[Music] hi this is John with citizen survival plan in today's video we are going to cover every single menu option in your basic gmrs radio this is going to cover a lot of your bow fangs like this your BX and any other General gmrs radio so if you're new to gmrs radio or you've picked up some radios and you really just want to know how everything works this video is for you so let's get started all right first thing on the list is SQL this is squelch so when you set your radio to one squelch one to five one is going to let in everything even the weak fuzzy crap signals you're going to hear them you're going to hear people trying to get through to you it might not you might not be able to make out what it is but it's going to let it in five if you set it to five it's only going to allow the nice cleanest clearest signal into your radio so you can hear it okay step step is for scanning and when you hit up and down on your menu when you're going through frequencies this is not super important with gmrs unless you are scanning other signals that are not gmrs channels so if I was trying to look up emergency services or I'm scanning my local EMS or police or whatever you're trying to do so this is a demo of Step we're going to go to step so this is 2.5 we will confirm it there and you'll see when I go up it's only going up 2.5 at a time now when I go into step and just for demonstration purposes we're going to set it the whole way to that the whole way to 50 so when I go back you'll see we're really going to start jumping 7 760 810 so that is your step it does that in scan mode also so it does it when you're just pressing up and down and when you hit scan okay a brief rundown on scanning on a gmrs radio when you're in Channel mode and hold scan it's just going to scan through the channels that are in the gmrs channel mode if you want to use that step feature you have to go into vfo or frequency mode typically and yours could be different you need to consult your manual you're going to hold menu and kick your gmrs radio on and it will go into frequency mode and then you can scan all bands using your step function txp this is simply just your power level there's nothing to this one um this is for transmit power so when you're transmitting has nothing to do with what you're receiving typically on these radios you're going to see them in high medium or low some of the BCS it's just low or high the higher you set it the more power the further you're going to go the lower the more battery you're going to save but you're not going to go as far save this is in your menu as a battery save option so the higher you set battery save so if you set it to 10 it's going to save your battery more and when you set it to one it will not save your battery when you set it to one it will burn up your battery faster now from what I can tell what this is doing is shutting your radio down into a sleep mode and waking it up so if someone were to transmit to you and you have your battery saved the whole way up you might miss a very small portion of the beginning of their transmission while your radio was in asleep mode in my opinion this does not save much battery but I typically put mine just in the middle I've never seen anything where I'm missing a bunch of Transmissions Vox Vox is voice activated transmission so what this does is when you turn this on 1 to 10 10 being you're really going to have to speak up into the radio for it to transmit and one being very sensitive you could whisper and your radio will start transmitting what you're saying this is not something that is good to use because if you have this on in my opinion it's just going to be transmitting everything that it's hearing your radio is going to be going off and just aggravating everybody just leave this menu item off WN is wide band or narrow band for us we just want it to be in wideband I want to get as much range as possible wideband will help this in your lower gmrs channels um I think between one and like Channel 14 I could be wrong put on the screen here it is going to be in narrow band because that is the limitation of that channel meaning the FCC has regulated it that it needs to be narrow band now once you get up past channel 15 and into your repeater channels it's wideband all the way it will give you better range just leave it in wide AB is your display illumination time so 1 being like 1 second and 10 being 10 seconds so this is just how long the screen stays illuminated after you're done pushing buttons it's the backlight basically you can turn it 1 to 10 or just turn it off TDR this is your dual watch let's say you have a repeater Channel up and you have just a regular Simplex Channel up talking to everybody when the repeater goes off it'll listen even if you're on your Simplex Channel and it can be used with two repeater channels two Simplex channels it doesn't matter it is going to whatever is transmitting between those two channels it will illuminate light up and let you hear what people are saying on that channel so this is a very quick demo on TDR which is just dual standby or dual watch or whatever you want to call it I will transmit to my repeater and even though you can see it's not on the repeater it will play and then if I want to go back to the Top Channel which is gmrs 17 it will listen there or right back to the repeater it is just listening to two channels at once be this is a really easy one this