Prep Comms - Is MURS Still Worth It?

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Episode 4 – Is MURS Still Worth It? Why This Forgotten Band Might Be the Most Reliable Tool in Your Family’s Kit After four episodes, we’re wrapping up the MURS Mini-Series with a hard look at one question—does MURS still have a place in 2025? For 15+ years, I’ve used MURS radios on our farm for everything from driveway alerts to in-vehicle comms on family road trips. In this episode, I’m breaking down: Real-world MURS performance from long-term use Why antennas matter more than radios (and my trusted picks) How MURS compares to FRS, GMRS, CB, and ham radio today Who MURS is perfect for—and who should look elsewhere If you’ve been wondering whether to add MURS to your comms plan—or keep using it—you’ll have the answers after this. Mentioned in this episode: Amazon Storefront (MURS Gear): https://amzn.to/3DKR8Lx ZBM2 QP Whip (Use Code: PREPCOMMS): https://zbm2industries.com/products/qp-whip-antenna-thicc Ed Fong DBJ-1C Antenna: https://www.kbcubed.com/DBJ-1C-GMRS-MURS-Dual-Band-Base-Antenna-by-Ed-Fong-p406162512 J-Pole for MURS: https://www.jpole-antenna.com/shop/murs-151-154-mhz-land-mobile-j-pole-antenna Centerfire Folded Dipoles: https://centerfire-antenna.square.site/product/folded-dipoles/5 Centerfire Ground Plane: https://centerfire-antenna.square.site/product/vhf-uhf-tunable-ground-plane-antennas/8 Comet GP-9 Vertical: https://rwantennastore.com/comet-gp-9nca-gmrs-frs-commercial-dual-band-vhf-uhf-base-vertical-antennas Low-Loss Coax: https://amzn.to/40xx47F RG8x for shorter runs: https://amzn.to/4m6EuqP 30/30 Ham Radio Challenge: https://www.familyconnectsystem.com/3030welcome Family Connect System Webinar: https://www.familyconnectsystem.com

it's take number two all the ham radio 360 podcast and i'm not even doing that show anymore so i need to say take two prepcoms podcast Caleb nelson k4 cdn it has been since 2018 that I've done a Ham Radio 360 show and that came out of my mouth. Welcome to the program. I don't know where that came from. It's just in there Freudian, I guess. Hey, this is the prepcom show. I am Caleb Nelson, K4 CDN, doing the last, number four, the last episode in our MERS mini series here on the show. Thank you guys for all the interactivity, the comments and the conversation. It's been great. I think you guys have enjoyed this. And it's really cool because we're going to be going into FRS and GMRS really soon.

So MERS, it's, again, I'm just going to say it out loud. I didn't tell anybody about MERS for years. Not that anybody didn't know, but I just wasn't bragging about it on the air because I wanted to hold it, at least in my little part of the world, is a real cool secret. Not that any of my neighbors listened to my podcast, by the way. Anyway, MERS is great. It's like the ultimate Grey Man Radio until I get on here and talk about it.

and thousands of people listen. So if you're living out in the country somewhere, you're still probably pretty good. We've already heard from a lot of listeners who said that in the city centers, there's a lot of interference, a lot of use. So if you're rural, this service is for you, especially if you don't want to get into ham radio. All right, it's going to work really great in rural settings. Now, GMRS will work in rural settings as well, but we're not talking about that right now. So we're building a plan. We're building a library of understanding for communications for families and preppers. And MERS, M-U-R-S, is a great service that we've been talking about for a couple of weeks now. So over the last episodes, I think we really clarified what MERS is

and what MERS is not. What is legal and what is not legal. What's a little gray, what's definitely black and white. And we'll touch on that in just a minute. But I think we've done a good job in that. And if there are still questions, put them in the comments or shoot me an email, check out the blog over at prepcoms.com. Whatever. We'll find an answer for your question. How's that? So I've been using MERS on our farm for about 15 years. It's a VHF frequency group of five frequencies, channels, if you will, low power, two watts, max, maximum elevation on your external antenna is 60 feet or 20 feet above the structure it's attached to. And like every other radio system that we have, and we are, and we're going to talk about, the antenna is everything. So when I say you can put an antenna at 60 feet, man, let me tell you, if you can get an antenna on MERS at 60 feet above ground level, pretty much anywhere, you're going to love it. It swell about that.

