The Only Radio You'll Ever Need? | Rocky Talkie Expedition

It's mail day and I have something very cool to show you here. This is from Rocky. This is one of their new radios. They just came out with uh a GMRS radio. We'll talk about that and what that means for you in a minute. Um but let's get this thing unboxed. Okay. So, what we have here is we've got some accessories for our radios, which we'll talk about, and the radios themselves in these boxes. So, uh, let's open up one of these things and see what we've got. Very cool box. Voila. This is the Rocky Expedition Radio in high viz orange, which is awesome. So, you don't lose it. First feel here. This is really nice. Um, I've used the Rocky um F FRS radios uh in the past and they've worked incredibly well. Uh this is a little bit little bit heavier as you'd expect. This is a 5 watt radio. This is the highest power that you can have in a GRS uh handheld radio. So this is going to give you plenty of power to reach up to 35 mi line of sight. But if you're in the back country of the mountains, probably 2 to 8 m is uh more realistic to expect. And if you're on a river, uh, because you've got some diminished power capabilities on a river because the water absorbs a lot of the power and reflects it as well, um, you're going to have about half a mile to 3 mi of range with one of these. Okay, so here's the radio. And then we've also got in the box, we've got another whip antenna. This one's a little bit longer. And then they also sent me these, which are really long. And we'll talk about why this is important and useful um in a minute. So, this is interesting. They give you an extra little quarter wavelength antenna here. And we get a charging adapter. We have a lanyard system here, which is really good if you're going to be rafting um or if you're if you're just hiking and you don't want to lose your radio. It's good to have a leash uh on your radio. And inside the box, they've given us a quick start guide, which is nice. It gives us all of the lowdown on the frequencies that you can use and the repeaters and all that fun stuff, which we'll talk about. All right, let's talk about this radio. Now, this is a GMRS radio. This is a general mobile radio service radio. So, that means that you need to have a license to operate it. But don't get scared. It's very, very simple to get this license online. You can do it really quickly. Another nice thing about these radios is that they are also compatible with the Rockyalkie F FRS radios. All right, so let's fire this thing up. Got it. There it is. Push and hold for two seconds. Fires up the radio. This is an IP67 water resistant radio. So, what that means is that this can be immersed in up to 1 meter of water and it'd be just fine. And it also um has uh a specific grill design here that allows it to shed water off of it so that you can have intelligible speech uh instead of talking through a whole bunch of water in here and then it's just useless anyway. So they've really thought this thing through a lot. And on the back side here, they've got the alligator clip. It's got some teeth in it, which is nice um because it'll grip onto whatever you're attaching it to. It's got the the spot for the the the leash here on the bottom, so you can clip that on to your backpack um or your vest if you're whitewater rafting or canoeing and kaying, whatever. Nice to have the leash. Now, let's talk about the the the whip options here. So, this is a whip antenna. Now I'm a I am a uh amateur radio operator so I have some knowledge about this. This is a UHF uh tuned whip antenna. So this is going to be able to make the most out of the power that your radio has. So the most important thing about a radio is its antenna. And this is really nice and compact that they've given us this little antenna here. but it's not the best for long range communication. So, if you're going to be in a situation where you know you're going to be trying to push the limits of this radio and do several miles of communication, um I would step up to this antenna right here. It's just that simple, just unscrewing it and screwing the new one on it. Now they have provided this other um I think it's a quarter wavelength antenna that's a little bit longer than the little rubber ducky which what we call these little rubber ducky antennas. Um now this is going to give you moderately better reception and power transmission. Obviously the rubber ducky is going to give you the least performance. So you want to have that on there if you're just doing like line of sight communication. Um, but if you're trying to push the limits of this radio, then step up to one of these other two bigger antennas. Okay, enough about that. What else did they give us? They gave us this carabiner attachment. So, let's check that out. So, the carabiner attachment is cool. It's anodized aluminum. U really beautiful looking carabiner. And then they give us this little box. What's in the box? This is the actual mount for this. So, and if you don't want to have the leash that's going to be like getting all tangled up and stuff, if you want to have a really short clip mechanism, so you can just clip this onto um any climbing gear you have or a web molly system. If you don't want to use the gator clip, you've got this wonderful option to put this on. So, this will replace if you use a Phillips head screwdriver. This pops off and you can replace uh with this, which is uh the carabiner mount. Definitely going to hang on to that cuz I think I'd prefer to have this over the gator clip uh personally. So, there's there's the option there. The battery life on this thing is really crazy impressive. So, they say that this will last 4 to 6 days, um, which is great for expeditions before you need to recharge. It also has a headset port right here that is, uh, weather sealed. Uh, you need to take a screwdriver to open this up. It's It's sealed up really well. And then you can attach their um, waterproof um, headset as well. So, that's another option for an accessory. And then for charging on the side here, they've got a USBC, which is uh which is great cuz that's standard now. USBC charging. So, if you push and hold the storm cloud icon on the side while you're powering this up, it's going to go into uh the NOAA weather alerts um feature, which is going to monitor in the background uh the NOA weather alerts and let you know if there's anything that you should be concerned about in your area, which is very, very cool. Also, you can scan uh to get to the next NOA weather channel. Um, and so you can listen in on weather updates that way as well. So, how you flip through channels is there's a channel flipper on the top. That's also the lock button. Um, also is the scan button. So, if you push and hold towards the scan, it's going to just fly through the channels looking for something to listen to you. These radios are also rated down to -20 Fahrenheit or 120° F. That is a huge range of operation for these radios. So, uh, be assured that if you take this out in some gnarly stuff that you'll be able to communicate, which is great. This also has 121 privacy codes, the CTDCS codes, uh, that allow you to have a more uh, private conversation between two parties. Um, you can also monitor a second channel. So, this has dual channel monitoring with this button right here. you can switch between those two channels and monitor and talk to two different completely different parties. So, if you had a group or a party on on like say the F FRS radios that Rocky makes and then you had your group with two of these or whatever, then you could switch between those and talk to those different parties, which is really nice. All in all, this radio is absolutely incredible. the feel, the fit, the finish, um the feature set, and how intuitive it is to use these just blows me away. This is a really a wonderful radio. I've used a lot of radios. Being a ham radio operator, I have gotten to try out a lot of different radios and a lot of them are very cheap uh and cheaply made and they don't work well, especially when you get them out in the elements. And so this is the solution for backcountry adventure sports enthusiasts, uh, whitewater rafting, kaying, hiking, camping, climbing, this is the radio for you. I'm excited to put these through their paces and use them on upcoming trips. Absolutely love Rockyaki's products. Thank you, Rocky, for sending these to me. I'm not sponsored or anything. This is uh they're not going to see this video before it goes live. And uh all these thoughts are my own. So uh I just wanted to give you a first look at these radios, these new H High Viz Expedition radios from Rocky. Hope you found that useful or at least entertaining. We'll see you later. >> [music]