over 63,000 folks got gmrs licenses in 2023 many of them are looking at their new radios and asking themselves so how does this thing really work if that's you stick [Music] around recently I've had several folks comment on some of my videos something to the effect that I'm assuming ass uming they know more about the radio I'm reviewing than they actually do this is especially true when it comes to how to operate the thing I have to admit that most of my radio reviews assume a basic level of understanding that allows the viewer to be able to make some sense of the radio features and capabilities that I usually call out in those reviews it's clear that isn't always the case the us the questions as we get started thanks for choosing this gadget Talk video on this channel we do reviews and howtos on a variety of electronic gadgets including ones like this one on gmrs radios if you find this video helpful please subscribe to the channel and click the like button so YouTube will offer this video to others I really appreciate it in this video we'll go through how to operate your new G gmrs radio this will include the radio's basic functions such as choosing what gmrs channel to use how to program in privacy tones and why you'll seldom need to do that we'll also show you how to use the GMS repeater channels as I said earlier I'm targeting a gmrs radio novice if you've been using gmrs for a while you're probably already well aware of these topics let's get started gmrs radios are designed to be easy to use right out of the box most radios will come with the gmrs channels assigned to the proper power levels bandwidth and with no privacy or ctcss or DCS codes set you should be able to take the radio out of the box charge the battery turn it on set a channel and talk I'll use a coup couple of different gmrs radios in these demonstrations but notice how similar they are as you'll see the items in the menu systems may have different numbers or slightly different names but they all work pretty much the same let's start with a tour of the outside so here we got a couple of gmrs radios from a couple of different manufacturers and a couple of different models so let's take a look at some of the things that you're going to need to know about and you're going to see that they're very similar between models and between manufacturers and so first let's start on the front of the radios we've got the speakers which you can see we've got behind a grill here and here and this one it's up on the top here it's a little more hidden in the middle um but they're all there with the speakers and then the microphones are also on the face plate so you can see we've got one down here here is up here over here it's over there uh up here and then again over here so all of those are going to be right there in front and so you're going to use the radio by holding it 6 to 8 in in front of your mouth when you do the press to talk when you're making a transmission now the most radios will also have a keypad and so you can see the keypads are here on each of these radios and they have a couple of things that I want to point out to you first there are the numbers and you can use the numbers to type in frequencies and you can use the numbers to type in menu numbers when you're in the menu system we'll talk a little bit more about that later and then you can see that most of these have shortcut keys in a different color on the various menu items so that means that if you were in the menu system and press two you'd be changing the transmitter power and that's the same with these three radios although they are different models and different manufacturers this rivis model has a different scheme and it's got letters like you would find on a telephone instead of these menu shortcuts the other thing we have in common in all but one of these radios are these three buttons and so we've got a vfo or memory button we've got that here in Orange and orange here it's in Black vfo memory VM and that changes the register you're in if you've got both displayed from the vfo mode to the memory or Channel mode and so you're going to be thinking in terms of channels for gmrs and so you'll spend most of your time in the channel mode the other thing you have here is the ab switch there's AB here AB here and ab allows you to make a change from the upper register to the lower register when we have those displayed so you can change what you're transmitting on so if you had two channels dialed in say gmrs 5 and gmrs 15 you could switch between the two if you're in one of the modes that allows that and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes as well now you'll notice that this radio is a little different it doesn't have the ab or the vfo and that's because they're using it doubling up the keys here so a long press on the menu in this particular model will change from vfo to memory mode and a long press on the exit if you're not in the menu system uh will change it from the upper register to the lower register uh so the other thing we've got up and down buttons which allows you to cycle through the various menu settings if you're in menu mode or through the channels if you are in Channel mode and again if you're in Channel mode you can just type in the channel and it'll move to that channel for you now all of these radios have LEDs on the front some of them are easier to see than others will point to this red of us and that it'll show red when you're transmitting and green when it's receiving sometimes it's one LED with two colors other times it's like this with two different LEDs so let's move now to the side if we look at the side we'll take a look at this R of us and these are all pretty much the same so you've got a push to talk button which you push to talk it's nothing magic about that and then there are two keys here that you can program in the software and sometimes in the menus uh to do different things normally one will turn on the flashlight and one will turn on uh maybe the FM broadcast mode for example on the top of the radio you have the onoff switch all