Midwesterners, if you can get your antenna on your old TV antenna, tower that y'all had back in the day before satellite and all that stuff. If you can get one up in the air, you're going to love MERS. Seriously. It takes antennas. Antenna is the breaking point of every single radio setup that there is. I don't care if you got a 5,000 watt linear. If you've got a junk antenna, you're not going to get 5,000 watts out of the antenna,

which means you're not going to get that kind of quality and that stretch that you think the extra power is going to get. The antenna is everything. I'll beat that horse to death, and I've already done it in past episodes. I'm stopping right now. So we've talked about what MERS is, isn't gray and the black and white. Here's the deal. There's some legalities.

We'll talk about in a minute. But the great thing about MERS is that it's a kind of forgotten service. And nobody really pays attention to it anymore. Nobody really cares. And that's why it's so great for families and preparedness folks. I don't want to call you, preppers. I don't like that word. We used to call ourselves survivalist, but I digress.

So here's the deal. MERS, five channels on VHF and the 150 megahertz spectrum, part of the spectrum there. You can't do repeaters. Okay. You can't repeat your signal. You can't do digital voice like DMR. You can't have those $50, I'm sorry, 50 watt Chinese low-cost GMRS radios legally on MERS. And you just have five channels and two watts.

But I'm telling you guys, if you'll use it right, it'll perform and do everything you need it to do. If you're looking for more coverage than you can get with MERS, then instead of trying to make MERS work to your additional coverage needs, you need to look at a different sort of service, whether that is CB Radio, GMRS, which is coming in a couple of weeks, or the hand radio hobby. Okay. So MERS does what it does fantastically well. The thing is, there's no need to kind of mess with it because there's better options beyond the messing. Okay. You still get 60 feet above ground on an antenna. Two watts out on VHS. You can cover all your farm. And that's where this really shines. It works great because you don't have a whole lot of folks on there just. yapping, at least in the rural areas. And I'll tell you why, because again, people forgot about it. The radios aren't readily, like, super available on Amazon for $16 a piece. You have to kind of want to talk with MERS frequencies to get the radio to talk on MERS frequencies. That doesn't mean that they're outrageously expensive. No, it just means that the typical little, you know, Chinese Big Penn Radio is not, you know, made for that.

So it, I don't want to go there. And I'm not. So we're going to continue. Merge Radio is great for you and your family, great for you and your group, great for you and your employees on your farm, great for you and your employees with your septic tank business, right? But it's not for you, like Mr. Lonely Guy, who's sitting at home by himself.

God bless you, listening to this program thinking I would really like to talk to somebody on the radio today, most especially someone I've never met before, and maybe I'll make a new friend, you should get your ham license because that's what a lot of ham radio guys do. But MERS won't really do that because we've already determined that not everybody knows about it, not everybody uses it. It's not necessarily easily accessible. And there's just not people riding around in their cars with a MERS radio, waiting for somebody to talk to them.

Now, you'll find the opposite of that with CB radio, GMRS, and ham radio. But with MERS, it's just kind of sitting there waiting to be used when you need it. That's why it's so beautiful, and that's how it, for the most part, in the rural areas of the U.S. stays quiet. The cool thing, an additional cool thing about it, the radios, let's say, they're not necessarily easy to find. They're really not, but Radio Shack back in the day made some business band radios. that you can still use. You can find them online.

We can find them at a ham fest. That's where the ham radio guys get together. It's like a big, big yard sale kind of a thing. Flea market. I'll try to link that product in my show notes here. I will say that a couple of days ago, I did a reel on Instagram and featured that radio in with all my other radios and kind of talked about it for a minute.

So if you've seen that, you know what I'm talking about. But great old radios, and they fit the bill for what we're talking about here, the legalities of this radio service. Yeah. And, you know, the cool thing about MERS is that since it's basically wide open out there in the middle of everything, if you've got an old 10 channel radio scanner from Radio Shack back in the day from the flea market for 10 or 20 bucks, you can listen to all five frequencies and hear everything. Yeah, there's no privacy at all on MERS. It's an open frequency group, man. You shouldn't have any expectations of privacy because you're not going to have any. That's just the real deal.

So like I said, I've talked a lot about using it on the farm. I live on a farm. We've used it here for 15 years with the driveway alerts and whatever. It's worked great for us. Before Ham Radio, before my kids were licensed, before our GMRS licensed, WRBR 27, we used MERS here on the farm. We used MERS in the car. Like if we were traveling to cars and going somewhere, we We put one in each car. We had these big monster Dakota Alert, AA battery powered handheld radios that were, man, I can tell you this. They loved AA batteries at the end.

