What Search-and-Rescue Actually Wants You Carrying

As many of you may know, I am kind of a radio nerd and I have some radios here for you today that are going to possibly enhance your outdoor experience. So these are all radios that were sent to me and I got to try out. Some of them are new and some of them have been around a little bit, but still awesome. All right, so let's dive in with the Redivus brand radio. This is the new EasyTalk 5 radio and it is crazy cool. It has a ton of really interesting features in it. First up, it is a long range GMRS radio, so you do need to have a license to operate this. A GMRS radio license is easy to obtain. Just go to this website right here and you can get that done really quickly and I think the fee is pretty low as well. Then you'll be legal to operate a GMRS radio. This thing is a high power radio. It's range is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6.2 miles in open landscape and if you're in broken up woods, then you'll probably get around three miles with it and then about three miles in a city as well. The really cool trick that this has up its sleeve is that it is a dual band radio for GPS and BDS signals. So you can actually have some navigation ability with this with the app. There is the Redivus app that you can get for iOS or for Android and you can just pair your radio right to it and then access map data and that is really handy because when you're out in the backcountry, you don't have like a Garmin GPS or something like that. This can serve as your GPS, which is really nice and this is very lightweight. The weight on this is 10.3 ounces. So it's pretty lightweight for the battery capacity that it has. It has a 2000 milliamp hour battery capacity, which gets you about 18 hours of working time or 100 hours in standby. So this is really excellent for backcountry hiking, canoeing, camping, all that kind of stuff. It is an IP54 rating, so it is waterproof, which is very nice in case you get into a downpour with it. Another really nice feature is that it's got a light on the bottom of it, a flashlight. So you just tap the emergency SOS button one time and you get this nice little flashlight and it's cool that you don't have to like long press or double tap or just one press and you get the light. Very nice. I like that feature. It does have a really cool alarm feature on it. So if you want to stop a bear from charging you, no, I'm just kidding. This will not stop a bear from charging you, but if you do get into trouble, you can hit that button and you can actually tell the radio to send your GPS location to your group when you push that button, which is amazing so that people will know where to find you if you're in distress. Super cool feature. They're also rolling out a perimeter alarm, which is very interesting. I'm not exactly sure how that works just yet, but know that that is coming down the pipe, a perimeter alarm. So very interesting. I'm not sure how they're achieving that with this radio, but we'll see. It does also have an FM radio so you can listen to some tunes or your favorite talk show while you're camping. And it has NOAA weather alerts on it so that you can tell if a storm is going to be hitting you before it happens. So you can set this up to actually alert you if there's bad weather coming your way, which is really, really nice. And if you've got GMRS repeaters in your area, then you can tie into those with these radios for extended range. So for the price, these are absolutely incredible radios. And here is a discount code for my audience if you want to check that out right now. I think their list price is $124 for two of them on Amazon. They may even run deals from time to time on top of that. So yeah, these are excellent radios. Moving on to the next radio that I have in this lineup is this really interesting radio from Midland. This is the Clip Talk radio. So this is it. This is all that it is right here. This just clips onto your shirt. This goes in your ear like you're some cool secret spy man. You can flip this around to get to your left ear if you want to. And basically all you got to do is just hit this button right here and you're communicating with the other person that has this. So this is one of the smallest two-way radios I've ever seen, possibly the smallest. And it's got a great range to it. It's FRS and GMRS capable. So you can use only the frequencies that are FRS if you want to just have this with your family and you don't need a license to run it. Or if you do have a license, you can tap into the GMRS frequencies as well. So very, very capable little radio. It's got a one-mile range, which is pretty amazing for how small this is, and an eight-hour battery life. So if you want to look like you're in the Secret Service, just get one of these radios. All right, so next up is the Mountain radio from Rocky Talkie. I've always loved Rocky Talkie radios. They're very durable, robust little radios, and they've got great mounting options. They've got a ruggedized carabiner that's a load-rated carabiner on it. It's got a lanyard you can put on it in case you're canoeing or kayaking and you don't want to drop this in the river. Very cool. I've mentioned these in other videos, but I thought they were definitely worth a mention in this radio video because they're fantastic. Very simple to use. These are FRS radios, so you don't need a license to operate them. IPX54 rated, so they're waterproof