The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Comms Is Still Sorcery

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcastSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, or the Matter of Facts Podcast*The MoF boys are joined by Sam, fellow radio nerd that Andrew met at one of MDFI's HAM radio classes to talk more about comms for the prepared citizen, and why everyone should probably take some time to invest the time and attention into this bit of sorcery.https://www.instagram.com/tonks_fal/https://trainmdfi.com/Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matter Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwfpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Rabelais, and my co-host Andrew Bobo is on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. And welcome back to the Matter Facts Podcast. I might be muting myself every now and then because I've caught a cold again. It's not going to kill me. Andrew's rolling his eyes and telling me be a man and get over it and I will.

You're always sick. First of all, it's allergy season down here. And second of all, my wife had a cold and I kind of live with her. Huh? When is it not allergy season in the South? For about four weeks between January and February when everything dies. But I die gross. Anyway, we have a guest, Sam. You and Andrew have met each other in person, so he actually knows what you look like. I'm just going to envision someone with glorious facial hair and a bursting knowledge of amateur radio. How close was I?

That sounds pretty close. Yeah. So introduce yourself to the listeners, man. As much as I know about you at this stage is Trek said i should have you on the show and that's really about all the endorsement i need and you apparently teach people how to talk to people using sorcery yep i uh i teach radios with mdfi with their bow thing basics course um i use radios every day and kind of just fell in love with them back in high school and i've been part of ham ever since going on 10 years now on and off um how things got really big back during covid and and people kept asking me how to use them so i i built this kind of course to teach them how

to use them yeah it's a it's a good course because uh i i should actually i should try i should just take it again because it was a course that got me really interested in learning radios and i was like all about it for like a month and then i'm just like i got then as time went on and i really don't have anybody to talk to so i kind of was like meh so now i'm like oh well just kind of focus on other things but so can i assume that this is my license to bully you into getting back in amateur radio no because i still can't talk to you over it so but you might there are ways well yeah if i got like high frequency stuff except i'm not invested in hf so that's not going to do any good exactly so that means you've got to get invested in hf see my problem my problem in like andrew and i've already had this conversation

sam and i think you and i might have talked about it offline, but what drove me into GMRS really was the fact that there are two people that are my wife and daughter, and they are by default members of my group. And if I can't talk to them on it, it's not useful to me. Your GMRS will now get in hand so that you can talk to further people. And I love that. Your GMRS will now get HAM so that you can talk to further people away. Well, see, that's part of the gig. But the reason I'm getting more invested in GMRS is mostly because it allows me to talk to the two of them. And a GMRS license covers, like, the whole family, basically, whereas a HAM license really only covers you. GMRS is, like, a really nice low low barrier of entry we talked about it offline and

you know it's 40 bucks for the license and then you can get a gmrs radio and with gmrs you can go up to 50 watts of transit power whereas like frs and mers are limited to like two two watts you can get a lot out of a really cheap radio. Yeah, I mean, I personally, I think GMRS is only real, I think the only real downside for GMRS other than the fact that, like, because it's channelized, you are kind of like, you know, I could see where in a large metro area you could get to the point where you can't find a free channel to talk on because there could potentially be so many people talking on a limited number of channels but i also think that like despite its very nature because it's uhf you're always going to be a little bit range limited by that but i'll be honest like in in the time in the short time i've gotten really heavily invested in gmrs and uhf and i've started learning more and more about it, I've been very impressed by the distance it will transmit, which I think is because I came into this with very realistic expectations. You know what I mean? Like when you get the bubble pack radios from Walmart and they say they'll talk 35 miles, and I just want to strangle whoever wrote it on the box,

because I'm like, there's no way on earth this thing is going to go 35 miles not even in lab conditions not even on the surface of the moon it's not possible i don't know i think like even in the the city you'd be surprised by how empty those gmrs channels are even in areas where there's like a really decent amount of radioactivity it's it's still those that are really active in radio typically have their ham license and they're on repeaters whereas the GMRS it's pretty quiet

yeah and I mean I guess that's kind of what I have noticed is that like usually when I'm just bumping around town I'll flip my radio on I'll flip the mobile in my truck on and I'm dialed into

the nearest large-scale repeater, which is in New Orleans. I mean, that's, I'm two and a half miles north of Lake Pontchartrain plus 25 miles, give or take, to the other side of the lake to where that repeater's located. So, like, I would never say, I would always say that with a 20-watt mobile, I'm within the range of that repeater because thank God it's 600 feet up in the air, but I'm not really, I'm not, I'm not firmly within the umbrella under which I can get a strong signal all the time. Like depending on where in town I am, I can't transmit to it, but I can still hear it sometimes. But a majority of the traffic I hear on that is actually coming in off of GMRS

Live, because that repeater is hooked up to a GMRS Live node. When I listen to local repeater traffic where people are identifying that they're from like Metairie, Marrero, and some of the bergs in New Orleans, that's a very small group, and once you

get off of that repeater channel on the simplex, you're right. I mean, it's, it's pretty quiet. The, the new like internet connected repeaters are bad-ass. You can get into all sorts of different areas.

