UHF Radios, Convoy Communication & Off-Grid Safety | Tony Crooke (GME)

UHF radios are one of the most important pieces of communication gear for travelling off-grid in Australia.

In this episode of the Off Grid Down Under podcast, we sit down with Tony Crooke from GME and the Outer Side podcast to talk about how UHF radios help keep travellers safe, connected and informed while exploring remote parts of the country.

We cover:

• Why UHF radios are still essential even with smartphones

• The most important channels every traveller should know

• Common mistakes people make with their radios

• Convoy communication tips

• How to choose the right antenna and radio setup

• Some of the latest GME radio technology

If you’re heading off-road or planning your first big lap around Australia, this episode is packed with practical tips to help you communicate better and stay safer on the tracks.

🎙 Guest: Tony Crooke – GME / Outer Side Podcast

📡 Topic: UHF radios for off-road touring

Subscribe for more Off Grid Down Under podcast episodes covering caravanning, off-road travel and life exploring Australia.

#offroadaustralia #4wdtouring #uhfradio #gme #offgridtravel #caravantouring

Escape with Confidence

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Let's talk about a couple of things. There's etiquette, there's uh channel placement.

SPEAKER_02 0:03

Coming up here this morning, where there was a couple of incidents on the highway, channel 40 was the wild west. Let me tell you, it was I mean, it was quite entertaining. One of the questions we get all the time. Why aren't you using digital?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

If we didn't have those uh CB radios, it would have been almost impossible, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Yeah. Everyone thinks they want to be able to transmit as far as possible, but ultimately what you're doing is just potentially annoying far more people over a greater area.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

That's your coloured light bar, that's what I'm thinking of.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Yeah, pretty lights.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

One each side. Yeah. Flashing to the doof-duck.

SPEAKER_03 0:33

You got buggy whips on there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Surely GME has some sort of amazing gadget they're going to release at this show that you could talk about.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Have you seen my 80 series? That's what we're releasing at the show, mate.

SPEAKER_03 0:57

Welcome everybody to another edition of the Off-Grid Down Under Podcast. I am Sam Morehouse. I'm the host, and I'm joined here with Vaughan Heinley, Managing Director of MDC, Campbell's Caravans.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Really stoked to be here again, Sam. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:11

You're welcome. And uh Banksy from Beach to Bush. Nice to have you on again, mate. Thank you, Sam. And we're jo and we're joined by Tony Crook from GME. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming up, mate. I know it's a bit of a trip up the coast for you, but uh we see the big bus parked out the front. She's looking pretty clean and tidy, all ready for the four-wheel drive show. Yeah, mate.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

It's just had a little bit of a birthday uh preparing for well, the first time it'll be on display will be at the show on the weekend. So yeah. Nice. It's been a frantic month getting that one ready. Some shiny new rims and new wrap and all those types of things. Yep. Lots of new bits and pieces, and nothing fell off it when I drove it up from New South Wales yesterday, so that's always a positive. Nice.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

So any any updates for the car enthusiasts that will know of you from uh some of your other work on in the media?

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Uh yeah, there's a long list, but in short, uh we replaced the whole front end with GU Patrol, so GU Patrol div housing fully braced, uh switched to airlockers.

SPEAKER_03 2:04

This is on your 80 series. Just to keep things in context.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

GU Patrol steering box, Fox 2.5, remote resi shocks, uh all new Alley Arms, etc. Nice. So a few little upgrades. Cool.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

Well, look, that's uh a nice little segue. You are becoming quite a figurehead in the uh Australian four-wheel drive and off-road industry for various reasons. Obviously, you work with GME. You guys have been really active from a you know product development point of view and a lot of new product releases and expansion in the business. Um, but you also sort of run a podcast on the side. So just tell us about Tony from GME, I guess, for starters and what your role is with the business. And yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Sure. Uh I ticked over 10 years at GME in October last year, which is great because now I've got long service leave. So I've got eight weeks of leave up my sleeve. So I'm just plotting where I'm gonna where I'm gonna use that and how. Uh so yeah, my background is product marketing. Uh I worked at Sony Electronics for a long time and really cut my teeth there with product development and product marketing. Uh, so I was there for 11 and a half years and then uh I took a year off and went fishing, nice. Which was pretty good.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

A year of fishing.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, that was pretty enjoyable. Uh and also bought my first four-wheel drive that year, and that's a key point. Uh, and then I started in 2015 at GME uh as a product manager for the marine category, did that for a little while, moved into the land category running the UHFCB products. Uh, and then I did both categories at once for a time, which was challenging. A lot of work, yeah. Uh, and then I moved into a marketing management role, and I've I've been in that role for nearly eight years now.

SPEAKER_03 3:44

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

So I look after marketing across all GME's brands and products globally.

SPEAKER_03 3:48

Amazing. Well, look, that's the purpose of today's podcast, really, is to kind of uh talk about communications. We've talked about travel on the podcast, we've talked about you know bush mechanics, how to keep yourself going on the road, how to be prepared for you know off-grid adventures. But I guess a fundamental part of that is communications when you're out and about. And um, you know, through the extensive travel that I think we've all done sitting around this trail, traund the table, we've all learnt that uh communications are critical. And um, there's a few YouTubers which give a lot of nice hot tips on how to maintain good communications and things like that with aerial placements and things. So we'd kind of like to dive into that a little bit with you today and talk about you know best practice, why technology is important and how it's being used, and um get some experience from the Vaughns and the the Banksys on the road, because I know we got the GMEs on the MDC trucks and Banksy's got them on his and I've got them on mine. So I think we're probably a pretty well-versed crew to uh to talk about it all. So nice. So Banksy, I'd bringing you into this discussion, you have done a lot of travel.

SPEAKER_06 4:49

Yeah, how important have comms been on your trips and without um the radio, like especially when you're on the outback roads, um hearing that truck's coming up to you or you're going the other way and you want to pass someone without that communication to that person in front of you or someone coming up behind you is very important. It can lead to disaster. If you don't have comms from that driver that it's all clear and you should be looking to, but it's when you've got road trains that are four long, it's very hard to see down the road. And probably the biggest one I've found now is from my tours is uh husband and wife having fights. Um without I reckon on men to all of them, get a second handset so that when you get to coming home and you're reversing or you're pulling up or you're at a caramel park, that piece of technology saves a lot of marriages.

SPEAKER_03 5:42

It's not so they can argue between cars when they've separated, right? It's not to keep the argument going.

SPEAKER_06 5:47

It's it's just to give them communication and clear direction of where they're going, yeah. And that just solves a lot of stress. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

I think a good example of that is when we just did our Bribe Island trip and the campsites up the top end were really tight, and we had some big caravans on that trip, and getting out of there, if we didn't have those uh CB radios would have been almost impossible, right?

SPEAKER_06 6:08

Yeah, because when they were backing in, you you bush either side, you're in sand, so the you know the stress level's a bit high, you're trying to back in between trees.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

You don't have as much control over the car, obviously, in the momentum. You've got to put a bit of boot in, you want to be careful how much you're putting.

