(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)
A friend of mine suggested that I include some discussion of less costly MURS radios for those prepping on a modest budget. There are not nearly as many options for MURS radios as there are for GMRS. A bit of research reveals that a Hong Kong-based firm called Retevis offers Chinese-made radios that it markets for MURS use. Their model RT21V is available in a two-pack for $44.99. They are CTCSS capable, but they do not come with any tones already set up. The Retevis units have the five MURS channels ordered in the sequence they appear in the FCC regulations: channel 1 is 151.820, channel 2 is 151.880, channel 3 is 151.940, channel 4 is 154.570, and channel 5 is 154.600 MHz. Here is a chart comparing the channels on the two units:
| Frequency | Retevis Channel | Motorola Channel | Allowable Bandwidth |
| 151.820 | 1 | 3 | 11.25KHz |
| 151.880 | 2 | 4 | 11.25KHz |
| 151.940 | 3 | 5 | 11.25KHz |
| 154.570 | 4 | 1 | 20.0 KHz |
| 154.600 | 5 | 2 | 20.0 KHz |
I ordered a pair of Retevis RT21V radios and evaluated them for this article. My first impression was that you get what you pay for. The cases, batteries, antennas, and chargers all looked okay, but as soon as I started turning the knobs, they felt loose with a lot of slop in them. I charged the batteries for the two units and started testing them. The two would talk to each other with no problems. Where I ran into limitations was when I tried to get them to interoperate with my Motorola RMM-2050’s.
I mentioned above that the RMM-2050 comes from the factory set up to use a sub-audible tone of 67.0Hz for both send and receive. In contrast, the RT21V’s are not set up to transmit tones by default, so out of the box, I could hear the RMM-2050 on the RT21V but not the other way around. My goal was to configure the RT21Vs to work seamlessly with the RMM-2050’s, so they could serve as a less costly alternative. I was only partially successful.Continue reading“Radios for Emergency and SHTF Use – Part 4, by Rufus King”