Cause they're just, they're just connected to the internet. So you can talk to like, I, I, I talked to some guy that was out in utah through repeater last week but obviously you know my uhf radio cannot reach that far so it's all it's all just through the internet repeater it's awesome yeah when i first got my

mobile stood up and i uh really i quickly radio checked it before I like started drilling holes and really stuffing stuff down. But I did a quick repeater check just to see if anybody was listening and had a real quick conversation with a guy from Florida. And again, it wasconnected GMRS repeaters that are networked together via the internet to be able to chat back and forth literally across the country. I mean the capability is there to do it. The only problem with that, which I pointed out the first time we talked about comms and I'll continue to point it out, is if you pump it out into the airwaves, it's not private. Like anybody that tells you you can have private comms minus some really inventive work, it's just not there. It's not there for radio. Like if you spit it up into the atmosphere, somebody could be listening.

Yeah, it can get into like some forms of digital that are like talk rooms. Yeah, you can get into some forms of digital that are like talk rooms, but those are really just filtering out other radios and not blocking yours from getting out. You can get into the, oh, what's it called? Astro 25 Motorola form of encryption, but that's illegal according to the FCC. Mm-hmm. Yeah. encryption, but that's illegal according to the FCC. Yeah. I mean, there are a great many things that piss the FCC off. In the interest of not upsetting three-letter agencies, I will only say that everything I've ever read in the FCC's rules pretty clearly dictates in an emergency situation, everything is green.

You know what I'm saying? Like if you are calling for help or if it is an emergency, you are greenlit to stamp on every rule to get on whatever frequency you want to do whatever you have to do so you can call for help. So I'm not saying that as license for people to ignore the FCC's regulations. I'm just saying that if it's an emergency, like, you know, take the rule book and temporarily put it in the circular bin and do what you gotta do.

Yeah. It's, it's cool that they have that rule written in. It's, it's, if you have it, use it. Yeah. Although the, even that being said though, like I get, I cringe whenever I hear, I cringe whenever I hear people that, that get said, though, like I get I cringe whenever I hear I cringe whenever I hear people that that get into amateur radio, whether it's Merz or GMRS or ham, they get the radio. They may or may not get the license. And then the next thing they say is, well, I'll figure it out when when the flag goes up. You know, I'm saying like, I don't want to invest the time to learn this thing.

I'll take the time to learn to use this thing in the middle of an emergency. And I immediately get really squeamish about that. Like that's the whole reason why I was, I've been really particular with my wife and daughter. Like we've been using FRS radios mostly for years. And if for no other reason than just the fact that like, if you don't use the dag and thing, you don't know how to use it properly. And i've been teaching my daughter since she was about i don't

know seven or eight like hey this is how you change channels this is radio etiquette you have to hold you have to hold the ptt down for a count count to one before you start talking like basic radio stuff because i want her to know how to use that. And now that we've made this move into GMRS, the radios have a lot more buttons. They're a little bit more complicated. And I am having to tell my 11 year old now, almost teenager, who wants nothing to do with this thing. I'm like, look, you're going to have to learn enough of this to get by because I might need to talk to you and your mom might need to talk to you and your mom might need to talk to you. You don't have to dig into it like I have as a hobby. You don't have to, you know,

like learn how to program this silly thing, but you have to know how to make it work so you can call your dad if you need to. And, you know, I've taken, I've taken a lot of the same, I've taken a lot of the same personality with her and with, with communications as I have with a lot of the same personality with her and with communications as I have with a lot of other preparedness skills where I've said if it's not your thing, you don't have to learn as much of it as I have, but you have to learn enough to get by. When she gets a call for a cell phone,

give her a ham radio instead, or a GMRS radio instead of a cell phone. Then that's a great point for anyone who wants to get into radios for preparedness. Just try to go a week without your phone and just take notes of like oh i really wish i could have contacted x person i know like when at&t went down there are a lot of people that just couldn't couldn't tell their friends or family what was going on dude there were people that were acting like acting like they were going to jump out of windows

when when they couldn't check their instagram status like i don't know like i i have this personality where like because of my job and because of the things i do for a living like i am forced to be connected to all my co-workers during business hours my phone is tech is ringing with text messages and calls throughout the day. I have a focus on my iPhone set that literally prohibits anyone from contacting me except for Andrew, my wife, my daughter, and like my family. And that's it. Everybody else has to wait until 3.30 in the afternoon because I just can't take the time away. And the only reason Andrew's on that list, even though he never calls me because he doesn't like me very much, is, well, I am always working, but my point is

the only reason you're on the list is because sometimes you reach out to me in the middle of the day and it's podcast-related stuff. It's stuff that I can take like five minutes and answer a quick question and I can move on. You and I are going to sit there and have a 45-minute long conversation during move on. You and I are going to sit there and have a 45 minute long conversation during work hours. You hang up. No, you hang up. You make it sound like we're dating, which is

weird. I guess we're. But anyway. Awkward. Awkward. But yeah, I mean, but because of all that, like the idea of not being able to call people on my cell phone is actually amazingly refreshing. And I,

