, where you're the only one, you know, if you're a dad, you know what I'm talking about, okay? So this is so hard for us, but you can't do that. This cannot be that. But you need to place these radios in front of your family. I mean, unless they're like 18 months old,

they're just going to slobber on them. But, you know, if they're five years and up, they can be a part of this conversation for sure and maybe even some three-year-olds. You have to show them how to use these radios. I mean, you've bought the radios, you've got your license so they're all covered. Now they need to know how to use them in case. And they need to know a couple of different things. How do they power them on? I mean, y'all, I get it. This is like kindergarten level, but we're talking about kids and family members who aren't thinking like we do, okay? They have to know how to power them on. And they also need to know that when they're finished with them, they need to power them off because kids will kill some batteries. Trust me. They need to know

how to adjust the volume. So is it a roller? Is it a knob? Is it a, is it a, is it a, is it a, is it a button, okay? Sometimes they'll need to know how to change the channels. Now, in some cases, you can actually lock these radios on a frequency or a channel, even when you power it off and power it back on, it's still locked. And that may be the best thing for you to do, especially when you've got little kids and maybe a wife who's really not paying attention. And if you're the wife who is paying attention, God bless you, I'm not knocking women. I'm just saying from my experiences, this has always kind of been a day. thing. And I want to make sure that I'm speaking to dads because wives, as you know,

sometimes us men don't really listen. So guys, teach your family how to power the radio on and off. Teach them how to adjust the volume. Teach them how to adjust the channel and make sure that everybody knows what channel, okay, your family's expected to talk on. Like around here, we're on Channel 3. And I can't tell you why. It used to be Channel 7. Back in the day, it was channel 13. I don't know. It's just what we use. All right. So if if you get them to turn the radio on and and start messing with the buttons and stuff, you let them get that out of their system, okay? But you've got to, you've got to teach them the power, the volume, and the channel. And you just, you've got to be just kind of basic with it. Okay, this is how we do it. And then,

you know, if you can lock it down, lock it. That way you don't. have to worry about it. Okay. But still, you need to remember, hey, we need to be on Channel 3, to the point that if you've got a label maker and most families nowadays do, and if you don't, that's okay, get you a Sharpie. If the radios are black, the silver or gold sharpies work great, and if they're these bright, funny colors, you can use a black Sharpie. Either way, just write down a couple of things on the radio chassis itself. It's not like you're going to be trying to resell these things, man. These are for your family stuff. So write your call signs. so that everybody knows it without out an excuse.

Mine is WRBR-237. I've got labels. I've got markers. I've done it all over the place differently. Okay? W-R-B-R-B-R-2-37 is my call. It's not yours. And like if you wanted to, you could even write on the other side,

home number sign, the pound sign, three. And that means home channel is three. Our home channel is 12, whatever you guys decide to make it. It's whatever making sense. Okay. That's how you explain these things to your family. Now, that's about as far as you have to go to start with with your family. Because there's some tweaks you probably want to make kind of behind the scenes. And if you have the kid that's got the knack, I believe it's what they called it back on the whatever cartoon that was. But if you got a kid that's got the knack or you've got a teenager that's into this kind of stuff or maybe, you know, they're just that kid, right? Like probably like I was when I was a kid.

you can teach them about some of these other things too, but remind them that these are these are settings that need to be made and left alone, right? They don't need to be in there fooling with it because these are here for when things stop working. And what am I talking about? Yeah, we're talking about privacy tones. Okay. So you'll see these, the marketing on the boxes or the packages or even on Amazon, you know, 7,000 privacy tones and speak to your family privately and all that stuff you can, but you can't. All right. So a privacy tone is just a filter. all right so um i got five kids i love ferris bueller's day off i love groundhog day there's a lot of movies that are great uncle buck maybe one of the best movies of all time but you can't generally watch that with a seven-year-old or maybe you shouldn't at least we didn't in my house but what we did is we paid for a service called clear play and clear play was really cool because it would take the cuss words out of the movies but you can still watch the movies because some of those great films from the 80s if you took all the work words out there'd be no movie left so it actually just mutes it when the word shows up and it just

keeps playing so it's a filter and privacy tones are just like that privacy tones uh allow your radio to block other radios that are transmitting on the same channels and frequencies unless they have the same tone programmed into their radio so it's not an encryption okay it's not protecting your transmission from getting out to anyone else it's protecting your speaker from receiving everyone else. Okay? And if your radio has a tone programmed in it that matches your son's tone, then the only two stations that either radio will hear is each other.