of these radio have onoff switches on the top you've got an LED for a flashlight again all of these have got uh LEDs on the top some have LEDs on the bottom some models but mostly you'll find them on the top and then we'll change radios here for uh this part of the show Intel and so you can see the antenna screws on with gmrs radios sometimes you'll find them kind of glued on uh but most of the time or if they transmit data the antennas can't uh be removed so um a basic gmrs radio is going to have a removable antenna this is called an SMA connector we'll move that here to the front and for most of the radios coming from China you're going to see a little plug or spike in the middle of that that's the mail side and So the antenna itself has got the socket side when you put them together they work now different brands such as ocean sometimes you'll find them with those uh connections reversed so if you're buying third part antennas before you order make sure you understand what connection the antenna has so as we stay with this bang UV 5G plus we can turn it over on the back we see we've got a belt clip belt clips can either connect to the battery or to the radio this one connects to the radio uh it's also got a little flap over here which allows you access to a USBC charging port with a little LED indicator that gives you the charge status for um the batter's charging occasionally you will find USBC slots in the side of the radio but most of the time for these inexpensive radios you're going to find the USBC charging built into the radio itself and in some cases like this uh older UV 5G or UV 5x you won't find USB charging at all and you'll have to use the radio charge cradle which these little little tabs will fit into and allow you to charge the radio now the other thing I want to point out to you um is the on the side of these radios we've got what's called a k connector or a K1 connector uh one of these is for the speaker one of these is for the microphone but normally if you have a speaker microphone it's going to come with a K connector with that just plugs in and that's the same as this programming cable which I have right here and so in that case the programming cable plugs into your radio like this and then this side of the programming cable has got a a chip in this larger USB as side of things uh which will uh convert the signal the audio signals coming from the radio into a digital signal that your computer can use when you connect it to uh customer programming software again we'll talk about in a few minutes so that's the basic tour of the out out side of these radios and what a programming cable looks like now let's turn the radio on and do a quick power on tour we'll take a look at the buttons and what they do so here we have two typical uh budget class this is a rvus gmrs radio this is a tid radio h8 um this one has got a color screen and this one has got a monochrome screen so we'll use these as exemplars between those two so we'll uh turn the radio on and you'll hear that it announces itself welcome and then the same thing here for this rivis radio welcome Chanel mode and so it tells you the mode that it comes up with this one this one just displays it and so let's look at a couple of things uh first we obviously have the power on button here the onoff switch the number keys in some cases they're illuminated sometimes the keys are not and so if we wanted to make a change to the channel we could press the up button or we could just type in the number if we wanted to go to like channel 15 instead of pressing the up button 15 times it's a three- digigit numbers in this radio so it will go and now we're on gmrs channel 15 which you can see there I hope in the little box so you've got the frequency 462.11cfp uh and then you can see the channel name is gmrs 15 there in the box so that's kind of the display now in this radio the display is a little bit more uh rudimentary and so if we again we want to change channels just go up or down two or again we can make a change and just go uh up to the channel we want so again and we can go up to channel 15 by hitting 01 5 and you can see over here that the radio is on channel 15 it's showing it there now in terms of the the vfo mode if we press this button we can go to vfo mode frequency mode it tells you it's in frequency mode it says vfo and here you can make input so if we wanted to set in a frequency which is a ham General VHF call frequency we can do that and we can put it in there however if we press the push to talk button it's not going to transmit because we're not authorized to transmit but we can do that and so normally when you're saving memories you're going to start in the vfo mode although as we'll see when we look at the customer programming software it's for my opinion it's a lot easier to do that again we want to get out of thefo mode we just press the button again and it takes us back to channel 15 same thing here moves the radio to channel to frequency mode and again you can use your keypad to make the changes the other thing we can do is we can switch which of the two vfos or two registers that the radio has and we're going to use the ab button so the upper register here is a and the lower is B so if we Press B notice this little carrot goes to the B and now when we press the talk it's going to transmit on B this display is a little different but essentially the same thing there's a little green carrot next to the word gmr S15 right here and so we press B it moves there and you can see that we move to what I have programmed in this radio which is channel 55 something in the 151 megahertz range and so that's what we've got here in terms of how those buttons work now the other thing that we can do then is we can move into the menu systems and in we'll do it in both of these just to give you an idea how they work so we can press menu and so now you can see the menu is there and we can work our way up through the menus this radio has like 42 menu items or we can press one of these buttons if we wanted to go to uh menu five we could just press