I look forward to going camping because I'm going to be so far in the middle of nowhere. My cell phone is not going to work reliably. Like that to me is a good time when there's nothing that runs on electrons that works. It's just me and maybe the humming of the compressor on my 12-volt fridge and, you know, coffee and cigars and peace and quiet and birds and squirrels. But we do live in a hyper-connected age

where everybody wants to be able to reach into their pocket and pull out their cell phone and call people from around the country. And I find that given the world we live in, conversations about comps inevitably go in one of two directions. Either A, there's that group of people who are so overwhelmed by the information, they don't know, like it's difficult to get the information across to them in a format they can accept and digest. Or you get the people who say, I have a cell phone. You know what I'm saying, Sam? Even after the AT&T outage, it's still so difficult to get people to understand that they need to have a backup form of communication

because cell phones are so reliable and they are so ubiquitous. Bearing in mind that, okay, you're 10 years past high school. Andrew and I probably got at least 10 years on you. But, like, I didn't get my first cell phone until I was 19 years old. I paid for it myself. I, like, I grew up in this weird time between the millennials and Gen Xers where like people didn't have cell phones were something that only a few people had. Like beepers were more common back then when I was younger. And it was this time when the only way you were going to find your kids half the time was to yell out the front door or like call their friends and see where they, you know, find out who had seen them last.

They, you know, find out who had seen them last. And to go from where I grew up to now where everybody has a cell phone, they almost always work. Like even in the most secluded areas, can you get one or two bars on a cell phone signal? It's hard to get through to some people and make them understand like, hey, that thing might stop working one day. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I like a couple months before I had started the class I had this my phone died just

bricked itself and I wasn't able to get one for a week and that entire week I was like oh I really wish I could tell my girlfriend I can't come home right after work and I just had no way to do that and I think like that experience alone would be a really good

eye-opener for some where it's all the very small sort of communications that you can't do that sometimes hit the most i mean for somebody trying to get into uh ham i mean what's one of the easiest ways for someone to get into ham i this it might sound silly but youtube there is so many good things on youtube to look into and there's there are some bad channels out there like anything on youtube but uh what a lot of people do on YouTube and those channels is that they'll actually show what they're doing with the radio that you can't always get from books or other publications online.

And a radio to recommend, basically, that's pretty easy to use is the Baofeng U UV5R, correct? Yeah. There's a lot of, uh, contention on in certain communities about the UV5R, but there's so much stuff out there for it. Books, uh, YouTube channels that are just dedicated to that, that it's, it's really easy to get a baseline for it

and and start using it right away the uh i know there's that nc scout guy that has complete manuals on a gorilla guide to beofang radio yeah for the uv5r um no we talked about on this show not too long ago it's a cool book it's not just for the Bayofang UB5R either like there's discussions in there about ComSec and about how to build jungle antennas

it's an awesome book for anybody that hasn't read it there's also the technician class ham radio prep books by Gordon West those things help me more than anything else the way the questions and explanations are broke down are awesome so what uh i mean what's what's a common mistake that you find that people do with the ham? What's one of the mistakes that you find?

Honestly, it's the failure to prep beforehand. Radios are really easy, and I covered in the class for about half of it, is just getting the radio ready before you even step out the door or go to go use it. radio ready before you even step out the door or or go to go use it um a lot of my friends in particular will show up um if we're out camping whatever and just hand the radio to me to to program it right i can't i don't have i i can't get it set up to the same level as mine because i either don't have my computer or i don't have all the things to program it beyond the front panel programming to get it to the same level.

Especially when it comes to digital radios like the Yaesu's, DMR radios, stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, that does bear pointing out like that's one of the things that i was very insistent on when i when i got into radios was i wanted to learn how to program as much of them as humanly possible by hand on the front panel using them you know using the keypad on the mic like i never wanted to be completely subservient to have and have a program cable and a laptop to change something on these things. But I am finding the more I dig into it, way above and beyond just ease of use to type it all out and then push a program.

It is like with a lot of these radios, I'm finding there are notable features that you will not access and they cannot be done easily through the keypad. Like having a laptop and a programming cable and knowing how to do that is definitely a skill that's worth having. But I think it's also super important for people to understand how to operate the radio beyond turn it on and hit the button. You know what I mean? Yeah. beyond turn it on and hit the button you know what i mean yeah when you get into the more uh less user-friendly radios like some of the motorolas are really difficult to program even on the computer the the software is less than ideal or even my yesu um mobile radio i really struggled getting that one set up.

