amaff

It's not advice. It's a statement of the current reality. So long as you're not egregiously breaking the rules and interfering with others (...and even then...), they don't seem to give a care. hey quick question: ..........what?

Uh oh, Smiley just waded into the swamp

There's an area in Utah that uses Channel 9 / Tone 11. Using a low power channel with a tone seems butt stupid to me, but I guess it's easy to remember... Edit: I misremembered slightly. 9 / 11 for when a rescue is underway. Which...changing channels when you're already talking to the guy also seems butt stupid when you have a comms link set up that works. https://utahavalanchecenter.org/education/group-group-radio-channel-initiative

right, so *probably* not GMRS then.

Are they announcing call signs? If not, there's an above even chance that they're using FRS radios.

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

"Sun still rises in the east, more at 11!"

To be clear, I didn't write the line you quoted

True, if your definition of "SHTF" is only "massive, region or nation wide calamity or collapse." There's a whole lot of gray area between that and "normal", even more localized disasters (weather events, wildfires out in the sticks or on the edge of town, extended power outages) where they're totally appropriate for a situation where the shit has totally hit the fan, just maybe not to the point to where the zombies are chewing on the door knobs. Which is a long way of saying, they're useful in a whole lot of real world situations that might not reach the level of a massive, metro-wide (or worse) problem, but which someone is a lot more likely to encounter in reality than those larger scale problems.

Speaking of that "anomaly" (...blowing the nozzle off the back is a hell of an anomaly, but anyway...), it looks like I accidentally captured at least part of it going sideways. Not the very big, not rocket-exhaust shaped flame in this shot: Vs 'nominal' a few seconds prior: It was SO worth the trip. If you get the chance, do it. Just, you know, bring plenty of water and be prepared for delays.

Hey hey hey, it only failed, like, a little bit! It ran fine for 100 seconds out of a 120 second burn. 83%'s still a passing grade in my book! I know, not ideal, but it kinda made it more memorable for us watching. Definitely for the group of kids we had with us.

A friend of the family works for Northrop, and invited us and a few others to go out and watch the SLS booster test at their test range north of SLC yesterday. Of course, being out in the middle of nowhere means spotty cell service, which means "I packed a bunch of radios to hand out to the drivers in our group when we rendezvoused in town" a ways before the launch site. And as always, they did exactly what we needed them to, to coordinate as we went through the huge amount of traffic and people who were out there for the test.

They must all be using voice modifiers on the repeaters around here

For a while there, IIRC, a lot of Midlands just *were* narrowband without an option to correct / change that. Were the rest of the group to set theirs to narrowband it would have likely corrected the issue.

And far more often than not, user error / misconfiguration stemming from not understanding how 'privacy tones' (I know, I know...) work.