SPEAKER_06 6:24

And um I know when we did the Fraser trip, if we didn't have those handsets, there's no way we could have got into those tracks.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

Yeah, and that's another thing I think we'll touch on today is handsets versus fixed mounts and things like that, which um I think there's there's certainly a place for all of them, and then strengths of of transmission as well. So I'd like to talk about that too. So yeah, I think that one of the times I've really benefited from radios is technical four-wheel driving when you're off track in particular. But also, as you say, Banks, if you head up north and you come up against three or four carriage road trains, it's nice to have comms because you can really underestimate how long it can take to get around some of those things. They are huge and intimidating if you're not used to it. So look, Tones, um GME has been around for a long time. Give us a bit of background on on how old GME is, and obviously an Australian-owned company, and yeah, give us a give us a high-level history of us of it.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Uh so the company was founded in 1959, so it has been around a little while. Uh, it's still owned by the family of the founder. Uh, so that was Ted Dunn. He passed away in 2000. Uh, but his family are still the majority shareholders of the business. It is private uh and it's truly a family-owned Australian business. We've got just under 300 employees nationally. Uh, we've got a very strong business here in Australia and New Zealand. Uh, we've got an export business that covers a lot of Middle East, Africa, and Europe. And as of last year, we set up a US entity and we've got a GME US company uh set up over there to have a crack in the US market.

SPEAKER_03 7:52

Amazing. So, how does that work? What considerations were there for that US expansion? Because they run on different radio frequencies. Am I correct? Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Yeah, it's one of the biggest challenges for GME, but also one of our biggest strengths, is that 477 megahertz UHF CB is quite unique to Australia. So, what we have here with 80 channels of free usage, up to 5 watt transmission power, all of those things that make up the class license or the standard for UHF CB in Australia makes it really usable.

SPEAKER_04 8:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

And a lot of other countries and regions around the world don't have that freedom and the flexibility. So, for example, in Europe, the majority of countries uh that are part of the EU have a 2.5 watt transmission power limit, which drastically limits the range that you can transmit. Uh in the US, they run something similar to UHFCB, but it's called GMRS, which is the general mobile radio service. It is licensed, so you need to get an FCC license in order to operate on those frequencies. It's like 30 bucks, and you fill out some questions online.

SPEAKER_03 8:53

But this is for any mum and dad that wants to use a UHF.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

For anyone that wants to use a GMRS. And so you can imagine just telling someone that they need to get a license is a barrier in itself for a lot of people. Uh and they run 462 to 467 meg, so it's slightly off the 477 meg frequency that we use here, but fundamentally it's the same thing.

SPEAKER_04 9:14

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Uh however, from a product development point of view, it is fundamentally not the same thing, and we needed to completely redesign the radios to suit the American standards and then have them approved by the FCC before we could offer them for sale. So it it how much consideration went into it? Lots. Lots, yeah, lots of research, lots of trips over there, really taking the time to understand the market, and that's obviously an ongoing process. Uh, but it's been a really good challenge for our business because we're so familiar with UHFCB here, and we are the market leader and we know what we're doing, to then go over to the US. It's almost like we're a startup business. It's a whole different mentality. So for a marketer, that's that's fun.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

Sound familiar? Very familiar.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

We've done the uh similar thing with the MDC brand since around 2018, and um the customers, although we all look very similar, they think very different to how we do here in Australia. But I guess um GME would be getting the same sort of traction that MDC is, being it's uh Australian-owned company, and you know, we use all the product out here and we beat the snot out of it. And um, you know, that's what the Americans are sort of looking for for robust products.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

Tried and tested, yeah. It was a it was a real eye-opener for me from the first moment that we set foot on US soil, or even before we went over there and we're just doing desktop research, how highly regarded the Australian overlanding and four-wheel drive community is, not only in the US but globally. Uh they think we're nuts. You know, you talk about going across the Simpson Desert and being three days from the nearest town, and they can't comprehend that because they're 300 miles from a gas station at any moment.

SPEAKER_04 10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

So you're absolutely right, Vaughan. There there's a lot of similarities, but the specific nuances and differences are great. Agree.

SPEAKER_03 11:04

So why do you think or how do you think that has translated in Australia to GME's longevity? What over you know 67 years or something like that? It's um what is it that you think has made or kept GME so relevant?

SPEAKER_02 11:18

The founder Ted was very much an entrepreneurial fellow. Now I never met him, but from all of the reading that I've done about him and all the stories from some of the staff that were around when he was was working there, and there's quite a few of them that have that have been there over 30 years. He was really good at identifying niche market opportunities. So he wasn't there going, all right, I'm gonna you know attack this market that I can sell a million units a year into. He was finding niche opportunities that weren't being addressed and addressing them. Uh he started out repairing television tuners in his garden shed. Right. So again, it was a niche where tube televisions at the time were a thing, were very expensive, and there was a particular component that would fail in them, and the manufacturers would say, Oh, new TV. Yeah, just get a new one. Sorry, champ. And Ted sourced the part from Japan, worked out how to fix them in his shed and started repairing them. So that's where the business started from. And then you look at the business of today, and it's something completely different. But it's been adding on little niches and addressing them really well, and also having local engineering. So we've got over 50 engineers in Australia at this point in time. We're always looking for more. So if anyone out there is an engineer and is looking for a job, please hit me up. Uh, but we've always been really close to our market, so we get direct customer feedback and then we feed that back into our product development. A lot of companies say that they do that, but then take shortcuts or cost savings or whatever it may be. There's a compromise somewhere. There's always compromises with everything, but for us, we really try and address the demands of our customers because it makes my job as a marketer much easier when I'm giving people what they've asked us for.

SPEAKER_03 13:02

So, where do you where do you hear about that feedback? I mean, you're obviously out in the road quite a bit. I mean, we hear about it through guys like you know, Banksy is on tours with other customers, we travel with the vans, Vaughan travels with the vans, you know, and we spend the the big red bash, we go out there with 60, 70 odd caravans. Where does that feedback come from for GME?

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Social media is a big one for us. We've got a really active community on social media, and they're very willing to tell us what they like and don't like about our products and our brand, which is great.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

You'd rather the openness than people just keep quiet, you'd sort of rather I wouldn't trade it for anything.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

It's such a good way of us staying in touch without being everywhere at all times, which is physically and mentally impossible. Trade shows are still a massive thing for us. Uh we've got the Brisbane 4x4 show coming up this week, and it's the first big show of the year for us, and we're always really excited about this one. This year in particular, because we've got some new products we've just launched, which is always nice. You've got something new and fresh to talk about. But being able to talk to customers that already own our products is for me the most valuable thing it shows. I don't attend a trade show to go and sell anything, I just want to talk to people. Yeah, I love a chat, which is handy. Uh, but people are more than willing to come up and tell us about their experiences, what they love, what they don't love, what they would like to see, all that sort of stuff. Uh so for us, social trade shows, and then personally, because I've got a heavily branded vehicle or a couple of vehicles, I can't really I can't hide. So I'll go camping with my wife and my daughter, and uh often people will approach me in campsites and say, Hey, I've got a problem with my radio, and a lot of the time I can fix it, it's just they've turned on a setting that they shouldn't have, or something like that. Sure. But those conversations for me are the most valuable because it's in a really relaxed environment, and you just get the truth out of people, and then I can feed that directly back to our engineers who happen to sit just below me in the office at work, which is really handy.

SPEAKER_03 14:57

Oh, look, the owners groups are a huge part of our business too, aren't they? I mean, you go out to the big red bash, for example, with the owner's group and the amount of feedback, and we normally take some skilled guys out there. And a lot of the time it's just small things. Could just be they need a split pin in something to hold it because if the split pin's broken or something like that, or whatever, just some advice. I guess what's some of the biggest improvements we've seen probably out of owners' groups?