Just because I didn't have all these publications that are out there like the UV5R. You just have the user manual. That is one thing that bears pointing out. I have gotten very heavily invested in a web forum and several Facebook groups specific to GMRS. And I see, at least once a week, I see a person come in who's looking for help programming a radio or setting up an antenna or doing something. And the first thing they butt heads with is the fact that they don't have any local friends who can help walk them through the process like the communities around individual pieces of gear or around ham and gmrs are so robust and at least in my experience with gm on the gmrs side they tend to be filled with people that

really do want to be helpful and help you figure out your problem you know like i haven't found a ton of gatekeepers in the GMRS world. No, I think a lot of the guys at radio want to talk gear. They want to help you out the best they can. Kind of like the preparedness world, man. I mean, we've had that discussion several times about how you show up around a campfire and start talking techniques or gear whatever else and we're going to get into it pretty quickly because like these are just these are communities that don't like to hoard the information they have they want to spread it they

want it to grow because like if we don't then these communities all die with us and that's just not going to work it's not why any of us got into these. It's not why you started teaching. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you didn't want to spread your knowledge, you would have kept it to yourself. Right. Yeah. It's,

it kind of, it goes hand in hand with the gun world, man. You want to talk about the shiny toys. You want to show other people how to use it. Even just so you can talk to them later about it, hopefully on the radio. Yeah. So talk me through, like, I'm curious how you went from, you know, like, in high school you got bit by the radio bug. And how did you transition from that to standing up in front of other curious radio nerds and teaching classes about how to use a Bayo Fang?

So I was part of the Civil Air Patrol when I was cool. Really big into it. And where the radio bug bit me was in the Search and Rescue Academy. like the search and rescue academy where we that's where all of our communications through a radio that was bounced from an airplane back to someone else or just from person to person and i uh i went into the workforce and where now i manage um 50 some radios at work and i see the same thing over and over and over where person doesn't care what i'm trying to tell them at the beginning of the day when i'm tanning the radio and then they have to come back to me with like within an hour it's like oh my radio doesn't work i just tuned to the wrong channel

so it's going from that, and then Trek actually pulled me out of our crowd because he saw me with some sort of radio coming on. I don't even remember what it was. And he just asked for help with his radios and off it went. Somehow that

origin story doesn't shock me. trek trek just saw you with a piece of gear on and immediately like it was like that's a person that knows something i need to know but it's pretty much what happened i i don't even remember what it was but he's he invited me up one day to talk about it with him and some of the other cadre and off we went. Yeah, I actually, I remember, because I remember I was helping him around his house one day and we were talking about ham, you know, ham and all that stuff. And he, I remember him telling me about the, about you, you know,

about how he had you come up and talk to him and his guys and you know you guys he basically ran you through a bunch of stuff and how to do it and and then uh i remember him saying i remember him saying something about a class and then all of a sudden like popped up on their website was like hey the uh ham basics ham 101 you know kind of thing so yeah it was uh interesting to see. It was really cool. I mean, it was really cool seeing, like I said, I took your, I think I took one of your first classes last year and you, you break things down really well to where it was, it was easy to understand. I think you got some really good feedback from people. And I mean,

I hope that people kind of took it and ran with it and learned more. I mean, I know, like I said, it kind of got me it kind of got a bug in me. And, you know, I need to I don't know, maybe I just need to connect with you some more since you're not far from me. But, you know, just to kind of get back into it. I can't peer pressure him very well from halfway across the country. See, with the proper UHF VHHF setup, I bet you could. We'll get that set up sometime. Yeah. That's the biggest thing is just got to figure out how to do it.

If I start doing it, I'm just so hands-on to where I hate – I'm not big into just reading, and I hate watching. I don't mind watching videos every once in a while, like YouTube and stuff like that, and the how-tos and everything. But when it comes to doing it, I'm just like, can someone just come show me? I learn more when someone's actually showing me, and I can do it hands-on versus, all right, I'm just going to read this manual, and hopefully I don't fall asleep. Yeah, I mean, it is also one of the cool parts

about ham is that you can you can kind of just try it out you know if you both have a set frequency and during certain weather conditions you're like all right well i'm gonna try it right now tell me if you hear me that's uh i know me and my buddy have done that just from here to uh another town about an hour hour and a half south of me and sometimes you can sometimes you can't just with just 50 watts from my my man pack he just has a a hand talky so he can't talk back but he can hear it sometimes interesting no i mean that that that is i guess one thing that i feel like that's the one place where like we have to we have to the conversation has to turn at some point is like you know our podcast is largely focused around like the preparedness community and by extension we dip our toe into

lots of different subjects but like from the preparedness standpoint, like I think what a lot of our listeners are probably concerned about. And I know that I've had at least one who has expressed like, I know I need to do this. I know I need to invest time in it, but it's overwhelming. I don't understand it. But like most people in the preparedness community are looking for how do I talk to people that I'm not standing right next to. And so when we start talking about like off-grid communications, we're accepting the fact that cell phones, modern conveniences and incredible pieces of tech that they are, are all beholden to a network of antennas scattered around the country. As a matter of fact,

