Those of you who just got done tossing all your 3G phones may get a kick out of this. Or maybe not.
Today I applied for and was granted an FCC license to operate GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) equipment.
For just 35 bucks, I may now legally operate a GMRS radio. The license is good for ten years.
But wait, there’s more! The FCC tosses in licensure of my immediate family members, for free.
Such a deal!
There were only two qualifications:
- I could not be a convicted felon.
- I had to be dumb enough to think I needed a license for a toy walkie-talkie.
This post is mostly a note to myself, so I can keep straight everything I think I just learned about some of the radios that you, as Joe or Jane Citizen, can buy and use for short-range communications. Unsurprisingly, I guess, that world has changed substantially over the past five years or so. Owing, in large part to a 2017 revamp of the FCC rules covering those devices.
The main surprise is that these radios keep getting better. Even in the age of cell phones.
To be clear, your kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkies don’t need a license. Not now. But, weirdly, until 2017, technically speaking, they actually did. As evidenced by the ancient manual for the Motorola toy radios that I bought for my kids years ago, shown at the top of this posting.
I’m guessing the number of FCC seizures of unlicensed Buzz Lightyears was pretty small.
In any case, here’s the story behind my newly-minted radio operator’s license. And everything I just learned about CB, FRS, GMRS, and other citizen two-way radios.
Background: Swedish Death Cleaning
I’m going through an extended period of GRS (Getting Rid of Stuff, to keep it family-friendly). My version of SDC. It’s a long-overdue thinning out of 30 years’ accumulation of stuff that I don’t need, but is too good to throw away.
Much of the volume of material is the result of those twin evils, Cheaper if Bought in Bulk and Free Shipping. There’s a reason my wife revoked my Costco membership.
But in other cases, I own perfectly functional items that I no longer have a use for. Sometimes I can recall why I bought a particular item, and the memory sparks joy. But most of the time, it’s more a case of “What was I thinking?”.
Luckily, for most of my stuff, even if I have no use for it, somebody else does.
This week’s task was electronics. Not computers — I dealt with my computers last year. This is mostly radios, cameras, WiFi extenders, weather monitors, adapters, cables, and similar assorted other electronic junk.
Mostly, radios — lots and lots of radios.
Breaker 1-9.
Amongst which was a perfectly useful Citizen’s Band (CB) radio. (Which, believe or not, has been officially re-designated by the FCC as “CB radio”. So “CB” is no longer an abbreviation for anything.)
Worse, it was a virtually brand-new radio. I bought it years ago, for a family vacation to Florida, thinking I’d use it to assess traffic conditions on the road. And otherwise pass the time on I-95. Only to find out that almost nobody uses CB any more. Not even truckers. Drove the length of I-95 and didn’t hear a peep.
But it’s not your grandfather’s CB any more
I found a good home for that particular unit. So that’s a happy ending. As part of the process, I decided to see what was going on in the world of CB. And that led to something of a surprise: CB FM?
I knew that CB had been around, with only minor modifications, for decades. It was first authorized by the FCC in 1958. The number of channels was increased to 40 in 1977. The use of some channels was restricted (e.g., channel 9 is used for emergencies). There was, at one time, a requirement that you have a license and call sign, just like ham radio. That was eventually dropped after people routinely ignored that requirement during the 1970’s CB craze. (All of that information comes from Wikipedia.)
The point is that, aside from a few legal changes, and the increase in the number of channels, the technical specifications for CB remained virtually unchanged until very recently. Other than SSB (below), until recently, I believe that every CB radio ever made for the U.S. market, since its inception in 1958, could communicate with every other CB radio. Which meant that if a bunch of people wanted to communicate, and they all had “a CB radio”, then all that equipment would play nicely together.
The only technical innovation (or equipment incompatibility) was the gradual addition of single-sideband (SSB) transmission, in addition to standard AM. Even with that, I believe that every SSB unit sold is also capable of broadcasting and receiving standard AM signals. Without going into detail, you need specialized equipment to translate SSB into intelligible speech. If you only have a standard AM receiver, SSB transmissions sound like a cross between Donald Duck and voice synthesizer. You can tell that somebody is talking, because it has the pattern of human speech. But you can’t make out a word. (It’s downright creepy to hear somebody laughing in an SSB transmission heard on a non-SSB radio.) If you ever tune in to ham radio bands, and hear something that sounds like speech, but isn’t, that’s probably SSB.
But, to be clear, CB uses AM transmission, and AM radio isn’t “nice”. It’s static-y, for want of a better term. And the weaker the signal, the worse the sound.