five and that's the bandwidth which is narrow and wide and so this on this particular channel it's set to uh arrow and then if I want to make a change I could go uh Press menu again and then I could change it here using the buttons Press menu a third time to confirm it and then exit and now I'm back now if I go to AB and go back to menus menu and you can see that my menu is is wide on this channel because a gmrs channel in this range has a wide bandwidth so then I can press exit it to leave here we do it the same way we can go into menu here the screen goes to the full size for the menu but it works the same way so if we want to go up we can go up through our steps transmitter power uh Power on Vox all these kinds of things we can enter and we do it the same way Press menu again press the numbers you want with the up and down screen this is how long the menu stays active before it closes out I want it for a minute confirm it and then I can exit or I can continue going up and down through the menus most of these menus for the new person in gmrs are going to be just fine where you get them now the other thing that I want to look at just briefly are the weather channels and fm broadcast and that's going to vary from Radio to radio so let's take a look and see what we get here I believe this one Los Angeles today mostly sunny high 69 tonight partly cloudy early that one was triggered by this lower programmable key and then this one I think if I remember right turns on yes it turns on the flashlight this radio accesses those same features but it uses different keystrokes and so you're going to have to look at the radio that you happen to own to know how to move into broadcast FM and how to get to the weather channels most radios have those however all of them don't now the other thing I want to show you here and we'll expand it with a a graphic here in just a second but that is the various things that are on the screen so on this tid radio the screen's a little more complicated it's got an RSSI or radio signal strength indicator at the top to show you how strong the signal is going in or out it's got a little like wire coat hanger upside down there that shows the antenna so it'll have a a change in that when you transmit the h means you're on high power the w means you're on uh wide bandwidth for a GM channel that of course is what you want and then the battery indicator over here on this uh little radio it says it's on high it's got the battery indicator so let's go up to one of the repeater channels and see if any of those displays change so here we got repeater channel 23 and you can see there's a little plus indicator and the plus indicator indicates that there's a positive offset programmed into the radio gmrs radios come with all that automatically set you don't have to worry about it but that's just part of what you see in terms of the screen icons so I mentioned the RSSI indicator usually there's a high and low power you can uh sometimes see a circle with a D or a circle with a c that means that your privacy codes either the DCS or the ctcss codes are enabled as I we just discussed the plus and minus show that there's an offset dialed in some radios allow you to listen to both the upper and lower frequency at the same time that's often called dual watch sometimes it's called dual mode but you might see a d on your display another icon you'll see is a padlock icon that's used to lock the keyboard so that you don't bump and change the channel you sometimes see a little text uh bubble on your radios that means that Vox or Vox is enabled most of the time you're not going to want to mess with uh Vox we've already pointed out the n and the W for narrow and wide band some will have an N for narrow and nothing for wide or some might show both the W and the n and then you can sometimes see an R which means reverse function which means that when you're in your repeater mode if you've got someone you're speaking with who are is within range you can press that mode and then your radio will switch what it transmits on so you transmit on the receive and receive on the transmit and so you can go directly to that person without tying up the repeater so those are just a couple of the things that you'll want to be aware of in terms of screen icons uh on your radio gmrs radios are required to be fairly locked down to gain FCC certification that certification is required for salale and use in the United States the reason for this is that you don't need any kind of radio knowledge to get a gmrs license or to use gmrs radios so the FCC only allows you to change certain things those things don't include changing the frequencies on which the radio broadcasts except of course the frequencies assigned to the 22 basic gmrs and the eight additional gmrs repeater channels before we jump into the radios one topic needs a bit more explanation I've used the term privacy codes ctcss codes and DCS codes already ctcss or continuous tone coded squelch and DCs or digital coded squelch are two methods to accomplish what some manufacturers call privacy codes for all practical purposes think of them as the same thing when you assign a privacy code to any channel the radio squel system will only open when it hears the low frequency sub audible tone embedded in the signal if there's no tone then you won't hear the transmission if you have a tone set only Transmissions with the tone you've set will break the squelch this system allows you to only listen to the folks with the same code set as you do in their radios the system does not prevent others from hearing your Transmissions if they have the same code or no code set in their radios my point here is that privacy codes really don't provide any privacy they just limit who you hear on busy channels so let's take a look at the things you can change and why you might want to make those changes so let's take a look at a couple of the menu settings that you might want to change so let's start by going into our menu and I prepositioned this to menu 10 on this tid radio h8 because it's the receive DCS