I’ve recently been approached by multiple, unrelated parties asking me to meet with them to give them personal, hands-on instruction on how to become familiar with their Baofengs and/or assistance with “determining a good frequency to go to in a crisis.”
Before this becomes epidemic, let me stomp on the brakes on the ‘needy’ train. I don’t mean to be a jerk, and we truly want to help folks, but if anyone needs to be spoon fed on something as basic as a Baofeng handheld transceiver, they’ll never truly be an asset to the network, much less to their group or the cause. They’ll fumble through a crisis, communicating for a short while, until Murphy shows up to kick them right between the radials and then they’re done.
Our mission is to produce radio operators and maintain a network where radio operators can meet up for mutual assistance. And when problems arise, each operator must be intimate enough with his or her gear that he can get it back into operation with minimal downtime or assistance.
We MUST become self-reliant and self-motivated patriots. If all you have is a shortwave SSB receiver, then own it and master it. The same goes for a Baofeng, a CB radio, a scanner, or any other piece of communications gear in your inventory.
We’ve provided a wide range of materials, resources, and tools, and we’re working on more (on the way). This is how we meet you half way. Now, meet us half way.
STEPS – this is what I say to every workshop I teach:
1. Watch Comms Up! and Comms Up! 2
https://www.amrron.com/comms-up-video-page/
2. Take ownership of your comms gear.
Go to https://www.amrron.com/communications-resources/communications-resources-2/ and scroll down to ‘Baofeng Tutorial Videos & Tools’
3. Go through and/or download each of those resources that we’ve researched, compiled, and made available. Print the PDFs.
4. Become proficient with your comms gear, to the level that you can teach others.
5. Acquire a copy of the SOI https://www.amrron.com/2014/01/28/communications-soi-signals-operating-instructions-2/
6. Begin participating in practice nets: https://www.amrron.com/nets-regional-national/amrron-local-nets/
7. …and if there is not one in your area, start one: https://amrron.com/net-resourcestools/join-or-start-a-net/
Now that you’re cringing and afraid to ask for help, let me back up and regroup… I have said many times, “If you need help, just ask. We want to help you.” However, I want to strongly encourage you to take advantage of the resources available to you. We want you to work through issues, figure it out, achieve victories and make strides and progress in your journey. This is all unfamiliar and new to many of you. We understand that. But make a diligent effort to work through problems, overcome obstacles, scratch your head and figure things out, and dig for solutions. You’ll be amazed at how much progress you’ll make, all the while reinforcing that self-reliance that is so necessary for us to be resilient people. Then, when you’ve tried and truly need assistance, PLEASE ASK. That’s the kind of patriot I will bend over backwards to help, and so will the other AmRRON operators.
Finally, remember “Youtube is your friend!” The resources there are abundant — A college-level education on radio communications for free, and it’s only a mouse click away! But you gotta want it enough. If you don’t, we won’t hand it to you on a silver platter.
Now you have your marching orders. Get your comms up! -JJS
This is gonna be required reading for those who attend my monthly meetings! Just sayn’!
Exodus 18. You need to find a way so that the dozens of us who are adept, or at least suffered through learning complex devices (by make and model, not just HF/VHF/UHF) can be local, regional, or even internet resources. You will exhaust yourself if you don’t.
Your youtubes are good, however they don’t work as well to someone just starting and is completely non-technical. They may not understand most of the technical words and it doesn’t work having to pause a video and spend minutes searching for the definition to understand what you are getting at.
This is normal with the technically adept – it is difficult to know how far to simplify things, how to convey an understanding. It is not unlike learning to understand a different language.
Perhaps at each local area (in reach of VHF/UHF line-of-sight) there can be a geek-guru. Feed me lunch, I’ll explain the intricacies of your device and even bring files and programs with all the frequencies, ready to configure.
Yes. There are several AmRRON groups across the country who meet regularly to help get their fellow patriots up and running. It certainly helps to have an ‘Elmer’ to walk one through things. And also, as I mentioned, we’ve boiled all the resources down to the best ones we’ve come across and compiled them at the links provided in the ‘WHAT?!?!’ posting. It doesn’t take a technically adept person to read through the very-well written Baofeng programming guide, it just takes a little patience and tenacity (a character trait that needs to be reinforced among patriots if we hope to survive the times ahead). This is especially true for very basic tasks such as saving a frequency to memory. This article is specifically addressing those who want personal one-on-one training without even trying to apply what they were shown the FIRST time. I’ve seen it many times, where in fact it’s not a ‘show me how’ session, but rather a ‘do it for me’ because they have other, more fun things they want to do than study materials that are available to them.
If one follows the steps I outlined in the article — ALL OF THEM — the number of those who truly need further assistance would be reduced to 20%, guaranteed. And, they would be better radio operators for it as well.
JJS, You are correct! Thanks for saying what needs saying…
Reminds me of the women who called me at work asking for help in filling out our online job application. I asked if she had considered that being able to fill out a simple online form might be part of the application process, she hung up without a word.
The manual programming aspect isn’t necessarily a technical endeavor of how, but why.
When you understand the why part, the how falls into place.
For example, if you know that your local VHF repeater has a CTCSS TX/RX of 67hz, you can stumble through the radio’s menu, and key it in, and make it happen. Negative offset? Stumble through the menu some more until you can find where that parameter is set .It’s all really intuitive if you understand the “why.”
Too many folks coming into the Comms game are expecting plug-and-play solutions to Comms, and the only way to make that happen, as JJ has stated before, is to get a Comms guy.
Also, whenever you hear the Baofengs mentioned, everyone is insisting on picking up the programming cable. The programming cable adds two capabilities to the toolbox:
Alphanumeric naming conventions for channel memory
Cloning capabilities
If you find yourself in a tight spot, and need to make contact with a known repeater RIGHT NOW, the lack of ability to manually program is going to cripple you.
Again, if you want plug-and-play solutions to Comms, you need a Communications Operator, not Comms Gear.