Communications Equipment / Radios
Who has CB/ ham/ or radio scanners in their vehicles, and why? I've been considering the three for a while, and ended up ordering a CB setup last night. I don't have a ham license and don't want to...
Forum Discussion
ng2951 wrote:
Your cellphone is better for traffic than CB or ham radio. GoogleMaps and Waze does a pretty good job of telling you traffic ahead.
GPS is still essential when you get into areas where cell service is spotty.
If you do not have a ham license, FRS/GMRS radios will do all you really need. Both the pardette and I are hams, and the ham radios serve us well when navigating around fuel pumps or backing in. We do a fair amount of dry camping where cell service is barely available.
FRS/GMRS radios can do the same as ham radios the way you will likely use them.
In short, if you have a ham license the available hardware is pretty nice, but I wouldn't knock myself out to get a license. Get a pair of FRS/GMRS radios, that is what they are made for.
Ham has been on my radar/to-do list for years. This truck build is just the excuse I needed to stop procrastinating and start working on it. I do have a pair of FRS/GMRS radios we already use for those sorts of things. I am not looking at ham for traffic, but more for emergency communications when out of cell range, APRS, and experimenting on packet radio. I use my cell for traffic but wanted some redundancy. In the week or so I have had my scanner installed I have heard about two nearby wrecks on the scanner that could have impacted me but I avoided, and heard truckers discussing a jam on I35 on CH19. Proof enough to me that these will be more useful than cell alone. Hearing the info when you are going down the road, in real time, beats a phone app. Especially if you aren't using the phone app for GPS, which I'm not going to do unless Waze comes out with a RV specific mode. When I did use it, it sent me down some roads I didn't quite fit on.