I was talking to my wife the other day because we were driving up to my brother and my sister-in-law's for a baby shower. And we just happened, like in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi, we just happened to pass a cell phone tower. And I pointed out to my wife, probably more information than she wanted to know, but I started explaining to her, like, why the antennas are arranged the way they are and why they're the size they are. And she glazed over, but she humored me. But anyway, but like I pointed out to her, I'm like, you know, you have to understand that like

the frequency range that cell phones operate in is even higher than UH. It's even higher than like GMRS radios. It's, it's above UHF frequencies. And as a result, the range is even less. So the only way you have a cell phone signal everywhere is because these towers are scattered all over the place. Like you can't go anywhere in the freaking civilized world and not find a couple of them. And so I'm always pointing out to her, I'm like, every one of those towers is an opportunity to have service or not have service. Every one of those towers is an opportunity to get on this side of a hill or a mountain, and now you don't have a signal. Like, I'm just trying to get people to understand that, like, yes, as ubiquitous as cell phones are and as well as they work, they're still based on an infrastructure that is incredibly complicated. still based on an infrastructure that is incredibly complicated and if the AT&T outage is taught as anything, an infrastructure that is so complicated it doesn't take much to choke

it to death. Right. I mean, a cell phone is just radio. That's all it is. And then you can decentralize it into your, now instead of relying on a different network, you just have your own network. Instead of lower frequency. You know, the police radios, they use a frequency range that is very similar to cellular.

And they all rely on different repeaters to do the exact same thing. Yeah. Chad Snow is in the chat saying, I'd be interested in talking to a local guy about ham. I'm just south of Bobo. You should look into MDFI's ham radio class, and then you can beat Sam. But anyway.

But yeah, I mean, so we talked about kind of like where you where you envision people getting started and you know i do i feel like the baofang whether no matter what flavor you're talking about if you're talking about ham or gmrs i feel like the baofang gets a gateway drug man it's the pot that gets you in all the hard stuff because they're freaking stupid cheap. They're not the hardest thing on earth to freaking work with, and there's just such a community base out there for you to lean on to learn how to use them.

But beyond that initial step of getting a Baofeng handheld, where would you send a person to kind of navigate that initial step of getting a, getting a Baofeng handheld, like how do you, how do, where would you send a person to kind of navigate them through if they start there and they say,

I want more. My, my next recommendation is always like you have the Baofeng. If you then look into a more robust analog, like a mobile radio or something, that opens a bunch of doors. They also look into a digital hand talkie. It kind of depends on the person and from where they're coming from. If it's just Joe Schmo from work, I just like, all right, well, how about GMRS? How about a GMRS mobile radio set up in your truck?

And that usually gets people going pretty quickly. It's such a low barrier of entry. It's so much fun to find someone and talk to them. And they're super easy to set up. Yeah, do you feel, I mean, do you feel, well, I was about to ask the question of, do you feel like GMRS is easier to set up than HAM? And I don't know about programming wise, but like, you feel, I mean, do you feel, well, I was about to ask the question of do you feel like GMRS is easier to set up than ham? And I don't know about programming-wise, but, like, you know, the thing about GMRS that makes it so user-friendly is the fact that it is channelized. And those radios come out of the box set up for those channels.

I mean, you're literally a couple of tones away from being able to talk to a repeater straight out of the box. you're literally a couple of tones away from being able to talk to a repeater straight out of the box. And I just don't think ham radios are out of the box that ready to go and that user-friendly. No, I mean with your standard ham radio, you're looking at a blank canvas. Whereas like a GMRS radio, there's at least some numbers to color by where you have your channels. They're super easy to find. If you type in GMRS repeater, they're super easy to find. If you type in GMRS repeater, they're super easy to find. They just come out of the box ready to go for you. Just like you said.

Yeah, and I mean there are online, at least for GMRS, there are online forums that have lists of all the local repeaters and everything, and even for those that don't publish their tones, most radios give you the ability to search for a tone once you lock onto a frequency. So I'm just saying, you don't necessarily have to talk to the repeater owner and get the tone. You can figure it out. Without having to brute force your way through all the frequencies. Don't do that to yourself.

You'll hate yourself really, really badly if you try that. But yeah, repeater book is a really nice resource for frightened repeaters. What you can also do is if you go to different repeaters, you can ask other people for the tones for whatever repeater you're trying to get to. I've done that a few times now for a repeater near me where I wasn't sure what the tone was. I went to the repeater close to it and just called around. Whenever someone else was talking, I'd wait until they finished,

call up, ask for the tone, and I got it. Someone else knew it. Yeah, and on the GMRS side, I usually default back to mygmrs.com ask for the tone and I got it. Someone else knew it. Yeah. And on the GMRS side, like I usually default back to my GMRS.com because they have a very, very robust listing of repeaters. And I have not found one yet where anybody was really shy or persnickety about giving me the tones on request.