is simply just when you push buttons If the radio beeps or not if you prefer to beep turn it on if you don't want to hear the beeps turn it off to is transmission timeout you can set this the whole way up to 60 seconds that means you can transmit for a whole 60 seconds before the radio kicks off and stops transmitting this is to save your radio from over heating you just can't just transmit forever and this just is just the timer for it this is also helpful when your radio is in a chest rig or something and it's bumping up against something and let's say it gets jammed on or it's in a bag and it gets jammed on it will time it out after 1 minute doesn't absolutely kill your battery so let's get into rdcs R ctcss tdcs and T T ccss so these are privacy tones and that's all that they are you can turn them on to limit other people transmitting into your radio if you don't want to hear everyone transmitting around you the transmit DCS and ctcss is to activate a repeater if a repeater has a tone on it you need to put your transmit tone in whether it be digital or a ctcss tone this will unlock that repeater when you transmit to it so you can use the repeater for this one I will do a little demo for you this is your privacy tones this is tdcs TCT CSS and the receive the both the r ctcss and all of them they all do the same thing R is for receive and then when you go to T that's for transmit either you're using digital or the analog ones so right now this has got a DCS tone on it of 23 so this is a privacy tone so everyone else this radio has no privacy tones on it they're all off but I can still transmit to it and it will play out of the radio when I transmit but because this this radio has trans has privacy tones in it when I transmit to this this radio will key up but as you can tell nothing is playing out of the radio this is because the Privacy tones only tone other people out so this is where transmit tones matter so this one has a digital tone on it of 261 and again your ctcss tone work the same way they're just labeled something different for but for all intensive purposes they all work the same they're just labeled different things in your radio so this is my personal repeater with that tone on it and this is my radio if I were to transmit to this radio my transmit tone from this radio has to match the repeater otherwise I will not be able to enter the repeater it just won't pick it up so right now my cones are in and you'll see this repeater I'm transmitting through it right now now if I were to take my radio and turn these off and we'll turn that off and you'll watch I'm going to key it up behind me the repeater will not pick up what I'm transmitting this is when transmit tones mat voice this is just the voice that plays when you're going through the menu it'll tell you what you're clicking on and repeat it out in English or Chinese the The Voice simply you can pick English or Chinese Sev is your scanning options so let me just go over which ones do what if you set it to to it'll stop when it hears a transmission and play it and then after a C amount of time it will move on and keep scanning Co will stop when it hears something and then it will move on once that signal is gone and there's no more transmission on that channel SE is my favorite because it will scan until it finds something and when it hears something on that channel it will stop and will not resume scanning until you let the radio start scanning Again by hitting the scan button mdfa and mdfb are what you want the channel on the screen to show you so if you have named the channel and name in chirp it will display the name whether that be Kyle or Tim or whatever you want to name that channel it could be anything it will display it as a name you can choose frequency and it just shows simply the frequency or the channel number so it will just say whether it's Channel 13 15 or whatever you can choose what you want it to tell you about that channel in this menu and a operates Channel a which is the first line and B operates the second line so you can choose the bottom one could be frequency and the top one could be a it's whatever you want is is just preference but if you've named something in chirp typically you're going to want it to just display that name and that's the menu option for it BCL is busy Channel lockout so if you're on a repeater or a Simplex Channel it doesn't matter and someone's trans mitting on it whether you have privacy tones on or not it doesn't matter it will not let you transmit up while that is busy this is kind of helpful so it'll give you a little beat back and let you know someone's transmitting on it and letting you know you did not make a transmission just give it a second and then you can you can transmit so there's two on here that do not pertain to gmrs but if you're using a ham radio or something I actually have a video on these two menu items and what they do it does not do anything in gmrs your frequency Direction and your offset are fixed on gmrs you when you use a repeater it will automatically do this for you it's set at a certain amount and gmrs never changes sftd which is shift Direction and offset if you want to watch a video on this I have one I'll put it here rc- a this is a channel ad it's simply let you add a channel if you click on this you can add a Channel with your own parameters privacy tones whatever you want in it and save it DCH is delete channel