Okay? Because you're blocking out the other signals because they don't have that tone enabled on their radios. It's a filter. It's like a screen. It's like a brick wall that prevents stuff from coming in. So if you live somewhere that's kind of a large metropolitan or whatever and there's a lot of radio use on GMRS, I would suggest, of course, anywhere really, but especially traveling, by the way. But you put these, you enact your tones and that just keeps your group talking together. Everybody else can hear you. Doesn't mean you're going to hear them. So don't be saying stuff. You don't want anybody else to hear. Remember, these are all public frequencies. But this will give you the opportunity not to hear what everybody else is saying, except. the people in your group that, you know, that you want to hear from. Did I explain that well? Probably not. Now, if both of the radios, you and your son, your radios don't have the same

tones enabled, everybody else will hear you, but you won't hear each other. Okay, so the tones have to be the same across the board for your entire family, your entire group, or whatever we're calling it. Everybody has to have the same tone. So remember the Sharpie marker? It might even be a good idea to put the letter T, the capital letter T, and then put whatever tone you used in that radio. So just by chance, somebody gets to fooling with the radio, they get it unlocked, and they start pressing buttons and going crazy. And mom comes around and she's like, why this is not working, at least she's got a note there that, hey, this is the tone. And this is not hard to set up on 99.99% of these radios. I'm just trying to give you some hints and stuff that we found

over the years. You got five kids, man, they can mess up some stuff. quick. So, anyway, I'll stop there because they may listen to this down the road. And I don't want to offend anybody. All right. So your channels need to be agreed upon. You need to have the correct privacy tones if you're using those. And if you have, most radios now have these little screens you display. If you have those, you know, show them what people, show the kids and the wife what those things mean. If they's got those little symbols on it. You know, when you press the push to talk button, it does one thing. When you let it off, it does another one. You can actually usually see that you've got a tone

or a privacy tone enabled up there. There may be a letter T or something. And then there's a battery meter, which is probably about 60% realistic, but it's up there anyway. Now, you're not trying to make your family, your group, or whatever radio operators. You might not even want to be a radio operator. And that's okay. Not everybody wants to be, has to be, okay? but the goal is you want to make sure your group is capable and comfortable enough to pick these things up to push the buttons to turn them on and to talk and to listen it's you know we've talked about it for for months now it's just as important to listen as it is to talk so there's that all right so now that we got everybody in the house figured out you got some homework to do for yourself

because here's the thing GMRS radios work great in your bubble but you also with a license and mission from a repeater owner potentially have access to use a repeater in your local area that, you know, gives you access from home to Walmart versus home to the park inside your neighborhood. Okay. So repeaters are systems that are up on high places where they're on radio towers, water tanks, some of them on the mountainsides down here up on the Appalachia. We have them on the mountains and they face back to where, you know, we live. but they're always

always listening on one frequency all right and they repeat the same thing that they just listen to and heard at the same time of simultaneous on another frequency. So that's how your little walkie-talkie can talk into this repeater and then that repeater takes the signal

you just sent to it and basically for lack of a better term, amplifies it at a higher elevation and sends it back out at the same time and people with walkie talk is all over your area can now hear you because you went through the local repeater. They're elevated, their higher power. They use a base style antenna. A lot of them spend more on their antenna than they do the freaking repeaters, which is a good thing sometimes. And it just really it maximizes your ability to use this really inexpensive service. And somebody paid for that,

by the way. And if it wasn't you, you need to find out who did if you're going to use it. Ask permission. and it might be that you even want to donate a little bit to help them keep it going because somebody's paying for the power. Somebody bought you equipment, programmed it, maintains it, all that stuff. So, Caleb, that's great. But how do I even know if I have a local repeater? Well, I cannot send you to my website because I'm not the GMRS guy, but this dude, I can't remember his name. And if he's listening, I apologize, dude. His website is called my gmrrs.com. and you just go in there and put your location, sometimes it'll self-locate if it's on your phone,

and it'll show you the local repeaters. And then you can just look at it and say, hey, I think I could use that one and this one and that one. And you just request permission by pressing a little button, and you give your name. And sometimes they ask you what equipment you're going to be using and who are. You kind of, you know, just a little survey of who you are.

