Admit Radio Field with airSlate SignNow

Stamp radio field

in this episode we're really discussing the HT or handheld go back in its application use for amateur radio operations hello my name is John Jacobs w7d Bo and this is the field radio podcast with the ham radio 360 Network and this is a live stream so those that are in the chatroom watching this live go ahead and give me a comment and let me know if the audio sounds good and if everything is coming over as expected so we are going to be talking about the HT go-bag and its application and use for amateur radio like I mentioned this is the field radio podcast so I'll go ahead and give a plug for our podcast that airs every other Thursday on the ham radio 360 Network you can subscribe to that podcast by going to your favorite podcast player or watching the episodes here in the youtube channel or you can go to filled radio podcast org for other subscription information and I'm checking there on the chat and it looks like audio and video are great so thank you very much so let's go ahead and get started first of all let's define what a go-bag or go box is so in general terms it is an organization of equipment put into a bag or a box for a designed purpose that's really as general as it gets you're taking gear and you're making it portable and it has a defined purpose and that's the most important part of any field go bag or go box is you have a defined purpose so let me bring up a slide deck here and so if you've listened to my podcast before I've talked about this I have some goals for operating and my first goal is get on the air and my second goal is stay on the air all too often especially with special service events we see stations that get on the air and then they go off the air so the second goal is very important I get on the air and then stay on the air and then be an effective communicator because being on the does not accomplish your mission being an effective communicator does and then lastly have fun because if this isn't fun why are we doing it and if it's an emergency situation if you're not at least relaxed and comfortable in what you're doing you're not going to be an effective communicator so my philosophy of use with the handheld Go Bag is to facilitate two-way communication and it's also to maintain that two-way communication and it's to have basic supplemental tools that help me either facilitate - a communication or maintain community two-way communication and then what you always want to do is a good way of philosophy of use is not only define what it is but also define what it is not and so this is not my primary form of communication a handheld is a deficient item when it comes to field communication it's very low power and the only that it does have is portability now if your mission is portability then this is what you want to be able to use but I have other forms of communication I have other forms of handhelds so this bag for me is my kind of I would guess you would say emergency bag or a go-to bag and then also this bag is not basic life survival gear this is not my survival kit now granted your survival kit may have a hand held in it but if we took the survival kit it would go from this size to this size and then it would be very luggable and very large so we want to make sure that we don't try and define this as being also our survival kit now granted there are some carryover with some items in here especially tools and so but that's okay as long as you have the space and it's it complements your communication so let's outline what this bag is it's has the radio antenna power and accessories has cell phone because the cell phone to me is my primary form of communication device and as long as I am in cell service and the cell network is working then yes your cell phone is your primary form and you need to have items in here to help maintain that and then you need to regenerate your power either through solar or external power now also I mentioned we have some tools in here so we have some lights small tools paracord note-taking GPS stuff like that things to help facilitate the communications now I skip the slide here so we're gonna go ahead and roll back there we go so let's define also what field expedient equipment is first of all it's modular so like I said this can complement and sit alongside a survival bag or a mobile vhf/uhf bag or my HF bag so everything can be Mountain modular because here comes the issue if you take all the equipment that you could possibly ever need for any mission or purpose in the field and put it into one bag or box you're not gonna be able to lift that box and if you do you're gonna be so burdened by all the equipment in it that you're not gonna be able to perform effectively so you need all of your equipment to be in a modular format so you can pick and choose at time of go time or loadout exactly what is my mission and what are the items I need to accomplish that mission so another item for filled expedient equipment is it needs to be portable now this is going to be defined by first of all your personal preference and the mission portability to a person on a soda activation is an ultra lightweight man pack where ounces count or it may be a vehicle load or in the case of an Ares M comm activation it may be the trailer load or in the case of the military may be a forklift in a c-130 you define your portability and as long as it meets your mission that's your portability now you also want to be have everything tested in the field is not the time to figure out that the system doesn't work or the components you selected to put together don't work together or they're missing some type of adapter that goes with it and so you want to have this stuff