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When I was young, I wouldn't have followed this advice, but I'm older and if not wiser, at least I know a bit more. Don't go into remote areas alone. If you're traversing difficult terrain, do it one at a time so there'll be at least one party uninjured if an accident happens. Make sure someone who isn't going knows where you're going and when you expect to be back. If communication isn't impossible, arrange a check-in schedule with someone who isn't with you. Don't try to pet bears.

Your entry level ham license is very easy to obtain. About 8 to 12 hours of Q&A memorization or viewing Youtube videos and taking a 35 question test to show you understand the basics is all that's required. You can find a local ham group to help you study and do the test from the aarl.net website. Good luck, and get legal on using the full abilities of your radio.

If not friend, then why friend shaped? I think people underestimate moose, too. Saw a female moose and calf at a ski resort in Utah during the summer and the employees were trying to keep people far away from them. They are absolutely massive and have no problems stomping someone who gets too close.

Even with an InReach, you need to evaluate the situation and decide if it's the best solution in any given situation. [Trigger warning - really graphic gory stuff follows.] In 2019 I fell while hiking on a mountain in the Mojave Desert in California. To be specific, I was standing on a rock that decided to disintegrate. I lost my balance, windmilled wildly for a few seconds, realized the situation wasn't salvageable and that I was falling into a jumble of large boulders. I instinctively put my right hand (I'm nominally right-handed) on my neck to guard my spine. After I landed, I took stock of where I was and the condition I was in. I had fully broken both bones (radius and ulna) in my right forearm, with the bones sticking out. My knuckles were pretty scraped up and I wasn't sure if I'd broken anything there, either. I was not losing blood (although there was a lot of bleeding) and I could both feel my fingers and move them, so there was no risk of bleeding out and no apparent nerve / muscle damage. If you remember the Harry Potter movie where Harry breaks his arm and the crackpot wizard 'fixes' it by removing all the bones in his arm, that's about it, but with more blood and protruding bones. I got some of my army surplus emergency clotting powder (the yellowish stuff) out of my pack and dumped it on the spots where I was leaking blood. I snapped one of my hiking poles (I wasn't going to be able to use both of them, anyway) to create a makeshift splint and used one of those giant Target plastic bags (that they used to give out when shopping, and which I carried to port out any trash I made or found), poked a hole across the bottom to put my arm in, and put the handles over my head. FWIW, in the late 1970's I was on the volunteer first aid squad in the town I grew up in, and have also had more recent survival training). With the immediate emergency taken care of, I drank some water and took a pain pill from my pack and sat down on a less defective rock to take stock of the situation. I was WAY up on the side of a mountain, hours from the nearest hospital (as part of my pre-hike planning, I always take note of where the nearest urgent care / hospital / regional trauma center is). I had an InReach (and the SAR 50 plan that covers up to $50K in rescue costs) with me. However, I was in the middle of nowhere (Inyo County is twice the size of the state of Connecticut and has 18,500 people living it, none near me). I figured if I pushed the button, LifeFlight would send a helicopter from Pahrump, NV (the closest medical facility), land down on the flatlands near where the Jeep was parked, look up the mountain and go "NFW" and call out mutual aid from San Bernardino Mountain Rescue. Which, aside from being in another county and several hours away, I know those guys well and it would have been pretty embarrassing. They would have to carry a litter from the helicopter up the mountain to me, strap me into it, and have the helicopter fly up over me and drop a line down to hook onto the litter. So I decided to self-rescue. An hour and an half to get down the mountain to the Jeep, an hour across open desert and dirt roads, and another hour on paved roads to get to Pahrump. So, 3.5 hours total. I decided I could do that in less time than being rescued via the InReach, so that's what I did. With a fair amount of screaming in pain as I drove over bumpy areas. I was proven right about 6 months later when someone had a similar accident nearby, but closer to the nearest place where people lived (calling it a town would be vastly overstating things) and it took over 9 hours for LifeFlight and SB mutual aid to get that person to the same hospital I drove to. The moral of the story is that you need to be self-sufficient in the wilderness, and also be able to evaluate your situation and make the best decision possible based on the information you have and your training. If you're alone and unconscious or pinned and unable to move, nothing will save you. If you enlarge the attached picture, you can see red captions for "Where I Fell" and "Jeep" to get a feel for the situation I was in.