SPEAKER_00 15:21

Um you guys uh made mention of it um in a podcast you guys shot a couple of weeks ago. And we're talking about Banksy's little tricks and tips he'd been giving me for a few years and um improvements on vans, and when when we think that's a great idea, we're like, thank you very much. We'll can we uh implement that on our vans? And if the customer says yes, then we know we go ahead and do it. And I guess it's um you know, 40,000 customers using the product uh continually where they see things that we don't like. We use the product a lot, but it's just those um everyone uses it differently. Exactly. And when someone comes with a great idea, it's just good to adopt it, I think.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

So what's been what are some of the real big ticket items that might have come out of that feedback? I know you've got the push to talk on the steering wheel, that's a pretty cool little function.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Yeah, the the push to talk's an interesting one. Uh got to be careful how much I disclose of our strategy here, but uh look, there's there's two aspects to the push to talk. One of them is convenience, not taking your hands off the wheel. Yeah, you mentioned technical wheeling. Sometimes you might be on the winch, you might be both hands on the wheel, you might be trying not to roll your car, and then you've got to pick up the UHF and talk to your spotter, and you've got not enough hands. Having a wireless push to talk on the steering wheel is really handy. So there's a real-world usability factor to it. There's also a bit of future risk mitigation from our perspective. If, for example, federally the use of UHF radios was illegal overnight, people like truckies who rely on them for for their day-to-day job but also for their safety, and for all road users that use UHF, particularly people towing caravans, overtaking road trains, all that sort of stuff, if legislation arrives tomorrow and it sounds silly, but it could happen, all it takes is one tragic incident and someone will say, Right, we've got to change this legislation. If you can no longer pick up a microphone, well where's where's the comms industry? So we got ahead of the curve with the whales push to talk, making sure that if that was to happen, we have a solution ready to go.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

That's a really good insight because I think some people think about it differently. But I in my head I'm just picturing driving past that road train. And you drive past the road trip, Banksy, you would have done it a thousand times. You want both hands on the wheel. You do not want to be grabbing a microphone to go, oh mate, can you just hold up a sec? I've I've lost power or something like that, or you want to communicate with the truck, you're having that push to talk is going to be a lot safer than grabbing a handheld or yeah, fixing it.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Especially when you come around the corner of that big wind gust when you go past the front of them, right? Or across a bridge or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 17:53

I mean, you shouldn't probably shouldn't be overtaking on a bridge, but where there might be a crosswind somewhere from something, you you do not want to take your hands off the wheel of a yeah, five-ton combat combination.

SPEAKER_02 18:04

So to answer your question more, well, I guess to answer your question, the push to talk wasn't something that necessarily came from customers. That was something that we identified as uh an opportunity and also, as I said, a bit of risk mitigation. The beauty of a UHF CB radio is its simplicity. Yeah, I agree. And they really haven't changed a great deal since the 80s. Now, when I say that, they absolutely have changed because in the 80s Bluetooth didn't exist and things didn't have GPS receivers built into them. So there's probably they probably weren't waterproof either or IP rators. The the product has definitely evolved. There's no question about that. And something that GME does really well is we innovate and we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in UHFCB radios. But at their core, the product hasn't changed. The proposition is the same. You push to talk, one to many, everybody gets the same message at the same time. It's analog communication, so there's zero latency, which is one of the questions we get all the time. Why aren't you using digital? Well, arguably it doesn't sound as good. It doesn't sound as real, and also there's latency. Now, if you're about to drop a wheel off the side of a cliff or something bad's about to happen, you don't want that 0.5 of a second latency or whatever the latency may be on a particular technology. You want to hear that message instantly.

SPEAKER_03 19:23

Instantly. Yeah, you want to hear the panic. I mean, rollover, rollover. We've had that where you want to know about it right then and there, and you want everyone out of the way, and yeah, you want people taking action.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

So what we hear from our customers all the time is the they want the basics to be better. So they want outstanding audio quality and they want really good display technology so they can see what's on the screen, they can read it at an angle, they can read it with polarized sunglasses on, all those sorts of things. So again, the beauty is in the simplicity, and what the customers really want from us is to be able to hear really clearly and transmit really clearly, which sounds so obvious. But the challenges that our engineers face with that, as more and more electronics find their way into vehicles, there's so much interference in terms of RF being emitted within a vehicle, LED light bars and lithium batteries and crazy 12-volt power systems and all this stuff. Mobile phone signals, Starlink signals, you name it. There's so much RF in a vehicle now. So for us, the importance is focusing on things like shielding and making sure that we can have all that technology within the radio and it functions effectively while still doing its core job really well.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

So, Tony, I've got a question around the um push to talk from a business owner perspective. So you guys have 50 engineers. I don't have push to talk, but it sounds like something I want to get. How do you guys go about protecting that IP? There's going to be a lot of companies around that go, hey, that's a fabulous idea. We'd like to implement that in our products.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

They are more than welcome to do so. Uh, there's a couple of different options around wireless push to talk and wired push to talk. When we talk commercial environments, things like skid steers that are dual joystick control, you can't be taking your hand off a controller to grab a radio. So a lot of them will have a momentary switch built into the top of the controller, which can be wired into whatever you want. In our case, obviously UHF CB radio. How we protect our IP with most of that sort of stuff is design registration. So it's around the particular look and the user interface and how the customer interacts with the product. We aren't able to design register or patent the technology of a wireless push-to-talk because it's been around forever.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

It's just how we do it, and we use Bluetooth for our particular device. Uh so the little wireless push-to-talk, all it is is a button. Uh, and then we supply it with a steering wheel clamp and some velcro or sorry, hook and loop tape, which can be stuck anywhere. Uh it's basically like a little Bluetooth beacon, is how we would describe it. So you just push and hold it, it comes up as a Bluetooth device on your radio, you add it, and you're away. So it's the simplicity again that really sets us apart from some of the other. Solutions out there that are a little bit more complex.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yeah. And the power system for those little push to talks, little button batteries or something.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Yeah, CR2032 button battery.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Right now.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

Nice and simple. Have you seen those banks? Yeah, have you used those in your travels?

SPEAKER_06 22:14

Um I haven't used them, but I've seen um a couple of guys in the truck group have them. Um and how they've got them set up is just on the top right-hand corner where their thumb sits there. Um yeah, it's a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 22:25

So yeah, I I agree. I think it's a great little innovation. And from a yeah, uh a uh would say from a strategy point of view in terms of um risk mitigation moving forward, should regulations change, I think that's a really smart approach. So you talked a bit about interference as well, and I think it's easy to attribute the success of a product based around the usability and the installation and how things have been set up, and I guess we experienced that with caravans and things like that, where you know people hitch things up or whatever, or they may not set the van up or prep it right for towing. They might have their weight distribution wrong, things like that, which is more of a user um influenced outcome. I know Ronnie Dale's done a lot of stuff around transmission testing with your systems and things like that, and the big thing that really comes out of his is everyone mounts them on the um the bull bar, but then if you're at the front of the front of the uh convoy, you might be getting blocked by swags on the roof of your car or things like that. So your transmission's actually blocked. What are some of the big interference things that users often miss or mistakes that people use around well that they could make sure they're optimising the use of their radio?

SPEAKER_06 23:32

Antenna placement.

SPEAKER_03 23:33

Antenna well ultimately it comes down to I think antenna placement, but also the wiring. You talk about interference in engine bays, it's making sure things are away from batteries and other electrical systems. Do you want to, or have I just done it?

