Prep Comms - Gmrs Series 7 How Families Actually Communicate On Gmrs And How To Keep It Calm

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Most families don't lose communication because the radio fails. They lose it because stress changes how people talk. In this episode, Caleb breaks down how families actually communicate on GMRS — the common mistakes that create confusion, and the simple habits that keep radio traffic calm and clear when it matters. This isn't about gear. It's about behavior, clarity, and confidence. What We Cover Why stress breaks radio communication The three most common family communication mistakes How talking too fast and over-explaining kills clarity A simple, repeatable family radio pattern that works Why roles matter more than radios How to teach kids calm radio habits without fear Need a clear family communication plan? Caleb offers a paid 90-Minute Family Communication Planning Session to help you decide what to rely on when phones fail. Book here: https://plan.prepcomms.com

Most families don't lose communications because their radios fail. They actually lose it because stress, the level of stress. You feel me? Yeah, it changes how people communicate. And today we're not going to just talk about gear. Matter of fact, we're probably not going to talk about gear at all. We're going to talk about how families can actually communicate, what to do, what not to do, and how to keep it calm and clear when it matters the most.

So welcome at the prepcoms podcast. I am your host, Caleb Nelson, K4 CDN, WRBR 237, and a couple of others that I should put on a pad around here somewhere so I could brag about having all these radio license, right? Just kidding. Hey, Merry Christmas. If you're listening to this in July, well, sometimes we do that then too. But it's December, the middle of December 2025. It's cold around here. A record-breaking cold happening this weekend, if you're listening to this live or close.

I guess it's not live. but when I released it, thank you for being here, by the way. We're into episode number seven of our GMRS radio service. And you know the funny thing? I didn't think we'd get to seven in here. And I don't really know how many more we're going to go, but it's going to be a lot, probably, in all sincerity, maybe twice as many shows about this service than I had anticipated.

And if you're already like, hey, I'm done. It's too much. I already know all there is to know about GMRS. Congratulations. It's come back in a couple of weeks and we'll have some different things to talk about. But until we finish, I want to make sure that every single dad, every single mom, grandparent, aunt, uncle, whomever that has questions about this type of radio service for their family to keep them safe and connected, I want to get all of those questions answered.

So I'm going to leave it to you, the listener, to send me those questions. Now, you can do that in the YouTube comments. It's usually the easiest way. email us on the website prepcoms.coms.com. You can also even leave a voice message on the website as well. So there you go. We're going to stay here as long as you need to stay here. And as long as your questions keep coming or as long as I find holes in plans, we're going to keep talking about it. Okay. There we go. So when stress shows up, now I'm talking to dads because here I am, you know what happens, right? Everybody looks to you. Where's the answers? What are we supposed to do?

why don't we know what to do? Why aren't the flashlights charged up? Why aren't the batteries and the radio is working? Where's our toe strap? Or does anybody know where the first aid kit is? Ladies, I'm not discounting your role, okay? But you know as well as I do that you're looking at him when something happens. So we're going to just talk that way. And if there's not a dad in the house, it's not a big deal. Mom, I know you're feeling it. Papa, I know you're carrying the weight, right? So whomever is leading, we're talking this direction and everyone else can come under the wing of the discussion here. Look, here's the thing. I have found as a talker, as a communicator, as a blabber mouth, whatever you'd want to call me.

I don't know what Carl actually calls me when I'm not around. But I found that a couple of different things happen. And if you'll slow down every once in a while in the middle of something big, you'll see it everywhere. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you when you can find it every day. day almost all day long is if you have a radio scanner that you can listen to the police or the fire service you let a you let a fire department receive a call for a car accident and they're just going en route and responding to the call and whatever and you let that that engine company show up on the call that car accident and the car's on fire and they can see someone trapped listen to their

voice it changes or maybe they go out on a just a regular alarm, like a fire alarm, smoke alarm. And, you know, they're just kind of do dolly and down the road. And they pull up on scene and they've got smoke showing. Their voice is going to change. They're going to talk faster. They're going to say a lot more words than they probably would if they weren't talking fast. They may repeat themselves. They may step on each other, the traffic, the dispatcher, back to the engine company and vice versa. It happens. It's normal. We do our best to not do it. But ladies and gentlemen, we all know when stress shows up, we're going to speak faster. We're going to just stumble over ourselves. We're going to stutter. You're going to interrupt

each other. We know it. We know it. And it's normal. It's human nature. But radios don't really work well when you're doing that. You may have noticed that your cell phone doesn't do great like that when you're on speakerphone especially. So that's how we can kind of quantify this. We're talking about stress, radio communications, family preparedness. It's not going to be caused. These problems we're going to talk about today are not going to be caused by equipment failures. They're going to be caused by human nature, human behavior under pressure. Got it? Okay. The first thing we've got to talk about, and kids are notorious for this anyway without stress, but when you add stress to a child's environment, it gets even more magnified, right? So,

kids talk too fast, especially on the radio because they're not really used to having to press the push to talk button before they begin speaking. Because the cell phone, you don't have to press a push to talk. And in conversation back and forth, they don't have to pause. So more than likely, your kids are going to start talking before the button gets pressed and they're going to cut a couple of the first words off. And usually that's the most important thing that they're trying to convey is what they're saying first. So that's number one.

Number two is you'll find that we over explain. And I am guilty of this. I am guilty of this as a 30-year veteran of the emergency services. I'm guilty of this as a 26-year husband. I'm guilty of this as a 22-year dad. I'm guilty of this as an almost 52-year-old son. Sometimes, especially in a stressful situation, we say too much. We just use too many words.

