Emergency FRS/GMRS Channels

I thought I'd posted something on this, but I hadn't.  

If you spend quite a bit of time in the outback, you should pack along an FRS/GMRS capable radio, or at least a FRS one.  I.e., a "walkie talkie".

I like radios, and it's really easy to geek people out on the topic, or for that matter to get arrogant in regard to them, which is a frequent problem in radio communities.  What I'm going to start off noting is something that goes down the rabbit hole in GMRS communities, but its easy to set yourself up with these sorts of small handheld radios.  Midland in particular makes good sets for regular people.

Everyone has seen these sorts of radios, and a lot of children actually use them, particularly the FRS ones.  When you buy a "bubble pack" radio set at the sporting goods store, that's what you are getting.

Okay, for some technicalities.  From the FCC website:

The Family Radio Service (FRS) is a private, two-way, short-distance voice and data communications service for facilitating family and group activities. The most common use for FRS channels is short-distance, two-way voice communications using small hand-held radios that are similar to walkie-talkies. The service is licensed-by-rule so the general public can use the devices without having to obtain a license and channel sharing is achieved through a listen-before-talk etiquette.

Other services that allow similar communications include the CB Radio Service, General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) and the Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS).

The FRS is authorized 22 channels in the 462 MHz and 467 MHz range, all of which are shared with General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) which requires an individual license for use.

That's frankly a little deceptive, for reasons we'll discuss in a moment.

A lot of the the radios you buy now have the GMRS bands on them, and lots of people, as we'll see, buy GMRS radios intentionally, which require a license, as noted.  Regarding GMRS;

The General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) is a licensed radio service that uses channels around 462 MHz and 467 MHz. The most common use of GMRS channels is for short-distance, two-way voice communications using hand-held radios, mobile radios and repeater systems. In 2017, the FCC expanded GMRS to also allow short data messaging applications including text messaging and GPS location information.

Services that provide functionality similar to GMRS include the Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS), the Family Radio Service (FRS) and the Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS).

The GMRS is available to an individual for short-distance two-way communications to facilitate the activities of licensees and their immediate family members. Each licensee manages a system consisting of one or more transmitting units (stations.) The rules for GMRS limit eligibility for new GMRS system licenses to individuals in order to make the service available to personal users. (Some previously licensed non-individual systems are allowed to continue using GMRS.)

In 2017, the FCC updated the GMRS by allotting additional interstitial channels in the 467 MHz band, increased the license term from 5 to 10 years, allowed transmission of limited data applications such as text messaging and GPS location information and made other updates to the GMRS rules to reflect modern application of the service.

I"m not going to bother with MURS, which you don't run into that often.

GMRS is a far more capable two-way radio system than CB is.  If CB's are down in their legally restricted power range, they really only have a about a three-mile range, which is also pretty common range wise for FRS.  GMRS varies by terrain and is line of site, so it can be quite short as well, although it can be quite long.  I've hit a hand held gmrs from a 5 Watt gmrs radio from a distance of 20 miles away, and the other day I was picking up the local repeater from over 30 miles away when I actually quite listening to it.

Channel 3 is a FRS channel that doesn't require the GMRS license, and it's the channel that seems to be getting adopted for emergency radio use.  Colorado Search and Rescue has adopted it:

You can read more about that here:

FRS3 For Colorado Backcountry

Wyoming Search and Rescue has as well, but there's an added wrinkle with them.  Riffing off of the widely held weird belief in Wyoming that the area code is somehow cool, they've added the suggestion that people program in privacy code 7.

Colorado specifically asks that people not program in a privacy code.

Privacy codes are really easy to program into any of these radios.  It's just done with the keys.  What a privacy code does is filter out all the radio traffic not using it, so if you have it programmed in, you'll only hear transmissions using it.  People not using the code can hear everything, but they can't talk to you.

As noted, I like radios and I carry a hand held Midland GMRS radio (usually a Midland) out in the sticks all the time.  Both of my regular 4x4s have vehicle mounted GMRS radios as well.  One of those is the most powerful one you can have by law, which means it should be able to broadcast at distance, and it also allows the user to program in "split tones", which are useful for privately maintained repeaters.  Northern Colorado is jam packed with a really good repeater system, and it now extends as far north as Cheyenne which is linked into it.  The Torrington area has a repeater as well, but I've never been able to hit it.  Casper has a very good repeater which is part of the GMRS Live system, so through net linkage, you can hit all the way up into Montana on it.

Not that most people want to do any of that.  But the recommendations are really good ones.  The hand held radios can be bought fairly inexpensively (although you can get a really expensive one if you wish) and if you are lost, or hurt yourself out in the sticks, and much of the sticks in Wyoming is without cell service, it could be a life saver.

Report dead wild rabbits to Game and Fish

 Report dead wild rabbits to Game and Fish

POSTED:

JULY 20, 2020

|

CHEYENNE REGION

NEWS

NEWS

Wyomingites are being asked to keep a lookout for dead rabbits in their yards, rural property and other outdoor areas. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is collecting wild rabbit carcasses for Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus2 testing, known as RHDV2. While not found in Wyoming yet, the disease has been identified in neighboring states. Testing rabbits is key to monitoring the disease spread.

RHDV2 is a fatal disease of rabbits and hares. An estimated 35-50% of infected wild rabbits succumb to the disease.  