tested the best way to test it in the easiest way is take your loadout go into a completely separate room in your house and start start assembling it and start putting it together and decide how many times did I walk back into my Shack and grab that one missing item and then you know that your loadout is not accurate or go into your backyard you don't have to make this a big deal just go in your backyard try sending it up observe if you can set up your equipment and operate it without having to walk back in the house or go to the garage for something missing so you also want your equipment organized and if you can't tell by that picture up there that is a sock drawer and that is a highly organized sock drawer that is the level of organization you want with your equipment if your equipment is that organized when it comes time to roll out you a belt a quickly grab the equipment you need for the mission you need and you know you have everything in your organized gear because it is very organized then once you get in the field you're not encumbered by unorganized equipment and not knowing which bag or what item everything is in now the last item is your equipment needs to be understood not only understanding its capabilities and what it can and can't do but you also need to know how it works and what menus work and how it how it functions and how to operate the equipment and this comes with time and testing so like I said going to the back yard going to the park those are ways you can do time and test this equipment now we'll come back here to full screen so in the chat I see we got some chat going on and so hello Keaton that's my son he's tuning in so it also looks like we have Kailyn here welcome Kel we've got a couple other people so we're going to go ahead and talk about this now as I go through the item we got some people in the chat room and then also all everybody that's watching this in archived as you see things that you like with your HT Go Bag go ahead and throw a comment in there and share and collaborate with the people that are listening and the people that are watching this an archived format now also while you're there I'm going to put another plug in go ahead and subscribe to this channel then give me a thumbs up that helps with you getting notifications of when we do live events like this or when we upload product reviews and other tutorials and so go ahead and do that and we will get moving on here so let me bring up the overhead camera move the mouse out of the way and what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down this box and actually really fast here I'm going to see if I can stop that autofocus I just noticed that we got an autofocus in there so just stand by one minute here for me and we will go in here and take that out there we go much better just the lighting to get this get this working for us here there we go okay we're back on now okay so this is my bag this is a Cabela's it's a duty bag these have been going for $10 during this Christmas season and also you'll find these randomly they're at Cabela's in the bins so I like these bags I have a lot of these bags that work very well so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna walk through I'm just gonna basically blow this bag up go pocket by pocket and to kind of explain what we're what we have here so I'm gonna stop with start here with the top and just kind of start walking through through items so first of all I have business cards that I keep plenty of them around so this is good if you need to take notes on the back or if you're talking to somebody to say here's my contact information so that's always a good thing to have I did a review on this and you can see this on the YouTube channel this is my gaff tape roll you take an unused credit card or gift card and start wrapping gaff tape or duct tape I like using gaff tape because it comes off and plays a lot easier and it's easier to tear in the field so instead of packing that huge roll you just take this gaff tape and there we go so we got that and then to follow up with that here is my electrical tape roll which I also had on that same youtube channel this is just electrical tape wrapped around one of these shopping favorite shopper cards that's how I got it so thin if you have a full-size card you can just wrap multiple lines and so there's my tape nice compact knife so I guess a we got some tools that might carry over but so I keep a knife right there on top so I don't have to dig through these pockets I can see my knife and then here's a jump drivin this jump drive has all of my FL digi all my chirp all my programming software all my repeater list everything so if I happen to come across the computer all my manuals are all in or Matt so I keep it on a jump drive and so I know worst case scenario I have something there so I'm gonna go ahead and switch fullscreen sorry I forgot to do that there we go that'll give you a little bit better view so here's my lanyard so I keep my ID clip to this and one of these try to kind of travel pouches or ID pouches you keep your keep ID or whatever ideas you have keep it on the lanyard now here's something that I just kind of threw in here and I will find a use for these later but these are just little carabiner clips great for doing whatever you need to do and you just keep it kind of a grundle those in the pocket and so that is finishing out this top pocket so let's go ahead and dive in to the meat of the bag so we talked about generating power so I have a goal zero Nomad three point five this is a very small solar panel but it fits in the bag and so it does what it needs to do now this one will charge directly off a USB or you can use what's called the guide 