And they talk great, but they sure love those batteries. Anyway, if you've got a workshop and you don't have a buzzer or maybe you don't have a real good sales service in your workshop, you can put some MERS radios in the house and in the barn. Dakota Alert still makes their base station. It's like 80 bucks. it's in the show notes somewhere and it works really well for that and it kind of stays out of your way it's um it's right there uh connected to an external antenna it does all you need it to do

legally and and i mean i've literally had them for 15 years they still work they still work great they'll work for your family right if you live in the rural parts of the u.s. mers is for you uh maybe you have a church parking lot team you know in the mornings on sunday morning or whatever day you go and you guys need help kind of coordinating. You know, maybe you have a business that you, you set up and tear down stages for concerts and you need connection, but you don't want to spend for a business license and all this. MERS might be a good thing for you to think about.

I mean, it's not just preppers. It's not just running around on patrol, you know, checking out the fence line. I mean, you can use it. In the United States of America, these frequencies are wide open and ready for you to use at two watts. you'll also find that in crowded areas generally you're going to find less traffic on it than GMRS but still it's a crowded areas

if it's an urban area you're going to find radio noise everywhere so bear that in mind again we've used them in our cars for years we used them from the barn of the house house to the barn driveway alert proximity sensors things like that here's the thing the antenna antenna antenna, antenna, it will make or break your system. You've got to have your antenna correct.

And I don't care, man, if we're talking CB, if we're talking a scanner, we're talking a shortwave radio just listening to a radio Havana, Cuba. I mean, it doesn't matter. Your antenna's going to make or break your system. So within the confines of what we're talking here, MERS, you can take an antenna, put it at 60 feet above ground level or 20 feet above the top of the structure it's mounted to. And with five watts, you compare it. to your walkie talkie standing there in the yard and it's it's going to blow your mind if you're

not involved or never really been around radios a whole lot it's going to freak you out how much better an external antenna will increase the capacity to send and receive over just the walkie talkie stubby i mean and even the good stubbies and the you know the the good whips they work great and they really increase the the productivity of the radio but man when you get an antenna up in the air above the trees, above the houses, above the metal roof, look out, it's going to blow your mind. Seriously, antennas. I got to stop. Okay, we're going to compare, do some comparisons here because I know we have people with GMRS licenses listening, and I have a GMRS license. I don't use it as near as much as I used to now that the kids have their tickets, but still,

we have it. I paid for it. I paid 70 bucks for mine. So anyway, try to compare murder. and GMRS. Really, really hard to compare the two. One is VHF, one's UHF. One is maximum two watts. The other is up to 50 watts with repeaters. So, you know, it's kind of like a pineapple and a can of paint. That's how different they are. I mean, they kind of hold liquid. You know, the pineapple's got the pineapple juice in it and the can of paint's got liquid paint in it. So yeah, it's a container. It's got liquid in it. So yeah, it's a container. It's got liquid in it. So they're kind of similar. You know, they're radio services, but, I mean, past that, they're really not comparable. If you're rural, MERS, if you need more channels, you need repeaters, you want more selection for radios to put in your car or to use as a base station, then GMRS is going to be it. Now, GMRS is going to cost you $35 and you'll be in a government database. And whatever, it's not a big deal. It's $35, $10 years.

It works great. There's repeaters all over the place now. generally everybody gets along. It is kind of the new CB radio, but I don't need to be talking about it because that's a future show topic. MERS, a lot more quiet, especially in the rural areas, this VHF,

it penetrates through trees and whatever really well. It works great at my house. How about MERS and CB radio? Because we've already talked about CB, where I got started. MERS, the frequencies are higher, right? So we're looking at 150 versus 27 megahertz. You can use shorter antennas

with MERS and because it's FM and I know but because it's FM you're going to get a better voice voice quality right CB is going to give you longer range but you're also going to be competing with Papa Sam down in Mexico with you know a 7 million watt linear and 14 different antennas aimed at your house you know what I'm saying so you're going to have more clutter over there more noise on CB whereas MERS again It's going to be very localized, but it's going to work really well for you. MERS and ham radio, this is a, so I got both. I got all of this.

MERS, no license, no test, no fees, nothing. But you have lower power gear, and you have a more limited selection of radios and whatnot to use. Ham radio, we're going to get there one of these days. I don't know how long it's going to take. We're going to get there, though. So, like, the capacity and capabilities of ham radio, you can't even really compare them to MERS. Okay. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like, gosh, what is the, F1 racing is so popular now.