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Uh no, there's there's three that come to mind. Yeah. Uh getting the red and the black wire around the wrong way and popping the fuse in the radio, that's a good one. Reverse polarity is probably our number one uh call to tech support. Oh, your radio doesn't work. You maybe got the wires around the wrong way, champ.

SPEAKER_04 23:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

So that's number one. Number two is running the antenna cable, so the coax, and it is shielded to the best of its ability, but running that alongside wirings for anything that runs a switch mode power supply. So the biggest defender for us is uh cheap LED light bars from a certain region in the world that don't have great shielding and and emit a lot of just RF, right? Uh so that will often introduce interference. People say your radios, you know, they suck, they don't work, and then you uh understand it's cable tied to a big bundle of cables running down the same side of the firewall.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Will that in will that interfere with the transmission distance and effectiveness of the radio as well, or is that more just in what's um presented back through the radio through the speaker?

SPEAKER_02 24:42

All sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. Little birdies squeaking, buzzing, popping, carrying on, uh and then look, does it it does it affect transmission distance? I don't technique I technically I don't know, but it's really just the interference and the general unpleasant experience that you have when your radio's squawking at you for no reason. And number three, antenna placement. Uh people uh or some people love having them tucked away. So behind a spare tire on a swing-away on the back of a Jeep, for example, I'm not picking on Jeep owners, but it's just a thing. It's a good gap there, yeah. Uh anyone that tries to sort of hide an antenna, it's counterintuitive because UHFCB, like all two-way radio, is line of sight. So the higher on your vehicle the antenna can be, the further it will transmit.

SPEAKER_03 25:31

The more uninterrupted, the better.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

That's exactly right. And a vehicle is a big old metal obstruction. And you know, I heard you say about the NPS, you could very easily have that mounted low on the vehicle, yeah, and it would drastically reduce its performance.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

Well, you do, don't you? It's on the bar on the front, isn't it?

SPEAKER_06 25:46

No, mine's up high on the windows okay. Yeah, but I do have on my bull bar two mounts that I'll never use. That's where I put my flag, sand flag.

SPEAKER_03 25:54

Oh, that's your coloured light bar, that's what I'm thinking of. Yes, your pre-lights, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

One each side. Yeah. Flashing to the duft door. You've got buggy whips on there.

SPEAKER_06 26:02

Oh, yeah. But um placement of that area though, is it like true, like on the roof, it's best to have it so it's like a flat surface, so that then that you go back? Where if you have it on the front bonnet, you've only got the that front bonnet, and if you've got big canopy on the back, swags on the roof, and you're at the front, that lessens you. But if you have it on the top of your roof, and it's that flat area, more range?

SPEAKER_02 26:29

Yes, yeah, yes, and no. I think there's there's probably two elements to that. So previously, when we're talking AMCB radios or 27 meg radios back in the day, a lot of the antennas, mm-hmm I'm gonna say all of the antennas were ground dependent. So they required a ground plane in order to operate effectively. So the best place to mount an antenna was in the center of your roof, so step drill through the roof, antenna done, and it would use the roof of the vehicle as part of the radiating element of the antenna. Nowadays, though, with UHFCB, 97% of our models in our range are ground independent, so you can literally mount them anywhere. But being on the top of the roof, because it's line of sight, will give you the best performance. The same as if you want to transmit as far as humanly possible in an emergency, get up high. Get on top of a mountain.

SPEAKER_03 27:23

Regardless of obviously the gain of the area, ignore that, it's still just height.

SPEAKER_02 27:27

It's just height if you can see it by rights, you should be able to transmit to it. That's the way it works. Now, there's many other technical considerations which are above my pay grade, and we won't go into that. Uh, but yeah, at its simplest form, up high on the vehicle, no obstructions, not next to a big lump of metal, basically.

SPEAKER_03 27:46

So those nice little um 90-degree pivoting mounts that you guys sell, they must be a hot item at the moment, I'd imagine.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

Good for car parks, as long as you remember to fold them down before you go into said car park.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

I've got one for you, Tony. So I'm gonna go back 30 years ago to my uh N12 Pulsar with the big soundstream stereo and the big 12-inch subwoofers and the six by nines up the front with the little tweeters on the pillars.

SPEAKER_03 28:11

And your GME UHF that you were driving around Brisbane in?

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Not at that time. But um back then we'd put like a little condenser on the positive wire coming off the alternator, maybe. Is there any little gadgets like that that helps with interference at all? Or is it just a bit of a fad and probably doesn't work?

SPEAKER_02 28:31

No, they definitely work. Uh there's all sorts of things available. Uh we've got a lot of filtering built into our radios because as much as possible, we want our product to be easy for DIY to install, and it really is. It's a red and a black wire that go to the red and the black terminals, and then route your antenna and plug it into the back of the radio. So they're pretty much plug and play. You don't need any kind of technical skill to install a radio. In some vehicles, though, where we've had issues where we just cannot get to the source of what's causing the interference, you can put inline filters in. They're little things you buy from JCAR. For 99% of installations, they're not required.

SPEAKER_03 29:10

Yeah. So with the we talked about some of the biggest mistakes. For someone that's new to off-roading or new to using radios, I guess what are the most important things to understand about using them? Is there there's obviously some rules around channels that you can use and things like that. Um it's and I guess from a from a legal point of view, we might just touch on that too, because we had the discussion. UHFs are permitted by law to be used, uh, mobile phones are not, even though they're a similar communication device. Do you just want to expand on that a little bit? Uh which element first? You want to talk about the legality or the legality? Well, let's talk about the legality, and then we'll talk about what do people yeah, channels and and things that people probably need to know about using a UHF.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

Uh so from a legality perspective, and we get asked this one quite frequently, uh, as of today, uh in all states in Australia it is legal to use a UHF CB radio whilst operating a vehicle, but there is always a grey area in road law where if you're deemed by a police officer to not be in adequate control of your vehicle or paying attention, you can be fined. So, yes, you can use a radio, but you still need to pay attention to what you're doing and operate your vehicle safely.

SPEAKER_03 30:24

They're quite a simple device, right? It's push to talk. So I guess you don't have the distraction of entering phone numbers or things like that to use like a like a mobile phone as such.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

And I'll give you a good example of that. Uh, we're very present in the truck industry, and when I say truck, I mean heavy vehicle, prime over, singles, doubles, triples, etc., road trains. The most popular radio that we sell into the trucking market is a design that is over 20 years old, and it's a big din mount radio, and there's a specific reason why truckies still buy that radio because it's got a knob on the front of the radio for volume, and it's got a knob on the front of the radio for squelch. Okay. They'll often have the radio mounted in a bulkhead up in a big Kenworth or a Mac, and they can reach up, change, change the volume, sorry, channel knob as well, change the channel and change the squelch without taking their eyes off the road. So where the majority of the UHF CB market in things like four-wheel drives and agriculture are moving to a smart microphone or an L C D control microphone, a truckey doesn't want to be looking down at tiny little buttons and trying to figure their way through whilst they're operating a I don't know how much one of those things weighs, a lot uh vehicle. So depending on the type of application, we've got different radios to suit different requirements, and it's those little nuances that again comes back to understanding the customer.

