Steak F.J.F Video killed
the Radio Telephone Operator A Foray into Tactical Communications | First of all, radio enables communication. Now I know some of those are big words so I’ve asked an AI guest editor to rephrase this to make it easier to read: “Okay, imagine you have a special box that can send your voice to your friend's special box even if they're far away. That's what radio does, it lets people talk to each other even if they're not close by. So, if you want to tell grandma a story but she's too far away to hear you, you can use the radio to talk to her!” Alright give a round of applause to our guest editor for their help on this project. Now if you read that carefully, you may have noticed something, and I apologize but this will get a little technical so if you aren’t so good with logic puzzles I’d recommend you skip down to the article written by Gamer this week (or any week, really) and practice deciphering that and come back when you are an expert in making sense out of incoherent rambling. Now that you’re prepared, look at the last sentence in the quote there. It starts with a conditional statement “if you want to tell grandma a story…”. This is your first requirement before you are allowed to own a radio. You have to have something to say, and someone to say it to. If your grandma is dead, or too stupid to understand your very funny stories, then there is no point for both of you to own a radio. The sentence continues with “but she’s too far away to hear you…”. This is a second condition. You must have something to say, someone to say it to, and a reason why you can’t talk to them without this tool. In this case, the distance is too great for grandma to hear. She is old and in the other room, so she keeps the baby monitor on her side table so she can hear when you ask her for more blankets in the middle of the night when your caffeine high wears off. I know this is more words than you are used to reading in your 7 second phonk montages, but if you really want a radio these things are important to understand. Let’s assume you have friends who are retarded enough to larp with you. In a “hypothetical” without rule of law situation, what are you and your “team” going to be doing, realistically? Have you ever done any training for actual situations like that? Are you planning to do close quarters combat, kicking doors down and looting libtards? Perhaps instead you fantasize about Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol. Whatever it is you think your are going to do, if it happened tomorrow, could you actually do it? If the answer is “uh well we were planning to do some small-squad infantry tactics but Josh’s sister needed picked up from school and it rained last weekend and the week before that the new Top Gun movie came out but we’re still planning on getting some serious training in I promise.” then perhaps you need to work on that first. If you actually somehow managed to have friends and be competent enough as a team to have done some of these drills, then there is still a question. During these drills, are you splitting up? Do you actually have enough people to make that effective if you are? If yes for both of those, are your two teams far enough apart to need a tool to communicate, but close enough that a hand-held radio is enough to bridge the gap? The subset of people who actually need this capability and meet this fairly restrictive criteria is quite an exclusive group. To top it all off, even if your superman team fits the bill, radio is not a one-size-fits-all. You will need different tools for different situations. It is also complicated. At least one guy in your miracle gang will need a triple digit IQ and enough free time and technical skill to understand the more complicated aspects of radio (all of it) and then they will have to do the setup for everyone else. And even then anything more than the absolute bottom of the barrel Chinese garbage is going to cost more than you are likely comfortable spending on something you don’t understand. | If this seems harsh that’s because the reality is that radio is not easy. Is is not cheap. And unless this happens to be your “special interest” it’s not fun either. For most people, that’s three strikes. Since you’ve made it this far, you either actually do meet the criteria for benefiting from this stuff or can not be convinced otherwise. In either case, I’ll finally give some recommendations. If you have a smaller group that never gets more than a couple miles apart, the cheapest Baofeng you can find is okay. They are bad radios, but you can’t beat the price. If you wanted something that sucks less, get an Yaesu FT-60(R). It is more expensive and quite a bit better while maintaining most of the same features as the Baofeng. Anything less expensive will not be worth the price increase for the quality improvement you will see. If you are consistently many miles away, you may need to look into HF radio. If this is the case, you will need to find a radio guy as that gets more complicated (and expensive). If you want to do encrypted voice, the only option I would recommend is something like a Motorola XTS5000. Again this is something you will need a radio guy to help you with except now he has to be half-way decent with computers too as setting up the encryption on these is not as simple as “building” and AR. You should probably already know this but if not I’ll let you in on a secret or two. Most of these options will be illegal without an amateur radio license. Encryption is illegal pretty much no matter what. If you must have radios, do yourself a favor and learn a bit about sigint and opsec. If you take anything away from all this, it should be that radio is complicated and will take a significant time and money investment to be anything more than a photo op. So if the only thing you’ve every “operated” is your domino’s pizza delivery app, you may need to invest in outside help to make this work. |
Do you like guns? Do you like posting pictures of yourself on Instagram in full kit? Can you name more than 3 tactical gear vendors off the top of your head? Do you spend more on “equipment” each year than what you actually send down range? If so, great! Guns can be a lot of fun and shooting can be a fulfilling hobby. You sound like a “gun guy” or perhaps even a “gear queer”. That’s all well and good. There are lots of people just like you, some might even be half as racially motivated. Nothing more would need to be said if it weren’t for the fatal curiosity of one of your kind. I imagine it went something like this: One day, while watching 17 year old boys in foreign army fatigues twerking to house music on TikTok, you decided it would be fun to dress cool like they did. So you googled pictures of “cool guys in army with guns and camo and body armor and tanks”. “Yes!”, you said to yourself, outloud. This was perfect. This was exactly what you wanted to look like. These guys look cool. But that’s when you noticed something unusual. This strapping young man you’ve been idolizing has some strange sort of wire sticking off of him. Now that you really look at it, most of these pictures of fit, brave soldier have something similar. After a brief spat with Bing, you learn that this strange wire is in fact part of a “radio” and that all the cool operators have these. Naturally, you believe your kit will not be complete without one of these “radios” so now that you have decided to buy one, you begin looking for reasons to validate your decision to buy one. “Ah ha!”, you said to yourself, this time in a low, muffled tone as you were in the middle of the pizza you payed someone else to make and deliver to you. After several long minutes of intense redditing on the subject, you learned that, actually, these radios were not just cool accessories to wear on your “rig”, but that “army guys” used them to communicate with other cool army guys across long distances. Being a gentleman of a cultivated palate, you instantly recognize that you would also like to communicate with cool army guys across long distances. Or at least the idea of that being enough to justify why you need a radio now when your grandma asks what you want for your birthday. Here’s the thing you don’t seem to realize: You are a gun guy, not a radio guy. Seeing your favorite GI Joe Brandon wearing a brick with an antenna on his rig does not make radio an accessory for your gun. I’m not saying you don’t need a radio. You can make a very strong case for why the average person could benefit from that sort of thing. I’m saying that radio is not a part of your gun hobby. If you are just wanting to buy a new gadget for your online modeling career, you’d be better off buying walkie-talkies from the Walmart camping section. It’s not like your “audience” will be able to tell the difference anyway. If you are still reading, I will assume you are even more retarded than the average reader of this god-forsaken journal since you still believe I’m going to tell you that “actually I mean no one needs a radio except for super cool guys like yourself”. Fine. You want a radio so bad? Let’s go over what that means. |