It kind of seems to me like so many social GMRS users are eager to shout out their call signs on the air. Why? is it like a radio-cool thing? Or you just genuinely want to shout out your home address to goobers with mustard stains on their shorts? It’s also legal to run it off in fast CW and ASSUREDLY no GMRS users would know how to deal with it. Legal. Your license situation is between you and the FCC. You don’t need to share it with every mouth breather on the air…

11.76dB 4w > 60w

It kind of seems to me like so many GMRS users are eager to police what other people do on the air. Why?

....penetration....penetration with or without lubrication, it won't change the price of noodles in Pandaland

I was in Sequoia a week or two ago and as we were driving around we came up on several people pulled off the road looking at a baby/small bear just off the road... Everyone was in their car.. except for ONE non-english speaking (spoke Russian or something) woman.. and her TODDLER trying to walk up to the bear to get pictures... Every time they got within about 5 yards the bear would trot away... I left before momma-bear came out to teach her a lesson about Darwin.

I spent 18 years in Alaska. You might be surprised how many people need to hear this.

I can hit a local repeater about 25 miles out with a 771 clone that I can't with the stock antenna but a 15" whip is annoying inside a vehicle. I also went down the "big antenna = maximum fars" rabbit hole but it turned out I don't really use it except to be a radio dork and listen to that one repeater - the stock antenna works fine like 90% of the time. I bought an even longer whip for ham stuff which did make a difference, but the biggest boost came from sticking that antenna on a mobile mag mount with 16' of coax and putting it out on my front porch. I'd say hold off on the bigger antenna unless your use case requires it. Edit: that said, the Abbree 771 was also like ten bucks so it's not going to break the bank if you want to pick one up just to mess around with it.

Line of sight you won't see a huge difference most of the time. It always comes down to when something is in your way. And the state I'm in is full of trees and hills and small mountains. The attenuation factor of the trees winter vs summer is something fierce. Signals in the winter making it with ease and those same setups in the summer not being able to touch the repeater. Did a job that was an hour away and in the winter I could talk with my wife most of the time through the Glastonbury repeater. As the leaves got on the trees my signal got much worse and I could only contact her sometimes instead of most of the times. I'll bet if I changed out from my 20w to a 50w it might have made a difference. Only because I know I was right on the edge.

I have an AR-5RM that will do 2w and 10w. I have a 701 style rubber duck, and a 771 style. And adapters to hook up to a variety of mobile antennas. And I can set up a radio at home to record into a VOX-activated recorder. So I think I have all the tools necessary to perform this test from a variety of locations around my city. I can say that I've done similar tests in the past, and that at the fringes, things will get more scratchy at 2w than at 10, but that other factors are more important such as not sitting IN the car with the rubber duck antenna, and not having my signal blocked by terrain. In such situations, being in the car vs out of the car can make the difference of getting a recording to take place (ie, squelch breaking on the radio at home) and not getting through at all. Power has only ever made the transmission a little clearer, better quieting, and only at fringe areas. But I'm happy to run the test with this specific equipment. I'll have some results Saturday. Ideally I'll be able to post the recordings and others can decide if they constitute proof or disproof.

Does not matter in what way? Range? Clarity of reception within that range? I agree that in the open, two watt handhelds with a rubber duck antenna will transmit clearly as far as the curvature of the earth will allow. But if transmitting from inside some attenuating material, such as vegetation or even a building or vehicle, the extra 7 dB of power can make a perceptible difference.

No one is coming. Expect to self rescue.

Indeed. Our group is 100% open to GMRS users...and nearly half of our group has GMRS licenses. We also maintain a GMRS repeater (SARC 650). It's used every day.

37 continuously, 50 amps at a 50% duty cycle.

@hxpx I measured my TD-H3 on a calibrated meter and got the 0.5w and 4w... so the TIDRadio advertising is very accurate. I was pleasantly surprised. It's assumed based on the framing of the question.

I’m wrong. My TYT and Wouxun radios arrived in white product boxes. One of my Baofeng (GT5R) arrived in the exact same kind of brown cardboard box as @WRTC928 showed in his photo. No product box between the cardboard box and the plastic liner. My original Baofeng UV5R arrived in a larger white box. It was the only Baofeng that I received with a long antenna.

I don't know exactly what they're doing but I can tell it involves linking repeaters to internet access (nodes?). I didn't see any listing on the site but that may be my content blocking interfering. Wouldn't being listed there be telling everyone you're breaking the rules? (I mean the repeater owner not the site owner.)