SPEAKER_03 31:42

Yeah, interesting. So then from people that are new to using it, what do they need to be aware of? The new users to UHFs. You can go and buy one off the shelf today, tomorrow, right? Uh let's talk about a couple of things. There's etiquette, there's channel placement, there's like conduct of how you use it, letting other people speak, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

Yeah. Uh coming up coming up here this morning where there was a couple of incidents on the highway. The army truck. Channel 40 was the wild west. Let me tell you, it was I mean, it was quite entertaining. But what should people remember? The first thing is it is a public open communication platform. So if you're on a channel, anyone who is on that channel within transmission distance will hear what hear what you can say. And your kids will hear what is said on there too. That's another thing too. So there's just uh I guess a general bit of think about it. Polite, yeah, just good manners to think about what you're saying. Don't swear on it. If you're gonna have extended conversations with people in your convoy, don't use the common channels like channel 40, the highway channel, or if you're in the Simpson Desert. Yeah, if you're in the Simpson Desert and Channel 10's the call channel, don't be having a chat about what you're gonna eat for lunch. Jump to a different channel, and we're lucky that we've got 80 of them. You can transmit on most of those channels, but there's some specific ones that you should not transmit on. The most important ones are channels 5 and 35, so they're your emergency channels. So you can transmit on them, but only in the event of an emergency. And in Australia, we're really lucky as remote travelers in that there's a lot of good-hearted people out there. A lot of them are retirees and people that are in regional areas that will monitor those emergency channels. And if they hear someone that's in trouble, they can then convey a message to the emergency services, which is really handy. Channels five and 35, just stay off them. It's that simple. Uh, channels 22 and 23 are reserved for data only, so they're for telemetry use, so you are unable by the class license to transmit voice on those channels. GME's radios, we inhibit voice transmission on those channels. So you just you can't do anything with them. Uh, I can't speak for other brands. And then 61, 62, and 63 are reserved for future use. What that future use is, I don't know. You'd have to ask the ACMA. Aside from that, though, uh you've got what are we talking? 73 channels available. So we've got plenty of bandwidth there to have conversations. So the the etiquette the etiquette, rather, is if you decide that you want to use a particular channel and you can hear people having a conversation about getting a job done, maybe decide to just hop up a channel or two and leave people alone. I guess that's really where it starts and finishes.

SPEAKER_03 34:20

Yeah, I agree. Look, the is there any benefit to having, I guess, or what is the benefit of 80 channels, which is now, I guess, very common in Australia, versus 40, what we had previously?

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Uh without getting too technical, it comes down to channel spacing. Uh so really the the ACMA who are uh responsible for spectrum management in Australia, and that covers everything, right? So television, transmissions, mobile phones, UHFs, VHFs, commercial radios, anything that emits RF effectively sits on the spectrum, and it's ACMA's job to manage that spectrum. Uh so I believe it was 2007, it was before my entry to the radio market, um, there were some changes made to enable more channels on the UHF CB band to reduce interference and people fighting well not fighting but battling for airspace. Correct. So really they they changed the channel spacing to allow more channels within the same frequency band.

SPEAKER_03 35:22

Okay. Yeah, cool. With smartphones, let's just come back to that. I guess what is everyone carries a smartphone. Where does a UHF sit in its usability versus a smartphone? I guess in your point of view. I know, I understand the benefit. I think it's more instantaneous comms. And why should they buy UHF versus just talk to someone on the phone?

SPEAKER_02 35:46

There's a number of reasons. Uh I mentioned earlier around the beauty of a UHF being its simplicity. So just push to talk, put it on a channel, push to talk. Anybody can use a UHF CB radio. You can teach a young kid to use a radio faster than I'd would like.

SPEAKER_03 36:02

I use it with the kids at caravan parks.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

They love them on the cruise. I've been on one cruise, my first and last, but uh it was amazing to see all the kids running around with little keep check on where they are.

SPEAKER_06 36:17

Cheap walkie-talkies.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

Yeah, it's pretty handy. Uh what was the question? Sorry, I got distracted by cruise ships.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

Yeah, I I distracted you, sorry. The uh benefit of why you'd actually use a UHF versus a smartphone. And I think thinking regionally as well. But even those that don't travel a lot, even those that travel locally, what's the benefit?

SPEAKER_02 36:35

One-to-many communication. So being able to transmit a very simple voice message, and however many people are in your party, you could be travelling with three other cars or 300 other cars. I don't want to be anywhere near that, but you can transmit the same message at the same time, and everybody receives it. So that's really again the simplicity aspect to it. But when you're traveling in a remote or regional area, a mobile phone is fantastic if you've got service. Now, of course, Starlink mini, Starlink portable is becoming really popular on the drive up here from New South Wales yesterday. I saw many people towing caravans and the little Starlink sitting on the front dash.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

You've got one used regularly.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

And having done a couple of remote trips last year for work uh with Starlink in the convoy for the first time, it was a game changer for me. I have a young daughter at home, being able to video call her was just it made me feel like I wasn't so far away, despite being 4,000 Ks from home. However, if I see a vehicle a kilometre away and I want to communicate with them, what use is a mobile phone? You you need to know their number. That's right. Or have them on Instagram. So being able to talk to people that you know but people that you don't know is equally important with a UHFCB. And we use the example of overtaking road trains, communicating with other road users. Uh two years ago I was heading up the Thunderbolts way. So if anyone knows that road in New South Wales, it's uh you own a TD42, don't try and drive up that hill. Uh there was a van in front of me, and there was some road works going, so stop, start the whole way up the hill. And every time they took off their front door, I guess you'd call it on a caravan. I'm not sure of the technical term, but the door would swing open, yeah, and then they'd stop and it'd swing shut so they wouldn't see it. Right. And I just called them on the radio, I jumped on channel 40 and said, Hey, so-and-so, with whatever van they had, your door's open. Oh, thank you, and they hopped out and locked the door. So I wouldn't have been able to do that with a mobile phone service or otherwise.

SPEAKER_05 38:36

Yeah, correct.

SPEAKER_02 38:37

So it really, when we talk about an open communication platform, it really is, and it is the citizen band. Anybody can use it, uh, which again is why it's so prevalent in Australia. And thankfully, in this country, especially when you're in remote and regional areas, and you guys would all know this, people are a little bit more helpful. The further you get away from Metro centres, you start getting the wave, and people will tell you if something's going on with your vehicle.

SPEAKER_03 39:01

So, in terms of being helpful, I guess that's a nice segue. Have you, Vaughan and or banks, in your experience, sort of had a situation where the UHF's come in handy and that you might have had your your backside saved by somebody or assisted or yeah, somebody that perhaps was out of the convoy or you've helped somebody else?

SPEAKER_06 39:18

So, where it comes to that open communication, so on channel 18, if you're driving out back, um you come along and you see some caravans come along, but you've just passed cattle that are on a blind corner. Or there's some bushes up close, and there's cattle that are sitting there behind there and young ones. So you get on there and give them that pre-warning. Now, most people on the caravans would be on 18 or 40, um, and then you can just quickly flick up to 40 and go, guys, just so you know, cattle around the corner. I've come across that quite a few times. Um, even when I was doing a little trip up through the back of Imble through the forestry there, I was surprised by how much cattle was there, and you're going through forestry tracks and you come around, and there's all of a sudden these young ones running through. So you just do it open broadcast on the channel that we're following, so everyone behind you knows why you're breaking so quickly, then the people further back can then space themselves out. So that's come in handy. Um, and then I've seen where um a caravan's coming up the freeway. I'm on this side of the freeway, um, all of a sudden I've seen their catch roof and it's gone up like that. Um so onto the radio, and then when I flicked the 40, there was already someone on 40 already saying, Hey mate, your roof's undone, it's coming up, it's bending, um, pull over. And then I could see in the distance through the mirror that he did pull over. So that saved that guy massive amounts of money.