so this just is the same thing as the other one instead of adding your deleting just delete a channel with this one the next three are kind of all the same they are just your screen colors so there is an RX LED that's received so what color your screen lights up when someone's transmitting to you it's typically two or three colors orange blue or purple and you can choose it there uh same with TX when you're transmitting what color do you want the screen to be WT LED is standby that's what color the screen is when you're just sitting there a m o this is your alarm mode so your radio has an alarm on it if you hold one of the side buttons on it it will sound an alarm this is going to be broke up into three different menu items you can choose from s t is just meaning it's only going to play the alarm through the speaker on your radio tone means that when you hit the alarm and you're on channel let's say 15 you hold it everyone on channel 15 is going to hear your radio is sounding an alarm but they won't know who it is which brings me to my next menu item code the code can be set in chirp to whatever you want so sometimes what I'll do is I'll pick my initial my three initials my first middle and last name I will take that and put it into the touchtone keypad and figure out what numbers they are and when I hit my alarm I could set a code in chirp that when I hold the alarm it'll send out a DTMF code we are going to get into those in a second so just wait but you'll see some radios and if you have an app on your phone can decode what those touch tones are and somebody could see the number in which what is transmitting and they could figure out who is in distress with this TD r a b so on radios like this from what I found online this is the uv5r I think this is like the pro model but they're they're pretty much all the same this is an unused setting I have desperately tried to figure out what the heck this is doing and from what I can tell it doesn't do anything is an unused menu item on this now where this does come into play is if you have a dual push to talk there's two push to talk buttons on this btech gmrs V2 and when you choose a as the priority Channel whether you hit a or b it will transmit on the top line your top frequency and same thing if you choose B A and B are both going to transmit on that bottom frequency I don't understand why this is a thing or why it exists but it does and there it is it took me a minute to figure this out because again on this one it wasn't doing any so the next three menu items are kind of useless in my opinion it is St RP s rptr l these all have to do with squelch tail elimination so St is for squelch tail elimin when you're transmitting from Radio to radio Simplex no repeater it is supposed to take out some noise at the end of the transmission from what I found I messed around with this a ton I see this much of a difference between having it on or off RP St is the same thing it's supposed to eliminate some noise at the end of a repeater transmission there's a repeater Trail noise it's kind of like a squelch noise at the end again I turned it on and off I've seen this much of a difference between it I guess that little noise could bother people and they want it off you could turn the setting on it eliminate it a little bit but from my opinion I I don't even see why you would even mess with this setting but it's there rptr RL this delays that tail and squelch noise that you're going to hear from a repeater I'm not really sure why you would delay it but you can do it it will delay it in milliseconds and you could set the the timer up or down depending on what you want again with gmrs I'm not really sure why you would mess with this but it's there p o n MSG this is the power on message you can turn it on or off and inside of chirp you could turn a power on message on all my radios have a power on message it's just my little CSP citizen survival plan I just do it just for fun it's not necessary Roger this is a Roger beep when you are done transmitting you will transmit and let go and it'll give a little beep letting everyone know and you that your transmission has ended reset this is something you don't want to do if youve have a if you have a programmed radio this will when you hit it and confirm it's just going to erase all your settings and all your channels out of your radio okay now we are going to get into DTMF tones I saved this for last a lot of people aren't going to use this but this is the demo if you want to know how to use them and how they work DTMF tones are this your radio's touchpad will emit a sound when you transmit and press the [Music] buttons If you can look over here I have a DTMF app up that can listen to the radio that is taking in the DTMF codes and you could see the numbers I can type so I'll typee 147 on this and the app will show that so if you have a radio that can decode DTMF tones like this kg 935g plus I can use another radio and while I'm transmitting to it type in a DTMF cone and it will show up on the screen this radio can actually decode let's go over the DTMF menu item in your radio this has to do with what you hear on your radio that you're operating dtst when you select this this means you're only going to hear the DTMF tones when you push the keys on your radio your automatic one that you have set for your ptti ID will not be heard from you but it will be heard on the other end again this