Matter of fact, Andrew, I found a repeater. I don't know if I'll be able to hit it from prepper camp in September but it's close enough that I'm going to try and I reached out to that repeater owner and basically just told me like hey I'm going to be in your neck of the woods end of September can I get your tone so I can try to link up to your repeater he gave it to me said hey look forward to talking to you of course the other reason i reached out to him is because when we get a little bit closer i'm going to politely inquire what simplex frequency can i get on in that area and i

have the least chance of pissing somebody off if we have a shite load of people from prepper camp all talking back and forth yeah i'm saying like i suspect if we get a shite load of people from Prepper Camp all talking back and forth. You know what I'm saying? Like, I suspect if we get on, like, 1 through 7, you know, like the 5-watt channels, I imagine we'll probably keep our noses pretty clean there. But at some point, I kind of want to get onto the 50-watt channel and find, and, like, you know, stand up my simplex repeater and see how it does for police and the whole campground my only worry then is is that if i if i wind up screwing with another repeater i'm not really being a good um good guest in their area but i wish i could uh i mean i guess

maybe you could figure it out with, again, YouTube University. But basically, like, set up our own repeater at Prepper Camp to have got, you know, to basically connect. Everybody could just connect to and, you know, you keep it. I mean, basically, it's try to, you know, try to make it to where you could try to keep it. Within reason, like monitored or secluded so not just not just anybody can log in or can uh can grab it it's uh just basically our group or something like that but i mean i basically plan to do that with the gmrs but sam i mean so what's your what you what's your license level that you have just uh technician just technician yep are you going to go higher yeah yeah i've been i took the winter to study to go for extra but we'll see we'll see i didn't do too well on the old uh practice tests yeah it'll take time

yeah no i'm sure it will um so i mean anybody who like so i guess if you can explain for the listeners who might not know what the different levels of the uh of the ham licensure and then what it can cover. Yeah, there are three licenses now. It used to be four, but it got rolled into different certifications or classes, however you want to phrase it. And with each new class that you get, you get more privileges to different frequencies and bandwidths. So I don't quite remember what the extra...

Yeah, I mean, extra can go pretty high. If I had my dad handy, he could probably tell you this off the top of his head. He's had an extra license since I was born. I'm going to get him on the show one of these days. He's a very private person, but, you know,

I'm determined I'm going to get him on the show one day. Yeah, for the amateur extra, they get like 80 meters, 40 meters, some really HF stuff that is really cool that I'd love to try out sometime. That's really pushing the distance with that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, it is pretty crazy with what you can do with ham. And I'm even GMRS with it, you know, how far you can go with the stretch and what you can do.

But, I mean, yeah, that's the thing is, I guess it would have been interesting to have this available just like, you know, when you got hit by that hurricane, Phil. And basically it's like okay well try to reach out to in-laws and stuff to make sure you're doing okay well it's one of those things where if we had the high frequency to where i know you were out of power but once you got the jenny and all that stuff or even currently you know it's it's one of those things like if you got the generator then you had some gear or even your pack and you have it set up with a battery backup and all that stuff uh what you know basically like how far you can reach and what you can do yeah and that's also part of my motivation for the project i'm working on is is the fact that like

i i can't see myself ever putting up a really tall tower in the backyard because you know hurricanes high winds trees falling i don't have to go back through everything I lived through during Hurricane Ida. But let's say I had had a hundred or 150 foot tower in the backyard, that damn thing would have been sitting on my house after Ida, you know? So like, that's just not going to happen. But what I do think there is, you know, like a good discussion to be had is for the person who says, I want post-emergency off-grid communications. And in that case, something like, you know, something like a 20-watt mobile or even a 50-watt mobile that you can run off of a battery or you can run off of a Jackery or something, run off a solar setup.

You can take an antenna and string it up into a string it up into a tree. And you can punch a pretty reasonable distance with a very simple setup that you can sit that you can put up and take down and not have to be the radio nerd with the hundred foot tower in your backyard. Like, no, no offense to the radio nerds among us. It's just that I imagine that there's a large percent of our listeners that look at this like they do most other things. It is for the utility that I

am interested in it. It's not for the hobby necessarily. So I don't think there's a lot of people amongst our listenership that would be super interested in like, you know, putting up a tower and all that. But I do imagine there's quite a few that would be like, I would like to know how to get an attendant up in a tree after the power is out so I can talk to a person further away than I can by shouting at them. Like that's where I see a lot of this getting really, really useful, really, really quickly. But yeah, so Sam, back to what you were talking about earlier, when we kind of nudge you away from a person that like a person is just beginning. Where do they where do we where do you think they're going to wind up if they get, quote-unquote, serious about amateur radio?