10 and so this is either Double A or Triple A so you go from the solar panel to this and it'll charge batteries but the nice thing about this is it not only has the input from solar or from other power but it also has output and so I can be charging batteries and using this output at the same time to keep my cell phone going or if I'm charging batteries to keep my HT going now a couple smaller accessories here I have is just the cable that goes between the solar port and this guy 10 and also a USB so if I happen to need to charge these batteries based on a car battery or whatever I've got that will work and then I also have a couple items this is an alternate --usb power meter when I plug this in this will just tell me what output I'm getting out of the solar panel that's always helpful especially these really small ones to see if you're even getting enough power to start charging and then this is called a it's from gold 0 it's called a stepper and what this does is cellphones like to be a certain volt to charge and if they're in between those voltages they don't really charge that well and so what this does is this either buck converts down to the next available charge that the solar panel wants so it goes in line just between your between your cell phone and the power source whatever that is and it just helps that cell phone take a charge so sometimes you'll see especially with Apple when you say this is accessories not supported it actually says that the power you're getting is not supported and so that solves that so that is my goal zero power where I can regenerate okay next item will go ahead and we got our HTS and like I mentioned this is not my primary HT I have a Kenwood HD these are my kind of backup HTS or my field I can drop them in the ground HTS they are the bail things uv5 our plus and I have two of them so the reason why I have two of them is because now I have all the parts I need in this one so I have redundancy and I can have the ability to redundancy because of the low cost now here's another thing we talked about primary communication you may assume that primary communication is between you and some other party somewhere else well the communication might come from just you in your own party say you're trying to talk between car to car while your caravanning or we had an instance in southern Utah where the the father went to go help get help the family ended up getting rescued while the father was out getting help then the father didn't make it so if you're stuck somewhere you can leave one handheld with your party and as you go for help or go up to the top of the mountain get better reception you can still have comms between your two people so that's why I have to it's redundancy and you're able to have that with these kind of radios next item I have is we'll start getting into some antenna options we will say here this is I've got a couple things here so I'll go ahead and slide this out of the way this is an M F J mag mount BNC magma antenna for your car so you pack this you take this you put it on top of your car run your line in or say you're at eMCON place or whatever you're doing you take and put it on a filing cabinet that gives you an external antenna for your HT cab now I have some adapters the first of all the adapter makes it - some radios and then also the BNC makes it - what I have here and this is a great item is the signal stick antenna that's made by our friends here in Utah so this is my another form of antenna I can use for the kit or I can use it to mount on top of this and use this antenna and an external so I'll go ahead and I'll set all that aside there we go and I notice we did have a question about why aren't we charging HTS off of USBs I'm starting to see more of that where there are USB chargers that plug into the base of your charger and so that is starting to come out more okay so my next item like I said tools supplementing communication I have a GPS because if I'm going to communicate and especially in emergency situation I need to say where I'm at and I'm not going to try and power on my cell phone and hope that the GPS on the cell phone is providing me any sort of accuracy so I know I have my GPS and also I can do more things with this GPS that's more reliable say I need to go up on top of the hill and get communications I can mark the exact location of where we were and so now I have the GPS readout of where I am and where the strands say the stranded vehicle is and so that's the reason why I have that GPS and then also just a charge cable for it now this runs on double-a batteries so I'm able to just use the batteries that I have in the kit okay next item we talked about redundancy so not only do I have two HTS but I also have two HT bases so this is the base this is the this is the DC so I can plug this into 12-volt in charge or this is the AC and I can plug into AC in charge so even in this kit I assume that I what happens if I do come across power I can still use AC so you don't want to exclude one form of electricity just because you haven't imagined that you are going to be somewhere without electricity because when you do have power you can use the AC so that is the kit and I like using these base charges and this is where I mentioned someone asked about the USB this is where I'm starting to see chords that go from here to USB to allow you to charge from USB power so I'll set that aside over here and we talked about redundancy so this is the same thing as what I just showed you base AC charger DC charger okay last couple items down in here this is an Rh 6 6 0 s antenna this one was an antenna shootout and I'll try and find that document and share it with you and put it in comments but this antenna