Nowadays a lot of people use GMRS when adventuring, hiking, skydiving or just sitting on the couch at home whenever need to talk to another person. It has a lot of improvements that ham offers, but with the simplicity of CB radio.
Any GMRS radio can talk to any other GMRS radio, because GMRS is set as a kind of radio standards. It has 22 simplex GMRS channels and extra eight more channels set aside for repeaters (if it’s a repeater capable GMRS radio, like BAOFENG UV-5G, UV-9G, G11S).
How easy to use a GMRS radio? Usually when you'd like to talk to somebody, just tell him to use the same channel, and you’re talking to each other. While talking radio to radio, you can usually get a range of easily one to five miles. But all at all, the talking range depends on what’s in between you and the conditions, so it can vary greatly. (Click to know more: <The Facts About Distance: What’s the Range for Radio?> ). Using a GMRS repeater can extend your range vastly up to hundreds of miles. But the person you’re talking to at the other end, has to be in the range of the same repeater as you're using.
The range on GMRS is line of sight. It means that the GMRS radio waves can’t go through mountains, and don’t go well through buildings and things like that. So if you can see the person that you want to talk to, you’ll be able to reach them. If there’s something in between you, like a mountain, or a bunch of tress, that is going to reduce your range quite a bit.
Talking on GMRS is just like talking on a CB radio, there’s no special language or lingo, or anything that you have to say or do. Really the only thing that you have to do is announce your call sign at the end of a transmission, or at least once every 15 minutes if you’re having a long conversation.
Lot of people, who have bought GMRS radios, plan to use them in an emergency. They’ve thrown them into the emergency bag. Don’t think that if you have a GMRS radio, just gonna take it out of the box, turn it on, and call 9-1-1. It doesn’t work that way. There’re no emergency responders that keep listening on GMRS frequencies. So if you’re going to use GMRS for an emergency, you need to know who you’re going to call, and they should know that you’re going to be calling them. You need to know what channel you’re both going to be on. If you’re going to using a GMRS repeater, you need to have your radios configured to use that repeater, and you need to plan it out. Want to learn more about how repeaters work and who owns them? Check out on myGMRS.com.
GMRS is a band or you can know it as a range of frequencies, just like CB radio. The frequencies are just above the ham 70 centimeter band, but you don’t have to think about offsets or anything complicated like how to calculate watts to AMPs to volts. The whole idea with GMRS is very simple. It's made for normal people to talk to other normal people. All you need to know how to do, is hold a radio, and push the button.