Like, you know, I know that progression, if I'm judging it based off of my own, it's start with handhelds or HTs. Usually they wind up getting a mobile shoved into their vehicle because that's the next step down this gateway drug. Where does a person end up i mean once they get much past that entry level i i fear they'll they'll end up like me trying to uh really push the the low wattage as far as i can um i do see a lot of guys getting into HF. There's a lot of data that people can push through HF. The tech prepper

on Instagram and YouTube is a fantastic example of that. He has an entire blog that he does through HF radio and just pushing, you know, data packets. Um, GPS with radio is also one of those next big steps. Like my, uh, my AC radio has GPS in it that I've been trying to figure out for a while.

Yes. There's a pretty, uh while. Yesus are pretty crazy. The Yesu FTM 200 actually has it where in the little screen, it'll actually point me in the direction of whatever station I'm receiving from. In the little screen, when I'm picking up or Peter 50 miles or whatever away, it can actually point me towards it like you go to the direction finding radio. How it works, I do not know.

That's interesting because it, I mean, you know, that you think about triangulation and everything. And then that just is like, hey, go left. Like, go this way, you know, and then it's I'm assuming, you know, as it as you start getting closer, if you turn the wrong direction or something, you know, it'll it'll do something. But or show something different or, you know, point, you you know try to point you in the right direction but but yeah that's just interesting for thinking about triangulation or even you know you think apocalypse scenario kind of thing and everybody's all paranoid about the government uh triangulating their uh their position for some reason i mean you got to think about the other people that are out there that are just listening to what your conversation is over the radio.

And then there, if your radio is able to say, hey, go this way, the amount of people that it's people that are going to get. They will find. Yeah. When you when you get into like direction finding with radios, it can turn out to be pretty easy. One of the big things we did back in high school was like Fox hunts with radios. Super fun. And all you need is a directional antenna.

That's all you need. And you just, you just follow the, the, the breadcrumb trail. That and an attenuator for when you get a little too close. Yep. But once you use like like SDRs are pretty

pretty cool you can use those to look at where people are talking without ever being on a radio that's my that's my next big project I'm working on is getting

an SDR set up on an old like factory blank Android phone and then having that connected to a directional antenna. Hmm. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah.

Well, and the other thing that's worth pointing out since we just tripped over that subject of like, people are nervous about how, how do I prevent someone being able to find me with a directional antenna, like literally Fox hunting me. But the other thing I point out, and this is covered in,

um, NC scouts book really, really really well where he talks a lot. He has I think a whole big chunk of the book is all about communication security. But he talks directly about the fact that like you will give yourself away just by what you communicate over the radio. You know what I'm saying? Like if you take my town for example. If I were to talk to my wife, key up on frequency and say, Hey, where are you? And she said, I'm at the Walmart. Guess what? There's, she has a, you have a one in two chance of figuring out where she is based on that one piece of information because there's only two Walmarts in the town. Okay, three if you want to go like way up north of us. But the point is, it's like, you know, people just don't think about, people get all wrapped around the axle about what if I key up and somebody has a directional antenna and an attenuator and they can figure out what direction I'm in.

And I'm like, what happens if the person you're talking about doesn't understand the basis of communication security and they tell everybody who happens to be listening, which could be anybody, what street corner I'm sitting at. You know what I'm saying? Like it's – I think it's funny to me because I see a lot of the same parallel. It's like the conversations I had to have with my daughter about like internet security and about – like when we were young, we always got told like don't talk to strangers. And with my daughter playing online games, we've had to talk about don't tell people your age, your gender. You can tell them your first name. That's it. They don't need to know your last name. They don't need to know what city or state you live in.

Like tell them nothing. And I've literally sat there and watched people through these, you know, try, like, try to chat with my daughter while she was playing like Among Us and stuff and say, Hey, where are you? And she'll say, she'll say earth. And just like totally, totally shut. Like, dude, I'm telling you, I've seen her go back and forth. Somebody like 12 or 11 messages. Where are you? Where do you live earth? How old are you older than one? I mean, just give them the most bull crap answers because she's already been told they're going to try to extract information from you. Don't let them. I cringe if anybody ever tries to interrogate this little girl, she's going to have them ready to jump out a freaking window because she's been trained to do this from a young age to give circuitous answers. answers. But I think that, I think it's a conversation worth having about it. It kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, Sam, is that like when you pick up a radio and you key up, there is no privacy. Whatever you pump out into the airwaves, somebody could be hearing.