This is your stuff. You're asking to play in their sandbox. So my gmrs. com. And the thing is, this is not really hard. It may sound complicated, but it's really not. Literally, you go to mygmRS.com, you put your zip code in or you find yourself with the, you know, GPS in your phone, and then you figure out which ones probably would work close to you. Maybe start with the closest to your location and just ask them if you can use it, apply for that, if you will, and get her done. See what happens. So every repeater is made up of an antenna,

a feed line, transmit, a receive, power supply, things like that. But those don't really matter to you right now. What matters to you in regards to a repeater is this. They have an output frequency. That's the frequency that you're actually listening to. You in your house or you in your car, you walk into the park with your walkie-talkie. You're listening to the output frequency of the repeater.

All right? So they also have, if they have an output, they have an input. They have an input frequency. This is the one that, although you're listening to one frequency, when you press the push to talk button on your walkie-talkie, it changes frequency, and that is the input frequency. That's the frequency that you speak into the repeater with. All right.

And every repeater out there has a tone enabled. Just like the privacy tones we spoke about a couple of minutes ago, this is a very similar thing here. It's a sub-audible tone. You don't hear it. It's not a beep or anything like that. But when your radio transmits its signal to the repeater, there is a subaudible tone built into that. And it tells the repeater, hey, this radio that's coming in here, this signal is programmed properly.

And we're going to open ourselves up to repeat whatever's transmitted. Tadda, that's how a repeater works. So if you get those three things right, you're going to get it in the repeater. And when you press the button, you'll let go, you'll hit the repeater. kind of kachunk, or you may even hear it beep, or you might hear it do a CW or a Morse code identifier, which is, you know, required, but that doesn't matter to you right now. You get the output frequency, the input frequency, and the tone, you're in. And you're like, well, how am I going to find those out, man?

I don't know anything about this. I'm just so lost. The myGMRS.com website has all of this information on there. All right, my gmrs.com, again, it'll give you. and it'll say the output frequency, the input frequency, and it'll tell you which tone they're using. And with your radios, you just set it up in the little selector menu there. This is not tough at all.

All right. That's all you need. Now, once you do those things and you press the button on your radio, you're going to be able to use that repeater. Now, again, you need to ask permission if it's required there on the my gMRs.com site. But you're also going to be able to, even without permission, and you're going to be able to open it and close it with your push to talk button. That's called kerchunking.

It's really bad form. I mean, if you do it once and you hear that the repeater came back and acknowledged your transmission, you don't have to do it another 36 times in the next 10 minutes, really. I mean, it's not changing anything. You're just a clicker at that point. And an annoyance. And whether you're a ham or a GMRS or MRS or FRS or whatever, that's just bad form. So don't be that guy.

don't be that guy now when you get in you get it programmed properly you've got permission to get in the repeater what's the first thing you're going to do well you're going to press the push to talk button and don't be nervous man don't be weird don't be everybody has to do this for the first time just like everybody else has done it for the first time and you're going to press the push to talk button take a breath give out your call sign okay and you don't have to do it phonetically but do it's slow. I mean, you can't get a WRBRR. 2037. Nobody's going to know what you just said. WR. BRBR. 237. Testing. And that just lets everybody know, hey, there's this new. I've never heard that guy before. It's this new guy out there. What was his call again? He's testing his radios.

Someone may come back to you and say, hey, I got you. Loud and clear. This is WR.B. 454 or something. But just be polite. Be polite. And try to have a conversation when you can. Remember that This is a cross section of humanity. So there's some great people out there. And there's some not great people out there. And there's a lot of in the middle. So just, you know, going to this, we've got eyes wide open. But understand that this is a great service.

These people have paid to buy this equipment, put it up, maintain it. And if they're sharing their access with you, you know, be nice to them. But listen. Listen and listen again. That's what we've talked about for months and months. But even in regards to the repeaters, sometimes it's really good just to program it in. if you've never been in this radio type of sphere before, and take a couple of days to listen, just to see how people go back and forth and kind of get a feel for the vibe.

I'll leave it at that. Now, again, we got to remember that it's not just for us and our drive to work and our drive home because we're making new radio friends or we're super prepper and we're just waiting for the end of the world so we can talk on the radios. this is really about keeping our people connected. Okay? So once you have these things programmed with the repeaters, if your kids and wife or spouse or in-laws or whomever is to the point that they could probably use this effectively,

I would teach them how to do it. And you're thinking, teach them how to do what? Teach them how to use the repeater. Because they need to know there's a difference between just talking around the yard to talking around. The county, okay? So there may be some instruction needed there, and I've gone long, and I apologize. It's just been a crazy week and so much to do.

Once you figure these things out with your family, and I think I'm going to hold this to the next show, we need to do some practice with them. And it's more than just sitting around the dining room table having a dad talk, okay? So we're going to just come back to the next show, and we're going to talk about that. But before we go, a couple of things I want to toss in here, remission, if you'll allow me to. Number one is I've got the new BTEC GMRS 50 Pro. I love it.

