Radio That Works, and the Closing Scanner Era

Five services, and the honest use case for each. FRS needs no license, gives 22 channels at 2 watts or less, and the antenna must be built in and not removable — genuinely useful inside a property or a convoy, useless at the ranges on the box. GMRS shares the 22 FRS channels and adds repeater pairs FRS cannot use; it permits higher power, detachable elevated antennas and repeaters. It requires an individual license with no exam; the license runs ten years, and covers the licensee's immediate family, which makes one license cover a household. Verify the current fee on the FCC's own schedule.

The other three services:

• MURS needs no license, has five VHF channels at 2 watts with an antenna height limit, and permits external antennas — quiet, lightly used, and VHF penetrates foliage and terrain better than UHF.
• CB needs no license and is still the road channel. Channel 9 is the FCC-designated emergency channel, and traveler assistance is also permitted there; volunteer groups have monitored it for decades.
• Amateur radio requires an examined license in three classes; the Technician exam is 35 questions needing 26 correct, and Morse code testing was eliminated for all classes in 2007. It is the only service here that reaches beyond the horizon without infrastructure, and the only one with an organized emergency-communications culture.

Now the physics that governs all of them. VHF and UHF propagate essentially line of sight, so effective range is set by the radio horizon — a function of antenna height above terrain, not transmitter power.

Doubling watts is marginal; raising the antenna is structural. That is why repeaters work, putting the antenna on a ridge so a five-watt handheld covers a county.

A “36 mile” claim describes two radios on mountaintops with nothing in between. The only range figure worth having is the one you measured on your own terrain, from the places you would use it.

The public-service side is worth knowing even if you never transmit. ARES is the ARRL's registered amateur emergency service; RACES is activated by civil authorities under tighter traffic rules and you join through the emergency management office, not a club. SKYWARN spotter training from the National Weather Service is free and requires no license at all.

NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts on seven channels between 162.400 and 162.550 MHz. SAME coding lets a receiver alert only for your county — the difference between a radio you keep on and one you switch off.

Emergency alerts can only be originated through FEMA's system by alerting authorities it has authorized, which are government agencies and some other organizations with a public-safety mission. That is worth knowing so you can recognize what an alert is and who could have sent it.

Finally, scanners. Federal law permits intercepting what is readily accessible to the general public, including unencrypted public-safety traffic. Cellular and encrypted traffic are outside it, and a separate provision restricts republishing what you intercept. States commonly add an offense for scanner possession during the commission of a crime — the same shape as the recording rule, where the tool is lawful and the purpose creates the offense.

But the change that matters is not legal. Agencies have moved to digital trunked systems and, increasingly, to full encryption, which a scanner cannot follow — with sustained press objection and legislative efforts to carve out access. So the question “should I buy a scanner” is now answered by checking what your local agencies have done.

The authoritative place to find licensed assignments is the FCC's Universal Licensing System, remembering that a license being listed says nothing about whether the traffic is in the clear.