And I feel like, I feel like people get a preconceived notion in their head about, well, I need to avoid this. I need to avoid that. And then I point out to them, like, you need to avoid saying things on the open airwaves that lets people find you or identify you if you don't want to be identified or found. Right. As long as you, you know, practice those rules and you just take a second to think about

however many frequencies are out there. There's a lot of frequencies that it's going to be really hard to find you if they got no information. Kind of like have reasonable expectations. Yeah. So what, I mean,

before we start wrapping up, I mean, I guess we got about 10 minutes or so, but I mean, so what's the, we got about 10 minutes or so, but, uh, I mean, what, so what's the, we talked about mistakes that some people make, uh, what's one of your mistakes that, uh, you look back now on your journey through ham. And, uh, you know, we always say that people, you know, basically Phil and I, we, this whole podcast, we've always tell people, you know, learn from our mistakes. Um, what's something that something that uh a mistake that you made that you wish you could go back to yourself and be like hey no don't do that or do you tell people uh you know don't do something um for me is there's been a few times

where we're gonna rely on our radios for like communication and then either myself or one of my friends didn't do the beforehand prep if i had to go back every time i'd make sure that that happens every time batteries are charged frequencies are in it's ready to go you know you know turn on your radio to to talk and then the radio doesn't turn on that's always been my big thing is making sure everything is ready beforehand this sounds like somebody is has been guilty of not planning ahead and it bit him in the ass before way too many times my friend as long as you learn from it eventually will count as a win but i think that's important though i mean because you'd like you are an instructor and as long as you learn from it eventually will count as a win. But I think that's important though. I mean, cause you'd like,

you are an instructor and I think that's important for an instructor to say, Hey, I did this. It bit me in the ass. Don't do that. Like, don't, don't learn from my miss. Don't learn the hard way from my mistake. Just take my word on it. It's a bad idea and don't do it. But I think that's like super refreshing because you know, talked about the gun community earlier the firearms community i don't want to say as a whole because it's not as a whole but there are a lot of instructors in the firearms community that are very guilty of this uh they only want to show themselves in the best possible light they never want to admit they make mistakes or be seen to make mistakes. And I just think it's super important to like, you know, square up with your students and tell them, hey, I goofed up.

It bit me in the butt. Don't do that. Learn from my mistakes. Do it this way because I think this way works better. And like you try to make sure that your students don't have to tread over the same broken ground you did to get to where you are. Like you want them to stand on your shoulders and go further than you did. Agreed. 100%. So for anybody, if you're in Michigan

or honestly if you just want to travel, MDFI is hosting you and so right now they they got two classes. One Saturday, May 11th in Mount Pleasant. And then another one Saturday, September 15th in Baldwin, Michigan. I don't think, yeah, I don't think, doesn't look like, it doesn't look like the Mount doesn't look like the mount pleasant one is sold out yet and it does not look like the bald one balden one is sold out yet either so um so yeah

get in on the get in on these and uh you said that uh barracks has reached out to you too yep yeah those should be in there hopefully soon so that I'll get all that worked out. Yeah. So Barrick 616, anybody familiar with Grand Rapids area, let's say it's a firearm range that you can indoor firearm range. You can go to, but they also have they also host classes as well. So you can go in there and track goes in there. MDFI teaches in there quite a bit. And they actually I think they do have a few other places, another couple of companies that come in. But if anybody is interested in your ham radio Bayofing basics, you guys can all go to

trainmdfi.com. And then if you go to courses at the top, under hosted courses, it's ham radio, Bayofang basics. That's the land navigation one, not that one. So courses, ham radio, Bayofang basics. So you can go to that or you can go to northernwoodstraining.com. That's actually where the class is being held is up at the northern woods

training facility now that track has so uh but yeah um are you are you on youtube do you should have you started have you thought about doing a youtube channel for this kind of stuff or is it just do you think that it's just there's so much out there already that it's not even worth it um i've thought about it and i'm probably going to in the future uh i've started working on a few things but it's not it's not out there yet but it will be um all right well where can uh where can people find you if they want to bug you or uh if they want to follow you on anything uh they can find me on instagram um Instagram. It's at T-O-N-K-S underscore F-A-L for an old gun I used to have.

You can hit me up on there. Also, yeah, that's actually it. Okay. Easy, bud. I'll have that down in the show description. I mean, insofar

as anybody that wants to learn more about ham radio, I encourage them to go and avail themselves of the knowledge because the scariest thing someone can say to me is I'll figure it out when I need it. Because in my experience, everybody that's ever said I'll figure it out usually doesn't figure it out when there's things like adrenaline and fear and everything else involved. when there's things like adrenaline and fear and everything else involved. So I wholeheartedly encourage you to go take Sam's class or a class in ham radio or read the fricking book or ask questions or do something. But I, Sam, I'm glad you came on because I really feel like we have, we have started taking this subject that,

you know, then the title of the show is comms is still sorcery, which is kind of a good natured jab at a friend of ours that has said comms is sorcery over and over and over. But I think we have to start demystifying it a little bit. Like people in the preparedness community really need to take hold of this subject and start figuring it out. And at least to the degree they feel like they have to, they need to start putting some things in place so that they can have a communications plan with people they need to communicate with. Couldn't agree more. All right.

Well, we'll go ahead and roll this one up so I can go kiss the green fairy on the lips and drown myself in NyQuil while Andrew makes fun of me for having a man cold. So matter of fact, podcast heading out the door. If you want to take Sam's class, check out train MDFI.com. If you want to harass him on Instagram, it's Tonks underscore foul, and I'll have all that in the show description and we'll talk to y'all another week. Bye everybody. See you. See you.