radios. Again, that's very handy for backcountry, realistic, real-world use. And they do have a clip mic, so you can clip this onto your sternum strap on your backpack or your shoulder strap and then be able to trigger that radio right like that. Rocky Talkie is the great plug-and-play option. You just don't have to think about it. Just turn it on, set it to the radio frequency, and go. Next up is the overlanding or car option. So Midland makes this just adorable little 15-watt GMRS radio. So this has actually got a lot of power in a very small package here. This would be great for your side-by-sides or your cars or your trucks. And it's got 99 channels in it, up to 99 channels. You can program them. IP67 rated, so it's waterproof and dustproof. This would be great for just getting out in the mud, doing some mudding in your mudding truck or your side-by-side or something like that. So yeah, just adorable little packaging here. You could even make this into a man pack radio by putting this in with a battery. And there you go. You got your man portable radio. It's got high and low power, so you can use the 15 watts, the full 15 watts, or you can drop it down to 5 watts. It has eight repeater channels on it, so you can dump this radio into a repeater and get some extra range out of it. It does have NOAA weather alerts on it and weather channels, so that's really a nice feature if you are overlanding, boondocking, whatever. This is excellent to give you some of that advance notice that there's storms coming. So this is compatible with FRS and GMRS radios, so you can have a radio like this one talk to this radio, and this could be like your base station radio. If you want to call the kids in from their five mile hike, then there you go. You've got the power to reach out and talk to them. So you can use a radio like this in conjunction with a radio like this if you want to use this as like your base station radio and then have people be able to hear you when they're out on trail or like the walkie-talkie. All of them can talk to this radio, so that's kind of cool. If you want to set up a base station in your RV or something like that, then boom, Midland makes a great radio for that. And we've got the nerdy option, because we've got to have the nerdy option, and we saved it to the end of the video because there's some people out there that just want to have something super unique and special, and that's why we have these options right here. This is a Meshtastic radio, and you might look at this and say, that looks like a credit card. What could that possibly do? This is actually a long-range text communication device. You pair this with your phone with a Meshtastic app, and you're able to send messages without cell service, without internet. This creates a mesh of radios that can talk to each other, so they can bounce like a text messages from device to device to device. So if you're in an urban environment or even out in the woods, and you have several people that have these, you can communicate really, really nicely. And a great thing to pair that with would be this. If you have like a base station, like your house or an RV or something like that, then you've got a solar-powered node. So you set this solar powered node up, and it can blast out to all these littler devices, and you can send text messages back and forth and GPS coordinates. So that's what's fantastic about this, is this little tracker device right here. You can put a lanyard on it. You can attach this to a high dollar value item and track its location. So people use these to track cattle, actually. They put like a little solar panel in there, and they seal it off with plastic, and they tag it into the ear of cattle, and they can actually track where cows are going. You can track where your side-by-side is or your camera gear or something like that. Then this is awesome for that. As well, you can just have this on your backpack and be able to send text messages to your group. So this is the WIO tracker, and it does the same thing as the SenseCap tracker, except that you can also type with a little QWERTY keyboard. It's got a joystick, and it's very difficult to use, but you can actually type out a text message and send it with this device. It is not IP rated. It is not waterproof, so you need to be very careful with this particular device, but it does have that additional functionality of being a standalone radio, and you can see your coordinates right on the screen here, which is really cool, and that also talks to the Meshtastic app. Yep, there you go. There's a little message that came in. Very cool. So yeah, absolutely love Meshtastic. I think it's really fun. It's very nerdy. It's kind of like a toy for an adult, and if you are technologically inclined in the least, then you probably would have a lot of fun with Meshtastic, and it's really inexpensive. These devices are on the order of less than 50 bucks to get one of these devices, so get one of these. Pure in a stocking stuffer this year for your friend who is a nerd, and they'll love it. Yeah, so there we go. There's some new radios that we can use in the outdoors that cover a range of frequencies and band types and power options, and I just think that these are all awesome options for you. So if you are getting into radios or you're looking to purchase a radio, then definitely jump on getting one of these. All right guys, thank you so much for watching. We will see you later.