SPEAKER_03 40:42

Yep. Now, another question do you run one or two radios, Banksy?

SPEAKER_06 40:46

Two.

SPEAKER_03 40:46

For the purpose of?

SPEAKER_06 40:48

Um, so I can switch in between or hear what's going on.

SPEAKER_03 40:52

So you can have one monitoring one channel all the time and the other one for you to communicate, perhaps on your convoy or something with.

SPEAKER_06 40:58

In suburbia, I try to keep off 40 and we'll go to like channel 27. Um, when we're in in convoy's at 27, and then I'll have it on 40 when we're on the open road so that I can hear a truck coming up. Or uh truck just wants to let us know that he's seen us in the distance. Um, he's coming up at pace. Um, he could be four trailers long. Um, guys, just let you know, and that gives us a chance then to discuss. So we go back down the other channel, discuss, guys. Look, there's a guy coming up, let's do the favour and get off the road for him, or at least find a spot where we can move over, slow down.

SPEAKER_03 41:34

Or let him know you you'll try and pull off in the next you're turning off at the next major intersection anyway, so just hold it.

SPEAKER_06 41:39

That they really appreciate that, and it's not just the helping him out, it's uh that old shit moment when they come up beside you because the draft on them when they come past you at pace um can pull your van in. Uh people make mistakes and they drop one wheel off on the gravel, and then all of a sudden there's a shower of shit going everywhere, and um you might do damage to your van behind you.

SPEAKER_03 42:02

Or the other thing is slowing down in anticipation to let the truck overtake, but the truck's actually speeding up, they don't know you've come off the gas, and all of a sudden the truck he would prefer you just to keep the main maintain the same speed.

SPEAKER_06 42:14

Yeah, he they'll always tell you maintain the speed. Don't don't lift. Don't change.

SPEAKER_03 42:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 42:18

Anytime I would lift is when they'll actually see that he's out in the other lane in overtaking lanes. And let him have the same.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

And then I'd lift. Yeah. Yeah, correct. Is that common now, Tones? A lot of people are having two radios.

SPEAKER_02 42:30

I was just thinking about that whilst whilst you're describing it, Banksy said now I run two radios in all of my vehicles. I don't pay for radios, so I'm lucky. And they're not that expensive in all seriousness, right? They aren't. But if you're a I guess a serious traveller and you're doing a lot of travel, then sure, two radios is a minimal investment. It's still two full radio setups is going to cost you far less than a set of tires, for example.

SPEAKER_04 42:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

But for a lot of people who might only do one or two big trips a year, having two permanently installed fixed mount radios, two external antennas, it can be a bit over the top, right? So that's where having a handheld is a really good option as well. So, in your example, if you've got convoy comms and you're within a kilometre of your convoy, use a handheld to communicate with them and then have your permanent fixed mount install on 40 to monitor over a wider area. So we do see two radios in a vehicle, but often it's a radio, a fixed mount radio and a handheld radio, which has the added benefit of then being able to spot with it, being able to reverse the van, being able to go for a hike with it, all those sorts of things. So I think they both have a place within a vehicle.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

That uh second radio, what size would you recommend?

SPEAKER_02 43:38

There's when you say size, you mean transmission power.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

Is it a five watt, two watt, one watt?

SPEAKER_02 43:44

Uh so there's they start at half watt. We don't make a half watt radio, they're triple A battery powered, cheap and cheerful for the kids. Uh that's not an area that we play in. We start our range at one watt, and we've got one, two, and five. Personally, I'd say for the difference in Cost you're better off going with a five-watt radio. The transmission power is one thing, but as you go up the range, they become waterproof and dust-proof. They've got more features, they've got better screens, better longevity, better connectivity with uh speaker mics, near piece mics, and all that sort of stuff. You're talking sub$300 for a good quality 5-watt radio from GME, and the the amount of use you'll get out of that and being mill standard and IP rated, they're pretty tough little little units. So I'd always say go for the better one, and you'll the best benefit you'll get from a uh higher spec radio is battery life. So our I guess you'd call it uh run-of-the-mill 5 watts. So we've got three different models of 5 watt handheld, but our entry-level 5 watt radio will last 30 hours between charges, and 30 hours of talking on a radio is a lot of talking on a radio.

SPEAKER_00 44:49

Yeah, and then they are they like a US recharge USB rechargeable or you how do they how do you charge?

SPEAKER_02 44:56

240 volt and 12 volt SIG socket are the two options at the moment, and we are working on a couple of different other charging solutions for again different applications.

SPEAKER_03 45:04

My yeah, I've got the this get my 6230, maybe 6320. I don't know. I'm probably making it up now. But the the hand to the 5 watt handheld, full waterproof. How old is it? Uh through two, three years old. 6160. 616. There you go. That's six in it.

SPEAKER_05 45:21

Six in it.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

I guess with that, the thing I like, I can actually run that at a lower power rating. I can pull it back to a two-watt power rating and it conserves a lot more battery. So if I am just using it in convoy or spotting, I'll just run it on two watt and it'll last weekends and days, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

Yeah, our flagship handheld, which is our XRS handheld, is a five watt radio, but you can turn the transmission power down to 0.1 of a watt, so 100 milliwatt. It'll still transmit a couple hundred metres, which for everyone thinks they want to be able to transmit as far as possible. But so ultimately what you're doing is just potentially annoying far more people over a greater area. Uh a hundred milliwatt means you can still talk to your your convoy, or in your example, if you've got kids running around a campsite, turn the power down. Yeah. You can keep the good ones, but they don't have to run around with the good the good handhelds.

SPEAKER_03 46:10

Well, the radio will last for weeks on that power output. Sure. No, I agree. Then antenna types. We've talked about handhelds, sort of fixed mounts, where they sort of sit as an application. Tall, skinny, short, fat. Just give us the quick high low. Anybody who's used them will understand, but let's just uh share for everybody.

SPEAKER_02 46:31

It can be really overwhelming when you look at the GMA antenna range. I know when I started in the business, and I wasn't a radio guy, just to be clear, I'd I don't know if I'd ever actually used a UHF before I started at GME. I looked at the antenna range and went, why is there 140 of these things and they're all different shapes and sizes? What do they do differently? Fundamentally, they all do the same thing. When we talk UHF CB antennas, of course we make AMFM and cellular and we make all sorts of different antennas, but when we talk UHF-CB, they all do the same thing. Probably worth pointing out, there's a lot of misunderstanding between aerial and antenna. So a lot of people call them aerials, which is factually incorrect because an aerial only receives.

SPEAKER_03 47:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:12

An antenna transmits and receives. So we don't sell aerials, we sell antennas.

SPEAKER_03 47:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:17

Short and fat and tall and skinny. The thickness or the construction of the antenna is purely down to how much abuse it can handle. So durability. Durability, that's a much better word than abuse. Trying to get you cancelled on the internet. Really, it comes down to things like, particularly in a towing environment, people think, oh well, I'm not doing any hardcore four-wheel driving. The number one thing that's going to kill an antenna faster than any other terrain is corrugations.

SPEAKER_03 47:46

Yep, I can speak from experience. So I've had the lightweight whip that's just eventually just broken the mount, it just fell off. And it would have snapped just above the ferrule.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

I know exactly where they snap because they snap in the same spot every time. Ultimately, when a car is vibrating so violently, that vibration has to go somewhere and it will find the weakest link, and often the weakest link is the small thin piece of fiberglass on the front of the vehicle.