is all has to do with what you hear on your radio a ni s means that you are only going to hear the DTMF tones that you have automatically plugged in so if you have your ptti ID on you let go and it's on eot and a transmission it will you will hear it transmit out DT plus a an I means that you're just going to hear everything when you push the buttons on your radio your automatic ones everything you're going to hear it all it's going to make all that noise on your end you will hear it off when you turn this menu item off that does not mean that your DTMF tones are off that just means that you on your end will not be hearing all right this is your anid this is menu item in here 15 it could be slightly different on your radio I have mine set in chirp and I change the number that it originally came with mine is just 57 so when I transmit you'll hear it will transmit two digits you hear two beeps when I transmitted so it is just sending a DTMF tone of 57 to another radio and again you can use a decoder or a fancier radio to actually decode this is DTMF codes in your radio's ID this is just sending them end of transmission both that's before and after off or before a transmission I usually have mine set to end of transmission eot and you'll see when I transmit it's just going to send my radio ID at the end this is your ptlt what this does is delays your radio ID transmission at the beginning or end of a transmission mine is mine is set to eot so it's going to transmit at the end my radio ID so this is set to 50 which is the longest it's going to delay it so let's go still transmitting and there's my PTT ID at the end let's take this we will set this down to basically the lowest one or basically nothing and what it's going to do is just transmit the ptti ID right away it's not going to delay it at all and it just hits it right so this is where DTMF codes come into your alarm mode so this is your alarm mode or almod I have it on code and I have an alarm code typed in in chirp and when I hit my alarm now that I have the code in and it's on code in the radio when I hold my alarm down when my alarm goes off on this radio it does not make an alarm sound anymore it sends a DTMF code which other people could decode and possibly realized that I would be in trouble all right we're getting close everybody hope pleas you stuck around this is scode this has to be done in chirp that's why I'm up here and we're looking at this screen so let's go to settings first you are going to go to your DTMF code your encode settings here where my mouse is I have it highlighted these are my numbers I'm typing in 555 222 so let's say we want a signal code of four on a specific Channel these signal codes are per Channel we need to go over to Memories so let's recap really quick we need to go to our DTMF and code settings you could type whatever you want into these you could see my alarm code and you can see my radio code my a ni I code is 57 now this is going to come into play in a second the AI code is 57 and I have that eot end of transmission so when I let go of my PTT button it is going to send that 57 out this is going to come into play in a second cuz this overrides your scode sometimes in certain settings let me explain in memories let's say we want channel 15 and I already have this kind of set up for this demo so it's already in here but I'm going to make sure that you understand we are going to rightclick the frequency of gmrs 15 that channel we are going to go to properties so here is a smaller screen with some more settings in it we want to hit extra so ptti I want it on both now CU if I'm going to send an sode it is still going to run my push to talk ID at the end so when you choose both what's going to happen is it's going to run your sode as soon as you key up and then when you let go of transmission or the push to talk button it will run your radio ID so you're going to have two DTMF codes going on this channel when you're using it if I were to choose end of transmission it would not work because I have my radio ID on it's just going to override the scode and when I do before transmission it will play the sode before the transmission but then it cancels out the ptti ID so it's kind of complicated the best bet is if you want an sode run it on both and then this is where you choose your sode so I want four remember the chart we were just at over here I'm going to go back to that really quick this is let me X out if I go back to settings DTMF codes this is where all your signal codes are this is where you can type them in so I want signal code 4 that's the one I'm going to choose in memories on gmrs 15 properties we're going to go back into extra and we have scode four chosen let's do a demo of this okay so let's do the sode demo so on this radio we're on gmrs 15 we did sode 4 we chose that in chirp and it's in the radio so what's going to happen is it's going to transmit the sode and then my radio ID at the end if we look down here we have the sode or the sorry the DTMF decoder on and it should play 222 then 57 which is my radio ID 222 being the scode program for GM rs15 let's go when I let go and we got it 22257 that is the sode on gmrs 15 and that was my radio ID at the end I hope everyone found this video helpful it is my goal to get people to understand how to use the radios if you have any questions just put them in the comments below and we'll see you in the next video [Music]