was the one that had the most gain for HTS well here's the thing it's one of these telescoping antennas so a word of caution on this especially if you're using a Baofeng or any trike on radio they are very sensitive at this base you get this thing whipping around first of all you may break this antenna but second of all you may break the connection inside your radio so I treat this as a this is the the last resort of device when I'm trying to make communications and so of course with redundancy we have two radios we have two chargers we have two antennas same thing and that is the rah-66 0s okay so back to the bag we now empty the internal part so we're gonna go ahead and work around the bag starting on this side so this is where some supplemental tools come in that i've found it just works better that has this so I have just a headlamp that's easy and I make sure that it runs off triple-a I don't want to get any interesting battery types in the field like that some paracord some cordage fits in there nicely some velcro ties if you listen to one of my tips and tricks I espoused the evils of zip ties in the field so I have some velcro ties in here just to wrap things up as I need to and then I start with the the battery parade so these are containers that hold either triple-a or double-a and the way you face them you can tell them whether you've used them or not and so I just keep a stack of double-a and triple-a batteries because my radio will run off that my headlamp will run off that my flashlight I can use these to charge my cell phone because of the gold 0 guide 10 I can plug in for doublea's and charge my cell phone off that so I just keep a Rundle of those down in the box so and then I also have a traditional flashlight once again this flashlight runs off of triple ace I don't want any special CR one two two whatever whatever whatever I don't have any more of battery I want to keep everything standardized across double-a and triple-a so that empties out that pocket and there's a side pocket here I don't have anything in so we'll go ahead and move over to their side this bag starting to get much much lighter okay so once again multiple power sources this is a DC 12 volt socket two clamshell device this replaces the battery on the radio and so now if I have a car battery or I have any 12-volt source I can be running the radio and this helps because a lot of times with the batteries if you try and charge the battery at the same time you're using the battery that causes the interference and then so this is really good it takes the battery out of the equation and so that's a must-have when you're dealing with multiple power options and once again redundancy same thing two radios two 2dc connections now we'll get into cell phone I'll set that aside until we get to war into cell phone stuff here are the external batteries these are a little bit larger so I have not only the batteries in the radio but I also have two external battery or larger batteries that can fit on the radio and then lastly rounding out the power front are these clamshell devices this is where you fit depending on your radio either double-a or triple-a you fill up this with the batteries and then you can run your device off of pop it open there so you can see that's just simply you're putting batteries in now you have to pay attention some of the radios you have to put a dummy load in depending on the the voltage and they also tell you what kind of batteries that could be used in these so once again redundancy I have two of these and so really what I have here is I can theoretically run my radio and my cell phone off of double-a and triple-a batteries okay that empties out that pouch we got two more to go and then we'll round this out as the table starts getting filled up okay so cell phone we want to talk about cell phone like I said this is maintaining communications and my cell phone is my primary form of communications so I always keep a just the cigarette lighter 12 volt socket to USB that's going to give me that power conversion that I need also maybe to charge my GPS and also charge my cell phone and then once again you have DC so we also have AC so you get every one of these with your phone just go ahead and grab an extra one throw it in because never assume that you're not going to have AC power now these little devices I like and I also keep the regular device to but it's a multifunction it's got the old iPhone but it's also got the new iPhone and mostly new Samsung's except for the new u.s. pcs so I keep that I also keep another just standard iPhone core because if you're an iPhone user you understand the fact that these will break routinely and for no reason at all so I keep an extra and then primarily for the cellphone I have this USB charger to keep the cell phone charged I can recharge this via cell phone or via solar panel also so that's a benefit of these devices and like we mentioned before if you get a USB to radio device you can also use this as a very large external battery for your radio okay now into some more accessories for the radios you always want your nice hand mic so that's normal and of course two radios two hand mics not digging in these pockets here little single buddy earphones for those hand mics so you can get an ear on it and then another one so once again two of everything and then this is what came with it the single earpiece kind of talked device this comes with the radio so I just went ahead and put those in there also I don't haven't really ever used these that much so okay that empties out that pocket one more pocket to go and then we'll wrap this up okay so a couple tools here this is an item that I found it's it's pretty nice it's got different