receive DCS is the code that is going to be in your radio that codes what you receive and so to get that we'll press um the menu again and then we can work through so look at here we've got we've got 754i and then we can go down 743 I those are all the DCS codes and there are a bunch of them and so you may end up having to cycle through them here is 023 n which is normal um it's more than we want to talk about now but that basically means normal and inverted and most of the DCS codes you're going to run into are going to be normal so we're going to go back to off cuz I don't want anything here and we'll select that and we'll go up to the next one this is the receive ctcss code there aren't as many of those but it works the same way goes up to 24.1 Hertz not kilohertz but Hertz so it's fairly low frequency uh and it starts down at 67 and so this is the ctcss code that you're going to set for the signal that you want to receive the next one is the transmitter DCS and this would be the input code for the repeater that you're trying to get or if you're just going between you and your buddy the code that he would have in his uh receive this is the code that's associated with what you transmit and they are the same codes we go up one more we've got the transmit ctcss and so again they work the same way the same code this is the one that's going to be associated with the signal that you are transmitting next let's go down to bandwidth now as I mentioned the uh bandwidth in gmrs for all but the interstitial channels is wide and you can make that change here you can go from wide to narrow we want it wide that's what we want now the bandwidth settings are 25 khz or 12.5 khz and what that means is that's the width of your signal now FM is frequency modulated so to code your voice the signal modulates a little bit off the center frequency and that's where the information lies is in that modulation as with am where the signal is narrower but the amplitude of that signal is how the information is coated and so the impact of having a a narrow band when it should be wide or talk with someone on F FRS on a narrow band while you are using a wide band because the channels are the same with gmrs is simply that the the reception or the signal won't be quite as as robust they're not going to be able to hear the full width of your 25 khz signal uh and you're going to hear more than the uh 12.5 and so it may sound a little more tinny to you and so it'll affect the signal but if you have F FRS radios for the kids you're still going to be be able to use them and understand each other just fine so um those are basic things that you might be wanting to change here in the menu system most of this stuff however you're not going to really want to worry with the last item that we'll talk about is is go up to that dual watch that we been discussing so we go in here and we'll start going up till we find it so here on this tid radio it's called dual weight instead of dual watch it's on menu number seven uh and we can turn that off and on and then this tid radio also has um a setting called sync and that is what allows both the channels to be displayed so we'll go up to the sync menu here and you can see sync on gives you the display that uh we see sync off will make it a much more simplified display here on this rvis radio we can see menu number seven again the same number but it's called something different and they call it dual standby and so in this case dual standby is off and so it wouldn't necessarily listen to both at the same time or you can then of course turn it on and it works the same stand by go down to turn it on go down again to turn it off it just toggles between the two and so again whether you want to listen to them both or not is entirely up to you and where you find them in the menu system may change other a little bit numbers wise and as we've seen the name may change a little bit but they do the same thing if you're a basic gmrs user what we've covered here we'll get you started you'll be able to communicate with family members choose a common channel for a Car Care van when traveling stay in contact with the kids when camping or with others on an off-road driving Excursion now however let's wet your appetite a little bit for a couple of more advanced features features found on most newer gmrs radios the first is do it-yourself channels in some larger cities you may find gmrs repeaters on the same channel if you want to use any of them without going into the radio's menus to change the CT CSS or DCS codes you can set up duplicate repeater Channels with different codes to make changing repeaters as easy as changing channels the this also applies to situations where you might want to set up repeaters in various cities that you frequently visit I've got a separate video on using gmrs repeaters I'll link it on the end card to this video and in the description the second feature most new gmrs radios have is the ability to program in lots of non- gmrs frequencies into receive only channels this allows you to add channels for such things as ham radio repeaters Marine band channels Ms channels or even railroad frequencies while gmrs channels are only in the UHF range many gmrs radios include receivers that also cover the VHF band as well check your radio specifications to see what frequency bands your radios cover again to operate within the fcc's gmrs rules a gmrs radio will only transmit on gmrs frequencies both of these features are much easier to do with what's called a customer programming software application you connect the programming cable I showed you earlier to your computer open the app and enter the frequencies or privacy codes you want in the channels that you choose I also have a separate video on using CPS to program your gmrs radio again I'll also link that on the end card and in the description I hope you found this video helpful if so be sure to like And subscribe to the gadget talk Channel join me over here to take a deeper dive into using gmrs repeaters and using a CPS to program your radio thanks for watching