But in July of 2021, the FCC approved use of FM transmissions on CB channels. The radios themselves have to be capable of both FM and AM, so they are backward-compatible with the original standard. But they will allow individuals who purchase new, FM-capable CBs to communicate using a far less static-prone FM signal.
Based on the reviews on Amazon, the resulting voice communications are a lot cleaner and a lot easier to listen to. Judging by the price, you more-or-less get the FM option for free. Give it another couple of years, and I’d bet that, with the possible exception of those who require the additional range offered by SSB, you won’t find a unit offered that doesn’t have FM.
So, weirdly enough, 67 years after the standards were first established, in a country where everybody has a cell phone, you can now get these niche-market radios with an FM option. That, along with the general improvement in electronics in general, means that you can now get a CB that has pretty good (or at least, non-annoying) sound quality. And yet, by law, every CB radio can still communicate with every other CB radio, using the original AM standard.
Who would have guessed that in the era of the cell phone, CB could still evolve?
FRS, GMRS, kids’ walkie-talkies, and the risks of believing what you read on the internet.
As part of this process I exhumed three old kids’ walkie-talkies. Probably bought them in the early 2000s.
They still work, and they are occasionally useful things to have around. So I looked into getting them up and running again, starting with the users’ manual.
To my horror, I discovered that these “toys” required an FCC license for legal use. The users’ manual said so, with zero ambiguity. Using these “toys” without a license risked fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of equipment. All that time, I thought I was just having a good time with my kids. And the FCC could have come gunning for me at any moment.
But that didn’t quite make sense. These things look like toys. We used them as toys. And the only other people we ever heard, through these radios, were clearly kids. Using them as toys. Yet, there was the manual, straight from the manufacturer. FCC license required, under penalty of law.
I looked around and found numerous seemingly-well-informed internet sites that said — again unambiguously — that any device capable of broadcasting on these channels requires an FCC license. In particular, use of any 22-channel walkie-talkie absolutely required an FCC license.
Seemed kind of silly, but $3.50 per year seemed like a small price to pay for staying on the right side of the law. So I got a license.
But, at some level, who’s kidding whom? I could go on Amazon and see 22-channel walkie-talkies that were obviously made to be toys. Barbie walkie-talkies. Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies. Hello Kitty walkie-talkies. There’s no way that the FCC is going to confiscate a kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkie for lack of the appropriate license.
And, as it turns out, that license requirement was the law, when my walkie-talkies were made. But what most internet sites failed to mention is that the law was changed in 2017. As with CB above, this market continues to evolve, and the law is evolving with it.
Not only do those little half-watt toy walkie-talkies require no license, but you can now buy and use the 2-watt versions without a license. Anything more powerful than that requires an FCC license for legal use.
You see a lot of stuff about this that comes across as just so much gibberish. So let me try to distill the current law. Without resorting to any of the arcane language that we have inherited from prior law and regulation.
Family Radio Service (FRS) and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are two FCC-authorized radio communications options intended to be used for short-distance, low-power communication. Once upon a time FRS consisted of just a handful of channels, restricted to very-low-power (half-watt) transmission. And GMRS encompassed a larger set of channels, and allowed mostly higher transmitting power (and allowed the use of remote antennas).
To cut to the chase:
Any device with a fixed (attached) antenna, capable of broadcasting at no more than two watts power, can use all 22 channels found on your standard kids’ walkie-talkie. No license required.
For want of a better term (and possibly even technically correct), I’ll call those devices FRS radios. Functionally, FRS no longer applies to a restricted set of channels, it applies to the limits on power and use of external antennas of any 22-channel walkie-talkie. (There may still be a lower power limit on the original FRS channels, but the device itself will automatically take care of that.)
Any more power than that, or if you want to use a remote antenna or repeater, and you need a GMRS license from the FCC. GMRS base units can operate at up to 50 watts, with reductions required around the subset of channels that was the original FRS channels. The law also added new “interstitial” channels that presumably would be available to newly-manufactured GMRS radios.
My recollection is that my kids’ walkie-talkies worked exceptionally well. Certainly had far better range that I would have imagined. Now I can operate them legally without a license. And I should be able to get license-free two-watt walkie-talkies with even better range.
Most importantly, all of that equipment will play nicely together. The two-decade-old units and any modern counterparts.
That said, manufacturers have complicated the situation with use of various “privacy code” standards. (See this reference). But the bottom line is that if you turn that off, every FRS/GMRS walkie-talkie or base station can talk to every other one. Still. Newer ones will have access to a few more channels. But that’s the full extent of incompatibility. My old units are weaker than is now allowed by law. But they remain usable, decades after they were manufactured.