But the laws!!! and the fines!!!!! Ohhh the fines!!!!!! Is it worth it?????

I did a similar experiment using 20 watts and 50 watts on my base radio and Comet CA-712EFC. There is a GMRS repeater about 50-55 miles straight line distance from me. I could get in and was heard at 20 watts but had lots of static/noise. Switching to 50 watts made all the difference. The extra 30 watts didn't get me any more FARZ but it did make my signal clearer. It's not going to make much difference between 2, 5, or 10 watts with an HT when everything else is equal. One has to quadruple the output power to gain 1 S unit (6dB). And most people won't be able to hear the difference in 1 S unit.

Trees.

At one time, Motorola had a Base Station Consolettevwhich was a radio, speaker and power supply in a box with a desk top microphone or a boom mic that were 4 or so channels. I doubt that they still have those, but I sure there are some still out there. I think the last series radios they used may have been the Astro Spectra, not sure if they used the XTL series radios.

The Astron power supplies are worth the extra cost when compared to some of the cheap power supplies on Amazon. I just replaced a 50 amp TekPower switching power supply from Amazon with a 50 amp Astron switching power supply. The TekPower was only a year old and it started making noises whenever I transmitted with my 100 watt HF radios and also put noise in my transmissions. Now for a truly clean power supply, you are going to want a linear power supply, but those cost more than switching power supplies.

I've seen a couple of these style 'base station' kits that let you mount your radio into a housing containing the power supply to make for a nice clean setup. This one is for an ICOM radio but I've seen them for other brands too. Any mobile radio should fit as long as the dimensions are the same! https://www.buytwowayradios.com/ict-cs120-20ag-ic04.html Goodluck and happy radioing!

Went on a road trip and my 6 year old rode with grandma. I gave him one of my radios and we kept the other. Thought it'd be a fun way to try to talk. In the 20-ish hours of driving: Kid turned off his radio "to save battery" Kid turned off his radio because he wanted to watch Minecraft videos on the iPad Kid dropped the radio and couldn't reach it Kid couldn't hear his radio over his headphones while watching a movie on the iPad Kid said "hi dad, I love you" and a construction worker on the same frequency responded "what?" and my kid went "what?" and the construction worker went "what?" and my kid panicked turned off the radio when he realized he wasn't talking to dad We talked about how big windmills actually are when we passed a blade being transported All in all, a fun experiment. He enjoyed using "dad's radios" and getting to use walkie-talkies somewhere other than the backyard (when it was turned on). Also, sorry, random Illinois DOT guy.

My RV Friends are just now getting out of Bear Creek Texas, untouched by the floods because they were camped high enough.. They say the devastation is unmanageable and the amount of rain they got in short period was beyond belief.. They've been staying in touch with the world via their GMRS radios, which they say were very busy by both rescue groups and people in general. There cell service has been spotty and just now coming back, they even had a hard time senidng text, which i thought worked off satellites now.. I would have been on the trip with them but had last minute issues with my VGT Exhaust break and still in the shop for a $4,500 repair.. (3weeks latter)... Thank god they are all safe..

Obviously you don’t ground a fiberglass mast, but your coax shield is attached to part of the antenna somewhere and it will develop a charge as air currents pass over it. Now the difference in potentials is between the metal parts of the antenna connected to the shield of the coax and the service ground, again going through your equipment and possibly you. One of the purposes of a surge suppressor (commonly called a lightning protector but nobody guarantees that) is to allow you to bond the coax shield to the grounding system.

He’s full of it. The license is in only one person’s name but all immediate family members are allowed to use that call sign.

Having a plan to "just call anyone" isn't really a plan. As has been mentioned, that's the flaw in "I got my GMRS (or technician) license and bought a radio that I store in a box in case of emergencies but have never actually used it". Rumor has it that there is a TLA agency that monitors "the full spectrum of radio communications" but they are looking for particular types of radio traffic and are not going to send help, no matter what the disaster. There is no way for local authorities to listen everywhere all the time. Chances are they don't have the resources to even listen to a few frequencies. Back in the day, CB 9 *was* monitored in a lot of places, but those days are long gone.

As soon as he said mountainous region the answer was probably not. Running with your buddies it would probably work. As an emergency device in a rural area not so much.