SPEAKER_03 48:06

And the good thing to know is if you don't, if you're not already aware or don't think about it, your bullbar's actually mounted to your chassis. It's not mounted to the body of the car. So what you feel is not what the bullbar and aerial is experiencing.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Yeah, and different vehicles will behave differently as well. So Prados are not, I don't know about the 250, the current model, but I know the previous gen Prados were antenna killers. Right. It was something about the way that vehicle was constructed.

SPEAKER_06 48:29

They would just harmonics in that bull bar.

SPEAKER_02 48:32

The harmonics through the bull bar would just shear antennas off, and people would call us saying, Oh, your product's failed, it's crap. It's like, well, unfortunately, you've bought the wrong one. See how we've got all these other ones. That that's what you need. Oh, I'm not doing anything hardcore, but I just drove the Gib. It's like unfortunately, that is about as hardcore as you can get.

SPEAKER_03 48:51

So a spring's not just a spring on the mount. It's worth having a look at the uh if there is specific for a vehicle. Is that how the is that the air, is there a specific Prado aerial that you would recommend in that respect?

SPEAKER_02 49:02

I wouldn't say there's vehicle specific. All of our products are quite uh universal, but when we talk about the construction, there's two key points. One is the spring base, which connects the antenna to your vehicle, and the other is the radome, which is basically the stick part. The the construction and the uh interaction between those two components is what decides whether the antenna is going to survive or not survive. Okay. So the bigger the spring base, the more metals in it, the more tensions in it, the more it can handle that vibration. It will absorb more vibration rather than feeding it up the whip and exploding something. And then the radome itself, again, back in CB days, all the antennas were quite thin bits of stainless steel with a little coil halfway up. You shake that enough and it will snap in half. There's there's no way of stopping that. So you'll see now, particularly in the four-wheel drive market, those big, thick fiberglass radome antennas, they simply can handle more vibration and more impact if you hit, God forbid, a little bird, or you hit a branch going under a tree or something like that. If you've got a thin wire whip, it's going to snap. So that's from a construction point of view, how to consider it. So, really, the first question we ask when a customer asks which antenna to buy is, well, what are you doing with it? Where are you going? What sort of travel are you doing? Uh, and then we can start to guide them into the right kind of antenna. You would have seen bonnet hinge mount brackets becoming really popular. Mounted up near the A-pillar. Because of that, and just simple physics with leverage and fulcrum's and all that sort of stuff, if you put a really big heavy antenna on one of those brackets, it's gonna be sloppy and flop around. So if someone says that they want to mount an antenna there, we'll recommend one of our lighter duty but similar construction, strong spring-based fiberglass radar. And then the last part of it, which is the technical part, is the length of it. Is it Hertz, is it? No, so it's in DBI, which is decibel relative to isotropic. And don't ask me any more about that because I don't know. There's a whole calculation. So I carry two aerials.

SPEAKER_06 51:10

So I've got one that's about that, short and stumpy. That's my Brisbane one. And then when I do my travels go west, the big long one goes on that puts me right up above the roof. But around Brisbane, I've got the little one that's level with the cab, um, and I swapped them out. But had some damage on the cape trip where I hit a tree and snapped mine off and found the rest of it on top.

SPEAKER_03 51:33

So now you got two short ones.

SPEAKER_06 51:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 51:36

I uh I lost an antenna in Cape York, it's still up there. Still there, yeah, yeah. Same thing, mounted on the roof and just sheared it off. Um, so really, when we talk about the length, we're talking about gain.

SPEAKER_06 51:45

Gain.

SPEAKER_02 51:46

And I made the foolish mistake one day of asking our chief engineer to explain what DBI gain and all of this meant, so I could explain it to customers. And after about 20 minutes, my eyes had glazed over and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. So the way we explain it in simpleton terms, and if anyone out there is an electronics engineer or an RF expert, they'll probably tell me why I'm wrong, which is fine. Effectively, gain is a multiplier. So the higher the gain, the further that transmission signal will go. So if you put the same input power into a 2.1 dBi antenna or a 6.6 dBi antenna, by rights, the 6.6 should transmit further. Okay. I won't say it will, but it should. Uh, and then you mentioned Ronnie's video, and that was really interesting from a real-world user perspective of the difference between the different antennas and how they perform. But the way we would describe it is a shorter antenna generally has a lower gain. So our short antennas are 2.1 dBi gain. They will transmit not as far as a 6.6 dBi antenna, but they will transmit a different radiation pattern. So the way the signal comes out of that antenna is different based on its length. So if you imagine a balloon blown up and it's quite round, again, we're talking in general terms here, that would be similar to a 2.1 dbi gain antenna. So it will transmit quite a round radiation pattern. As you go up in gain, imagine you're squeezing that balloon. So it gets flatter, but it gets longer. And if you were to overlay that with a transmission signal, that's effectively what higher gain does. So if you're out on the plains, crossing the there you go, you've you've done it. Uh if you're out on the plains, you're going across the nullabore or something like that, and you just want maximum punch, then you can put a longer antenna whip on. Higher gain. If you're in hilly terrain, if you're in the high country, if you're down in valleys, or if you're in a built-up area like the city, then a shorter antenna, whilst it won't transmit as far, will overcome those obstacles and those obstructions more effectively. Which is why most of our antennas have interchangeable whips. So you've got one spring base mounted to the vehicle and then a grub screw in the side of it, unscrew the tall whip, put the short one on, chuck the tall one in the canopy. Suitable for the environment you're travelling in.

SPEAKER_06 54:02

Exactly what I do.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

There you go. You're onto it, mate.

SPEAKER_03 54:05

One of the last kind of questions is if there's one piece of communication gear that you would recommend, okay. We're looking down the range of other products that GME does, yeah, what would you recommend? We talked we talked entirely about UHF and communications, but in the case of an emergency, you know, you've obviously got PLBs and things like that. What would do you have sort of a recommendation around that?

SPEAKER_02 54:29

Yeah, it's the strangest product for a marketer to take to market. Because when we have conversations with people about PLBs, we tell them about all the features, we tell them what it does, they ask how much it costs, we tell them, and then they say, I'll buy it, and you go, Cool, I hope you never use it. Yep. So it's a really bizarre. I mean, it's like an in it's it's like health insurance, right?

SPEAKER_04 54:50

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

You hope you can make it. You pay for it, you really hope you don't have to use it, but if you need it, it's quite important. So we need to go right back to Ted Dunn. So when Ted Dunn founded GME, he was an electronics engineer, he was an entrepreneur, but he was also really into his sailing, and his whole life was around sailing.

SPEAKER_04 55:09

Right.