Phillips in standard sockets and then of course a bottle cap opener because what you wouldn't want to be in the field of that one of those so that's kind of a little tool to have the keep on hand this is my favorite tool for the field it's it's not bulky like your rather regular Leatherman but it's it's just the Cabela's small knife I think in like four about eight bucks multi-tool it's got a knife it's got a couple tools but it's it's small enough that you can keep it in your pack or keep it in your pocket razor blade screwdriver that's a multi-function flips around for standard these are my favorite type of screwdrivers and we've got some standard antennas so the like I always say especially with the chai khon radios the first thing you get is this is comes with the radio it's called the dummy load no I'm just kidding but it's really a terrible antenna they put with it and it's also so stiff that like I mentioned on the radio how you have propensity to break this antenna is going to really cause that if you hit the top of this antenna you might damage your radio so go ahead and throw those away but I keep them in here just because yeah I'd hate to leave at home and then it turns out it was going to work so here's the standard antenna that I use just in Nagoya antenna and of course we have two of them two radios two antennas okay digging into the last final pocket this is a USB USB light there's one from goal zero that I like they're a little bit more expensive they're like ten dollars I think when they're on sale but this was like a little two dollar thing I found at Dayton this part just glows and so I can take if my regular flash lights go out I can use this to just temporarily light or some fixed lighting type thing and so that works out pretty good to have that in your bag and then note-taking so you want to keep keep notes and of course you never trust a pen so mechanical pencils a regular pen when they work they're great so some mechanical pencils and then these little golf pencils you can get a box of a hundred for pretty cheap I just throw these little golf pencils in and then extra lad of course note-taking and then this is my search-and-rescue item this is a laser pointer it's a green one and if you haven't heard of this before this is a good item to have in especially search-and-rescue like I mentioned situations because the laser light on these the FLIR operators say on your search and rescue helicopter your sheriff's helicopter FLIR this lights up very well and you don't point it at the helicopter obviously but if you start pointing to a mountain and start spinning it in a circle that FLIR operator is not we gonna see that switch over here that FLIR operator is not only going to see the circling going on on the mountain but they can also see the line tracing back to where you are so if you're in low light or no light situation and you hear the helicopter you can start painting up a mountain side or a rock side and or speak you know say you want to spin it in the air you might start lighting up the helicopter but so a laser pointer is a great finding device to be to get your search-and-rescue helping you and then we'll switch back over here last item is and this is I think the most important item in here is this is my check checklist so what I have in this I do this for all my bags you won't be able to read the text here but so all of my bags have all my items the date so at the top it says HT go back checklist revise two of fifteen so this is the last time that I kind of changed my configuration and then it has all of the information listed and I checkmark whether it's packed in the bag or I mark a note that I don't have it in the bag and then I have a date down here that says with the lightning we'll be able to see that but it says last checked and then over here it says last charged and so I take this and keep it in the bag or I keep it on top and so the minute I pull out that bag not only can I see when was the last time I check the inventory on my when I repacked it but I also can look at and say when was the last time I charged the batteries and now I know I need to recharge the batteries this helps because like I said if you get a lot of modular items in your get a lot of modular items in your go kit you're going to start forgetting exactly what items in what bag maybe and so this is going to help you you pull out the inventory item you say okay I know I have this in the bag now the last item that I don't have sitting here with me is all the documents so repeater book for my local area my FCC license different types of family plan communication plan local Ares plans a photocopied very shrunk down manual for the radios so I can know what if I need the manual for the radio so like that so just different documents that you can identify so we are going to go ahead and wrap up the live stream here but I'd like to thank everybody that's in the chatroom I see some great comments going on and thank you for tuning in also thank you for everybody that's going to be watching this in archived and so as a reward for for sticking with me here till the end if you go to field radio podcast org and halfway down there is a email subscription if you subscribe to my email so I can send out notifications of events like this and other items within a week I will send you a very nice PDF document with all of these items all the manufacturer parts items and everything like that plus a little bit of what we talked about here today kind of it as a reward for subscribing to the fill'd radio podcast and I want to just roll some music here and thank you for tuning in my name is John Jacobs w7d Bo and this is the ham radio and 360 build radio podcast [Music] you [Music]