Samantha Allen, Game and Fish state wildlife veterinarian, said all of Wyoming’s rabbits and hares are susceptible — that includes game and nongame species like cottontail rabbits, jack rabbits and potentially, pygmy rabbits. Domestic rabbits are also at risk; however, other domestic pets and livestock are not at risk from the disease.

The first indication of RHDV2 infection in rabbits is dead animals.

“Any rabbit could become infected with the disease - so it could be a cottontail living in your yard or the one you see while hiking,” said Allen. “Please report any dead rabbits you find. Testing these carcasses is the only way to know if the disease is in Wyoming.”

The disease has been confirmed in California, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. 

RHDV2 does not pose a threat to humans, but rabbits carry other diseases which can —  like tularemia and plague. The public is advised not to touch or pick up any dead wild rabbits. Rather, note the location and call the Game and Fish Wildlife Health Lab at (307) 745-5865 or the nearest regional office. Game and Fish personnel will evaluate the situation, and make plans to collect the rabbit.

Sturgeon have recovered in the Detroit River.

Blog Mirror: Colorado Eliminates Over-The-Counter Archery Elk Tags For Non-Residents

 

Colorado Eliminates Over-The-Counter Archery Elk Tags For Non-Residents

Blog Mirror: Natrona County Sues Ranchers Over Threat To Close Off Road

 In the words of sages everywhere, "oh shit".

Natrona County Sues Ranchers Over Threat To Close Off Road

Frankly, I really question the County Attorney's conclusion that this isn't a county road, but then, I haven't looked at the topic either.

Bear

"Bear" is one of the oldest words in the Proto Indo European language group.  It's one of the hand full of words that comes down to us through the ages.

There's a reason for that.

Bears are dangerous.

Here's a recent headline:

Woman mauled by bear after her dog chased cub up a tree

Attack was in a Vermont condo complex near Stratton Mountain. Bears were also dining on pumpkins in the area.

Most of these articles go on to explain that black bear attacks, which is what the bear in question was, are "rare".

And they are.

Grizzly bear attacks, FWIW, are not.  We have a few in the state every year.  There's been at least three this year.

But attack a black bear will, and while rare, they do occur.

Blog Mirror: Cottontail Tacos

This looks really interesting:

Cottontail Tacos

I really like cottontail rabbits as food to start with.  I usually "Southern Fry" them.  But my wife absolutely hates them, so I don't hunt them much.  I'd like to.

Blog Mirror: Lummis Wants To Use Federal Land For Affordable Housing

 There are other ways to go about this. . . 

Lummis Wants To Use Federal Land For Affordable Housing

I'm Just Here For The Potty: Little Outhouse on the Prairie. Walker Jenkins Lake

I'm Just Here For The Potty: Little Outhouse on the Prairie. Walker Jenkins Lake: 

Little Outhouse on the Prairie. Walker Jenkins Lake

These are the facilities at Walker Jenkins Lake, a fishing hole that was, originally, an open pit Uranium Mine.

We'll let you ponder that for a second.

 Fairly typical rural facilities for Wyoming, and a nice example.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, June 7, 1924. Signing bills.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, June 7, 1924. Signing bills.: 

Saturday, June 7, 1924. Signing bills.

Interestingly related to something we recently posted, photographs of Boy Scouts participating in contests on this day in 1924.

The Clarke-McNary Act went into effect, making it easier for the Federal Government to purchase land to expand the National Forest System.

President Coolidge signed the Cameron Bill authorizing Coolidge Dam.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, June 3, 1924. Gila Wilderness

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, June 3, 1924. Gila Wilderness: 

Tuesday, June 3, 1924. Gila Wilderness

The Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, became the first designated wilderness area in the world thanks to the lobbying efforts of Aldo Leopold, then the United States Forest Service's supervisor of the Carson National Forest.

Lex Anteinternet: Boy Scouts no more.

Lex Anteinternet: Boy Scouts no more.:   

Boy Scouts no more.

 

The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America

Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.

Article in the Tribune. 

Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?

I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts.  I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.

Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true.  I was briefly.  Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts.  I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why.  Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them.  The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself.  That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group.  Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.

Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.

We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.¹   Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts.  The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.

The original organization had no place for girls.  Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations.  The two didn't mix.

And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues.  Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them.  Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men.  Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.

There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it.  One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out.  Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it.  Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.

Signs of decline were there even then.  Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been.  Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it.  I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization.  Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.

I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't.  I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful.  Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded.  Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc.  Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them.  Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way.  It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.

The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with.  The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture.  It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.

In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem.  The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.² Out with the old, and in with the new.  The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation.  It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.

Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.

People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted.  One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers.  No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts.  A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.³ 

We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers.  The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month.  I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old.  If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.

Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent.  It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened.  That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes.  It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.

This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts.  Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't.  Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.

There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women.  Probably our biology has a lot to do with it.  The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.

The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then.  The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons.  Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.

Footnotes:

1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting.  The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't.  The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.

It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own.  Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.

As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male.  I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming.  Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to.  As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.

2.  Only if troops adopted it, however.

3.  Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after.  The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.

Related threads:

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

No place for boys. . .

Exit the Boy Scouts Stage Left. Boys, Men, the "Masculinity Crisis" and the "BSA" as an example of it.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8. The LDS severs ties with the BSA.

Blog Mirror: What Scouting Has Lost

Labels: 1960s, 2020s, 2024, Boer War, Boy Scouts, British Army, children, Commentary, homosexuality, Men, Muscular Christianity, Sexual Revolution, Teenagers, The Rural Purge in Television, trends, Women, Youth Organizations