And it's because we're trying to, our bodies, the physiology of our bodies are trying to get this stress relieved. And since our mouth is the most optimal way to get words out of our body, the only way. But I mean, it's how we're trying to convey this situation to someone else. And we just use too many words. Now, the thing that you have to know about radios, if you're not a radio user, they're not like telephones. They don't work, you know, where people, two people can talk at the same time. It's one at a time in what we're talking about here. And that's how it works.

So you have to really, really slow down and not use so many words. And number three, one of the things that you find, and again, you can find this in the professional services, you can find this at Carol Wins or Six Flags or whatever place you guys go as a family, the campground and people have radios. everybody's going to try to talk at one time, most especially in a stressful situation. So here's the thing. We're going to have to train our families to do the best they can, but we can't just handle the stuff and expect them to know something just to know it.

Because here I'm telling you, 52 years old, 30 years in the service, and I still talk too fast sometimes. I still try to convey too much or give too much information at one time. And that's fine if you're like Mr. Super Professional and you're, You've never done that before. Congratulations. We'll send you a cookie. But I bet 99.44% of you have used too many words.

You've talked too fast and you've accidentally talked over someone whether in person or on the radio. So here's the thing, my squeaky chair, by the way. Here's the thing that you can express to and help your family begin to understand. So like you have to call someone on the radio. All right? You press the button. You call whomever, you take a breath, and then you convey your message, and then you need a word, especially in a stressful situation, that lets the other person know that you're finished speaking and you're getting ready to disengage the push to talk. That sounds complicated, right?

Here's an example. Hey, mom, this is dad. Hey, the kids are at home. everybody's good. Over. Now, I'm just going to be straight with you. We don't really talk like that on our radios. But most of my family, all of my kids have had radios like since they were born.

So they're used to it. I'm used to their, you can kind of assume what's being said or what's getting ready to not be said. And you know this. You may not need to say over at the end of your transmissions. The one that gets me is for ID. and then they give a call sign. That's on ham radio. And a lot of times I've been hearing it on GMRS and just drives me crazy.

You don't have to tell me that you're giving your identification. You just gave it to me with your call sign. Sorry off topic. But the thing here is in regards to the pattern that your family uses in communications, you want to make sure it's short, it's calm, and it's complete. And then you can move on to the next transmission back or forth. The best way I've found is because I've got one boy that talks a million miles an hour is to ask him to take a breath between every statement.

It's like, hey, dad, breath. I'm going to go over here and get on the four-wheeler. Breath. Is that okay with you? Breath. So I don't know how you best would explain it to your kids, your wife, your husband, your in-laws. I don't know. You know them better than I do.

This is just a suggestion. Now, another section here we have to think about is the roles on the radio. Like, not that dad is always in charge or mom tells everybody what to do. That's not what we're talking about. These are more like rules than they are roles. And these rules are like this. One person talks at a time while the others listen. One talker, everyone else listens.

And then when the talker gets finished, he becomes a listener she becomes a listener guys i understand this is like kenna garden for the vast majority of you but i also know there are a lot of fine people out there who are looking to learn more about this means of communications for their family and i want to help them that's what i'm here for is to help them so bear with me i get it i get in this if you need to tune out totally get it thank you for being here i'll be back next time but you who don't know we're here for you okay The easy rule is this. Don't talk fast.

Don't talk over someone. Don't say too many words. And let one person talk at a time. Okay? Because it's just like an argument. Compare it to an argument. If everybody's saying something at the same time, the argument just gets louder and worse because nobody knows what the other person's saying.

Well, this is kind of the same thing. The situation has the opportunity to get worse because not everybody else knows what the other person is saying. Now, you've got to teach your kids this kind of stuff on a beautiful, sunshiny day. You don't just wait till the power goes out and there's a huge electrical storm outside and the winds are battering the house and there's tornadoes siren screaming on your weather radio. You do not wait till then to teach your family, your children, your spouse, your in-laws, whomever that is there in your household. You don't wait till that time to teach them how to use the radios. You want to teach them how to use the radios after the snow has fallen.

And they're going to go outside and make a snowman with the neighborhood kids. And you're clipping it to their little snow park outfit that looks so cute when you bundle them up. You don't wait, you don't wait until it's bad to teach them. You teach them on the good days. And really, you keep it as boring as possible. Now, not to the point where they're, you know, with their finger in their knows just checking out but you don't want to be like oh my gosh this we in an emergency we pick these radios up and we can talk across the neighborhood no no no see talking too fast too many words it's like hey this this radio will help you call mom if you get really cold and you want to come in and I'll fix you some hot chocolate or maybe hey you know sometimes we have storms and the

power goes out or maybe mom's phone quits working well today you can see it's a beautiful sunshiny day and it's not storming. So we're going to play with these radios. We're how to use these radios just in case we do have a storm later because you never know down here in Florida, you're going to have storms, maybe this afternoon. And teach them to use their calm voice or maybe you have, you tell your kids use their inside voice or whatever. We just told them too loud. But you tell them to use their regular voice. No need to scream. It's not going to make the signal go any further. It's actually going to make it harder to understand. Again, you're not going to rise up to the occasion.

You're going to fall back to your habits, whether you're eight years old listening to this or you're a 66 year old granddad or your 42-year-old dad. All right. So what you practice now will show up later when the need arises. Okay. Before we go, if you're listening to this and you're realizing that your family doesn't actually have a communications plan. Now, you've got radios, but you don't have a real plan.

I'm now offering a paid 90-minute family communications session. And you can find that sign up at plan. coms.coms.com. It's a great time to get a plan. Okay, so the next episode we're going to build out on what we've talked about today. And that's about checking in with your family, how to build some simple radio routines like who checks in first, how often, and what happens if everything gets real quiet?

Guys, I'm going to go. Hope you have a great day. Thank you so much for your time here. Don't forget you can check us out on a lot at prepcoms.com. And until next time, Merry Christmas, 73. God bless you.