It's kind of like comparing if ham radio is F1 racing, then MERS radio would be your kid's hot wheel. Okay. It's that different in the capabilities. they both work the same way but the ham's going to give you so much more of the same way stuff okay and but with that said MERS acts a lot like a section of ham radio which is very popular with the hobbyist and the reason being because it works so freaking well so MERS is awesome and I'll tell you just flat out not everybody needs ham radio not everybody needs GMRS you got little kids, you probably don't want a CB radio laying around talking. So MERS is a great place

for you to start, especially for you and your family. And we're going to talk about another great family service in the next show with FRS. But we're not there yet. So you don't have to buy anything. I'm just trying to educate you. So here we go. What do you need to do next? If you think this is your, it's going to fit for you, but you still don't know, just hit me up and we'll talk about it. But the fact is you have to start with your antennas. So you're you're like, okay, we have a farm in Iowa, and I want to be able to talk to my neighbor who lives, you know, a mile and a half across the fields. Put an antenna up.

He puts an antenna up, and you guys have a virtual intercom between your houses. And let's just say you're not that person, but you want to use MERS, and you want to use it around your neighborhood in Kenosia, Wisconsin. Put you an antenna on the outside of your house, mount it to your chair, Chimney, bring your coax in your house. You can plug it into a handheld radio or a base station that's suitable. And you can talk to your neighborhood. You can have a family neighborhood connectivity there if you choose to.

We'll have some links again in our show notes. We've already put those in there before. We've got a storefront in Amazon with some gear too, just for MERS. That's probably what I'll link because that's really going to get you going down that road. If you're interested in this one particular service, yeah, some stuff there. that I think you would like. Some things you've got to do. You've got five channels.

Everybody's got to be on the same channel. You can't be on channel one and your kid on channel three and you're not going to hear each other because you're talking on different frequencies. And then just make sure that, you know, you're doing it the right way. No repeaters, no digital voice. And I know some of you guys are doing stuff. Okay. But I'm talking to people who aren't.

So that's the rules. Two watts. 60 feet. Um, man, what else I want to say here? Um, there's, there's just the, there's some great accessories out there like Derek's ZBM2 whip antenna. Um, got the, got the stuff in the storefront for the MERS on Amazon. I'm also adding a roll up antenna for GMRS and MERS together. So, uh, we have the ham radio bands frequency antennas up there. Now the roll ups. And I've got a couple to put up for MERS and GMRS.

So if you're looking for something in that field, let me know. I haven't got them on the site yet, but they're going up in a couple of days. I got two of them here. I want to give them a test to see how we like them. But they roll up antennas. You can put them in your pouch. You can put them in your plate carrier. Put them in your backpack.

You can put them in your diaper bag. It doesn't matter. But we'll increase your radio capabilities because you've increased your antenna. Hey, the Family Connect system webinar is coming real soon. if you haven't signed up now's the time. If you think you want to get your ham radio license, check the show notes out in here. I've put together a challenge. It's a free challenge, and you guys can sign up, and it'll be daily encouragement

from me to you to help you get licensed if you want to go that route. Ham's not for everybody. I need to say that like every show. I'm not here to make every listener a ham radio operator, because not every listener to this program or in America or the United States or, well, that's the same place. I meant to say the world, not everybody needs to be a ham radio operator. Maybe some one or two people in your group, but not everybody.

So don't think that that's where I'm headed because these services that we're talking about are great for prep, they're great for preppers, and they'll serve you well if you will allow it to. All right. So here's the deal. MERS is like the gray man's radio frequencies. Merr's is like the gray man's radio dream unless everybody listening to this program goes out and starts talking it all the time, then we've blown it up. It's not flashy, but I've proven

here on my farm for the last 15 years it's worked great. And, you know, it's reliable. It's easy. It's reliable. It gets to the trees. If you have it, you'll use it and you'll like it. I promise. It's a really great radio service. I don't really have anything else to say before I just continue to repeat myself. So I'm going to leave it. there and say thank you for being here. If you have any questions, feel free to DM, IAM, email, comment on YouTube, whatever you guys want to do. I'd love to hear from you. I appreciate hearing from you. Thank you for listening, sharing this with your friends, of course, and helping them get on board to get in their communications, your communications, your family's communications lined up and ready

to go, not because we're afraid, but because we don't know what's happening. We're in the middle the hurricane season when this is recorded, and their storm's already brewed. So guys, thank you for listening. If I can help you, please let me know. Check out the show notes and the blog for this one. It'll have all the links we've mentioned in there. But until next time when we'll start a new series, probably FRS, I'll just say, save me through, y'all, God bless.

Thank you.