SPEAKER_02 55:10

And he was one of the first people to start developing e-perb technology back in the 70s. Uh, the first 406 meg digital e-perb came from GME. We had government grants, and Ted developed that. Right. Uh his wife recently told us a story of him setting one off in the pool in their suburban backyard and a police helicopter uh being tasked and then having the police knocking on the door asking what the hell was going on. So um, yep, he he tested them. But that e-perb technology is developed specifically for marine use, so for boats. And generally, an e-perb is allocated to a vessel rather than a person. To meet the standards to be an e-perb, they need to be a certain size, they need to be a certain shape, they need to float upright to keep the antenna out of water, they've got to transmit for 48 hours continuously. The development or the research, the development, and the approval process is so full on, which is why there's five companies in the world that make emergency beacons. But it's hard. The technology itself, it it's a radio transmitter, but to get that radio transmitter approved through the bureaucracy and all of the different in-country approvals is very hard. So GME has been making emergency beacons for a very long time. Uh, in the Australian e-perb market, we are by far the dominant player. And Australia is unique in that we're the only country in the world that mandates carriage of an e-perb for recreational vessels. So as a result, whilst we have just under a million registered vessels in Australia, we have a huge number of e-perbs per capita versus any other country in the world. So I think the only other country that has more absolute e-perb units than us is the United States, and they have over 10 times our population. All of that being said, so the logical progression for an emergency beacon from that marine usage is how do you then use that on land? And back in the day, people used to literally take the EPUB out of their boat and put it in their vehicle if they were safety conscious. But personal locator beacon technology has been around for a little while now. Again, GME's been producing them for a long time, and it's effectively the same device as an EPUB, but shrunk. And it's for a person, not a vessel. The best thing you can do if you are traveling in remote and regional areas in Australia is buy one of these little devices. Doesn't have to be a GME one, just buy one of them, put it in your glove box and know that it is there. Test it frequently, test it before every major trip. And the most important thing is that everybody that you're traveling with should know that you have it, they should know where it is, and they should know how to operate it in the event of an emergency. So it's all well and good for you to go out and buy a PLB and stick it in your door pocket and not tell anyone. But if you have a rollover and you get knocked out and no one knows it's there, it's it's pointless. Yeah. Uh there the technology has evolved so much that they've sh they've shrunk. Um, they'll last our particular devices will last for seven years. So at any time from the data manufacturer for seven years, you push that button and it will transmit for a minimum of 24 hours. Perfect. And rescue authorities will get your location in under 15 minutes with an accuracy plus or minus 150 meters. So if you're out in the middle of the SIMO and it all goes pear-shaped, can't get anyone on the UHF, your mobile phone may or may not work. If you've got Starlink, great, but you've got to be able to relay your location effectively.

SPEAKER_03 58:39

Or power your Starlink if you who knows what's happened.

SPEAKER_02 58:41

Correct. You sink, you sink your vehicle and you lose your whole power system, your Starlink's dead. Yep. The beauty, again, of this device is its simplicity. It does one thing and one thing only, and that is when it hits the fan, you raise the antenna and you push the button. Again, put it up high. If you've got your vehicle, your van, put it on the roof of the vehicle so it's got an uninterrupted view of the sky. And the most important thing is don't move it. So once you set it off, leave it. Okay. Because the worst thing for the rescue authorities in Canberra is when they get an EPERB or a PLB activation and then it keeps moving location because they've got to task a rescue asset and say they're here. And if you keep moving, it's hard to know that. Now they're here. Now they're here. Yeah, so don't turn it on and turn it back off and turn it back on and try and conserve battery life. Turn it on, leave it on, don't move it. Well that since in desert one two, three years ago.

SPEAKER_06 59:32

That's probably the one I know of the most. The story of the truck, yeah. Yeah, in the desert got bogged. Um I think that car stayed there for 20 to 40 days or something. Um and after about five days, they end up doing a task to go send them and get them, pick them out to bring them out. It's interesting watching that.

SPEAKER_03 59:51

It's interesting watching that because they turn up, they do the flyover, they inspect where they are, they then drop the drop essentially a mobile phone to them or a satellite phone, I think it was. So then they could communicate with them. Then when they communicated with them, they said, All right, we'll be back tomorrow, or whatever it is. They supplied water, I think, some very basic supplies. And then they came back and did the rescue and recovery the next day or something like that. It's quite an interesting process. What happens?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

So, with that particular one, when they did the flyover and dropped them a sat phone, they then had two ways, whereas an emergency beacon is one way comms mostly. Uh and at the time the rescue authority said, Do you want us to get you out of here? And they said, No, no, we're cool, we've got heaps of water, we've got food, we'll just we'll just wait it out. And then after a couple of days, I think they went, Mmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:39

We might like to go now.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:40

Yeah, let's let's go. Uh and so you're right, that truck was out there for a long time, and the recovery cost would have been significant. But at the end of the day, who cares if the family's out safe? That's simple. They have the kids there too, I think.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:52

That's why we're buying that recovery package.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:55

Yeah, I just put a PLB in a big circle around it. We're doing the simo later this year. I've got one more question. Go for it. Not sure you can answer for us. You're up here for the Brisbane 4x4 show, which starts in a few days. Surely GME has some sort of fendangled amazing gadget they're going to release at this show that you could talk about.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:15

Have you seen my 80 series? That's what we're releasing at the show, mate. It's all about the land cruiser. No, I'm just joking. Um, I I actually fell for it because it's great. It looks new. Uh we do. So um I'm not sure when this will come out, but uh on the 9th of March we announced two new products, uh flagship products in GME's UHF CB range. Uh so within our range, we've got lots of different models, and as I said earlier, different applications. What we sell into the trucking market is very different to what we sell to farmers, generally speaking. Uh we've got products that suit hikers and we've got hunters that use particular products within our range because of the way they operate. XRS Connect is one of our sub-brands that sits under the total UHF category, and that's really where we put all the RD effort into innovation. And that's when you look at an XRS Connect radio from GME, it's got all of the bells and whistles, it's got GPS built into it, it's got Bluetooth audio, it's waterproof mic, it's it's got the best of everything, and it's really set up for it's it's our aspirational product that we want people to want to own. All of that being said, we just announced two new ones. Uh so on Monday, the 9th of March, we announced them to the market, and it's a not just new products for us, but it's a new platform. So it's a whole new technology platform, new circuitry, new microcontroller, the whole deal. Our replacement cycles and our life cycles of products are quite long. Uh so when we announce a new model and bring it to market, generally speaking, you'll see that model in the market for five to ten years. It's a huge amount of RD effort. You would know this as well as someone who manufactures things that new models are great, but they take a lot of input effort to bring to market. So we don't do it often, but when we do, we try and make a pretty big impact. So the step change in technology and features and benefits in these radios to their predecessors released 10 years ago is significant. So if you want to see one, and this comes out before the forward drive show, I don't think it will, uh, then come and see us at Brizzy. But otherwise, we'll be at all of the other major shows this year uh and we'll be showing off those radios at every opportunity.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:25

Yeah, but we'll put links to it in the description, obviously, for the episode, and we'll have some imagery up there by the time we by the time this goes to air. So it won't be out in time for the forward drive show. But I was gonna say your editors have been on a swift turnaround if they're doing that, that'd be good. Looking at them over there giggling, thinking, think, thinking it's not gonna happen too. Tony, be quiet. Stop it. Stop pushing us. Well, Tony, that has been really interesting, really intriguing. I've watched Banksy kind of watching with a lot of intrigue as well. So it's obviously I think you're sharing a lot of inf information.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:54

Um think I'm gonna be uh spending some money.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:58

So look, I've got the XRS Connect system in my car and I use the handheld. So I mean look, we're testing it and say we all use we've all got GMEs in all our vehicles. So it's obviously a great product, a great brand, and mate, it's been a pleasure having you on. Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge and yeah, we look forward to hearing more and seeing what you guys come out with soon. Oh, you're welcome. Awesome. Thanks, Banksy. Thanks, Vaughan, for joining us. Thank you, Sam. And thanks everyone for watching another episode of the Off Grid Down Under Podcast. Please like, please subscribe, and as we say, check some of the links below for some of the cool new products from GME, and uh we'll see you on the next episode.