I was just sitting here thinking about RADIOS. Yep, just Radios in general and what people will or can use them for when the SHTF. There are so many things that they will be useful for that I won't even try to name them all. I was trying to think LOCAL rather than long distance. I remember way back in my old CB days and how everybody had a 5 watt CB. From that point on out to the antenna, every household was different. Most people had about 40 feet of some skinny coax and some kind of factory made antenna up about 25 feet. Then, there was the Hot Shot operators who used about 100 feet of RG8 or better coax, lived on high ground, and mounted their Factory made antenna up about 50 feet. I'll pause here to relate an experiment that I did many years ago. I compared the transmit/receive range of a CB station and a 2 meter station. Both stations ran 5 watts, had high quality coax, factory made antennas, and were mounted up about 30 feet. It turned out that the results were about equal except the 2 meter FM didn't have the noise problem that the CB had. Now, I'm moving on into today's world. I personally have loaded up with a ton of UV5R's and will have those things scattered all over Hell and Back when the time comes. The people who connect High Quality Coax and High Quality Antennas up about 50 or more feet are going to get some serious range out of those little pea shooters. I've tried a few experiments already with a few HAMS on 2 meters Simplex and those with good antenna systems do very well. I have one Ham friend who connected his UV5R up to his base station antenna and I could hear him 22 miles away but he really sucked. I have bought more two way radios than I'm willing to post here but let's just say that I'm not worried about radio malfunctions. Moving on..... HF is a whole different world and would take forever to fully cover so I'll just skip that for the time being.