As a ham radio operator, I'm begging them to give me this radio in a dual band format for my vehicles. Number two, there is prepcoms.shop. There is a brand new quarter wave GMRS antenna. And so what that means is it's a small base. I'm not going to get into theory here. There's no time. cares anyway. It's a small base station antenna. When I say small, it's not a lot taller than my 20 ounce coffee cup here. And it's not much wider. The circumference around, you know,

its whole footprint is not much bigger than maybe a CD or a DVD if you're old enough to know what those are. And it's made out of aluminum and it's super light weight. But at the same time, it will massively increase the productivity of your walkie-talkie if you use a walkie-talkie from side. So this is not a huge base station antenna that you would put up. And I encourage you to do that if you can, but you might be in an HOA and you've got to kind of tuck a little something away. You could put this on the eve of your house. You could put it on, you can put these things anywhere because they basically weigh nothing. And you can put it on a mask. You can attach it directly to your house. I'd love to see some pictures of what you guys are doing with them. They're in the store, shipping for free. And you get them before Christmas. and of course you'll have to have coax cable and stuff like that, but I can help you there if you need to, let me know. Check them out, prepcoms.shop. All right, and the last thing, why have I been so busy this week?

Well, Carla's birthday, of course. I got our new radio. I got to check bringing new stock into the store and getting that all ready to go. All that's done. And then, on top of all that, my work week has consisted of building out, completing, finalizing, and publishing the Prepcoms Network. and I just tossed it back here to the back of the show from the beginning because it's just too much to try to talk at the front. This is not a membership. It's not a course. It's not a,

hey, sign up and I'll give you a PDF every month. This is a, this is something folks have been asking me for. So I've got the Family Connect system and some folks who have been in that have said, hey, this is great, but I need more because I'm above and beyond what this course teaches. And that is like the kindergarten level. This will be more of your middle school stuff here or even further, but you're not starting at the ultra super base of the floor, right? It's a private community is what it amounts to. It's for people who are serious about getting good with the radios and learning how to do

stuff more than just kerchunking repeaters and talking to their kid across the neighborhood. It's a monthly training system live on Zoom that we will actually do trainings to together and then we'll have our we have a private group we'll have conversations throughout the month throughout the days whatever it takes questions and answers we'll have subject matter experts come in and share on particular topics and whatnot lessons gear setups testings how we're testing this while we tested that how to have a conversation with your group or your family and it's a private group and it's for members only so this isn't open to the public so you can come in and be a part of this and you can ask the dumbest question

on the planet and nobody's going to troll you. I'm the king of the dumbest questions on the planet, okay? Go back and listen to Ham Radio 360. But this private group is built to insulate you who want to learn more about communications, especially alternatives for your family. But you don't want to go out into these public groups on Facebook and just get shamed for not knowing or not saying the right word or using the wrong jargon or something. So this is a this is real conversation. It's a real group friends and families in here helping each other and working together. So you can you can find it online. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's prepcoms network.com.com. Um, seriously, if you've ever wished you had a place to just ask questions and compare notes

without getting, you know, beat up on social media, this is, this is what you've been looking for. I'm hosting it. I'm excited that it's there. I've been working on it for my and it's not just ham radio and it's not just GMRS. This is alternate communications for your family from top to bottom. Now, we're going to probably start with some really simple stuff, of course, in our inaugural kickoff here. But the goal is to help you grow, to learn, help me grow and learn and learn together. So we're not out here trying to just watch random YouTube videos and figuring it out

and going out here and having to find a post that somebody put that and this and that. We're bringing it all together. We're working as a community to grow up in this thing. and learn more together. All right, I got to go. I'm so sorry. I've gone this long. It might be the longest show I've ever done.

I apologize. We've covered a lot today. We're going to come back next time. We're going to talk about getting your family involved. We'll probably talk more about the network and whatnot. If you have any questions in any of those regards, of course, I'm always online, Instagram and YouTube. I appreciate your comments over there and you guys just being a part of what we're doing.

Share this stuff with your friends and family. It's not complicated. The GMRS stuff is not. complicated. You actually control this stuff once you get your head around it and it's not hard. You just have to start practicing with it and make it work for you. All right. Have a great week. I really appreciate you guys. Listen, it's getting cold and don't forget to check your smoke detectors. See you next time, guys. Y'all have a great day. God bless you. Seat me three y'all.