I see a frequent question in Facebook and Reddit posts for new hams, non-hams, GMRS users and preppers (it's probably somewhere here on QRZ, too, but I guess I haven't been going there): What radio do I need to communicate X miles when all the infrastructure is down? We dig into that in episode 451. Yes, in our usual meandering way. This is not a Ted Talk. Not a graduate thesis. Hoo boy is it not. But our crew isn't without experience in the matter. And we're including repeaters in the missing infrastructure, even though the people asking the question might not know what a repeater is. 25 Miles? We fill in the X with several distance options (technically known as 'fars', I'm told). Most experienced hams know that the answers to that question have a lot of qualifiers and 'it depends'. But very loosely speaking, we peg 25 miles as the point VHF/UHF peters out without some advanced/extreme measures in power and antenna height, while a modest HF station using 60 or 75 meters can do the job most of the time. So we make the distinction about where a ham license might be needed. We point out that in a big SHTF disaster, being licensed might not be that important, but you need to use the technology and become familiar with it if you expect to be able to rely on it in Armageddon, so you'll need a license for that (GMRS, ham, both). During the live feed of this episode, we had a buffering problem on YouTube. You won't have that problem playing this YouTube link back, because we uploaded a clean copy from a local recording, but we will talk about it (way too much) as the chat room informed us of the issue. Oh, and we fixed it the next day (I was trying to send YouTube a higher bit-rate signal than they recommended. Lesson learned). Most of that talk comes before the 33-minute point, but it keeps happening, so we revisit the problem now and then. So, you want to zip in 33 minutes into the program for the beginning of the discussion. I guess I'll note that I have not been posting an announcement about every show we produce here on QRZ. If you've been missing us because that was your cue, I suggest doing that 'Subscribe/Notify' thing on our YouTube channel (https://YouTube.com/HamRadioNow). We've settled down into a live show on Sunday night, 7 pm Pacific, 10 pm Eastern, 0300Z (Monday morning, Zulu time). We also usually do a random 'promo' sometime between Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. Those are often show-length (30 minutes, an hour... this week's was an exception 3 hours and 15 minutes). You'll get cued to those, too if you 'click the bell' on the channel page. 73, Gary K4AAQ
We do! But you can just search pretty much any podcast app to find us. Only hitch is you find an older version of the feed (with no content in it) from an older feed provider. Stop by our website: https://HamRadioNow.tv. There's an RSS link there. 73
