Programming Encrypted Radios: The Basics

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so maybe you've been playing around with radio for a little while maybe you have a uh a decent uh little cheap Chinese uh radio that you use a little bit every now and then like a bow thing or something or maybe one of these Quan Changs uh the latest and greatest from the Orient but after a while you may realize that you need to up your game a little bit maybe you've realized that analog uh unencrypted Communications are just not for you and you want to pursue the route of more commercial radio well since most of the people who are contributing to the world of radio in terms of knowledge and sharing information since most of these people tend to be amateur radio operators radio hams there tends to not be a whole lot of information on the internet regarding encryption uh because as we all know encryption is probably the most forbidden topic when it comes to ham radio even asking about encryption even just asking an innocent question about encryption on a ham radio Forum or a board or something like that might get you instab banned just right out of the gate so um as we all know hams don't really like encryption uh however that doesn't mean encryption is illegal it does not mean that it's immoral it doesn't mean that it's bad in any way as a matter of fact there is an entire Community built around using encryption how do you think businesses use encryption how do you think a lot of agencies use encryption well they use encryption through a different series of licenses one of which is LMR land mobile radio radio now this gets a little bit into the weeds uh so I'm not going to talk about it right now but just know that there is a lot of of potential for using encrypted radios otherwise they wouldn't be making these right so today let's talk about one particular setup that I personally like to use it seems to work really really well and it's at a great price point in fact it's at the point to where if you're going to spend your your hard earn money on something like this a you know one of the latest and greatest bow fangs plus all the dads have to go with it by the time you've spent all of that money you could have just bought one of these so which radio are we talking about well we're going to start with the good old standby this is the tyt UV 390 plus uh this radio in some form or fashion has been out for many years but this is the latest uh iteration of it and this one has two uh main features that we really want first of all it is a commercial radio that's sort of marketed to hams and you will see why uh this matters when we get into the programming software a lot of people get super frustrated with digital radio because they buy themselves a handy dandy analog radio and they download chir or some other programming software and they don't realize that Digital radio is a lot more complicated but today we're going to break it down very simply either way we're going to start with the tyt UV 390 plus make sure it is the plus variant then the the regular standard variant does not have a AES 256bit encryption it just has I think rc4 or some other lower level of encryption but this one right here will get you a long way and and it's more water resistant it's IP67 uh rated to be waterproof when you have the the door on the side here to cover up the buttons whereas the anone 878 series well let's just say it's a fantastic radio but it's way more expensive it's almost twice as expensive and uh there is no way on Earth this thing is going to survive in any kind of inclement weather so again uh this is the radio that I keep coming back to it's a good one so let's move forward with it and let's start with what you get in the Box because that's super super important uh like I mentioned if you were to buy something like a standard ham radio that is meant for ham radio operators um uh cheap Chinese radios there's nothing wrong with them uh however you know price-wise you know this is what $660 something dollar 80 something dollars for the newest variant if you want it then you have to spend $20 on a programming cable and you probably will have to spend you know 20 or $30 more dollars on an antenna well now you're in the realm of buying one of these and this is exactly how the UV 390 comes in the box now uh don't freak out uh when you get it because I ordered this straight from Amazon just to see what everyone else is the experience everyone else is going to get this is exactly how it came and it says right here on the side I'm not sure if you guys can see that or not but it doesn't say plus it just says UV 390 so you know not a uh not not super reassuring right there right off the start but this is in fact the plus model and you can tell once we get into it the reason that this radio has uh kind of taken the World by storm is because everything you need is in here you don't need to buy anything else so let's go right through it so opening up the box you of course get the manuals and documentation you get the transceiver itself and in the bottom you get the programming cable now this is super important whatever you do do not throw this away you need this desperately you can't do any of this without this programming cable uh you get the charging dock you get the battery here which will go ahead and throw in and you get a few other accessories interestingly enough you actually get two antennas in the Box a sort of larger uh whip antenna like this one that you might have to buy and I I threw these on an SWR meter anyway just to make sure they're actually okay to use uh before I I use them but everyone that I've tested from uh you know uh tyt is it's always been pretty good uh the other one is your standard rubber ducky antenna so there you go you're pretty much ready to rock right out of the box now the reason that I I said keep this cable is because this radio is a little bit special uh when you buy an analog radio like this a balang a quan Shang some other cheap Chinese radio again they're perfectly fine to use if that's what you need but they use a special cable so what you have to do is you have to hop on the internet and buy yourself see if I can show you here a bow Fang specific cable now the reason that you need a B Fang specific cable is because these radios are made um well I guess you could say they're kind of missing a few parts so to speak this cable here for Bal fangs has a computer chip inside here you can't see it but there's a computer chip inside here that allows your computer to talk to this radio the UV 390 does not need such because that chip that's in the cable is not in the cable it's actually already in the radio so really a few years ago people were getting scammed on places like eBay or Amazon because they were buying cables that were just dumb they were just a simple kinwood style connector cable and they were trying to use them with their bow fangs and they're figuring out it was it wasn't working because you needed to buy the special cable with the special computer chip in here that allows your computer to talk to the radio ironically the more expensive radio needs the cheaper cable so make sure you keep that because that's going to come with it again every one of these that I've bought also comes with one of these little mini CDs uh I didn't even know they were still doing these anymore but it comes with a little mini CD for the driver software to make this cable and radio work you don't necessarily need uh to keep this because you can download it the most recent version from the internet so let's go ahead and jump to that now the place that I prefer to get software for these you're going to need two things maybe you will definitely need the CPS or customer programming software this is theof software if you're familiar with programming some of these other radios it's like chirp but it's for uh these these specific radios so I like to go to buy 2way rios.com find the radio uh for sale you can buy it from these guys if you want they're not a sponsor or anything but they do have documentation and downloads so you can download the uh ZIP file that has the CPS software in it for whichever radio you get also listed there is the USB cable driver if if you need it you should not need it if you're running on Windows you should not need it but you might so get them both while they're there keep them stored away you never know once you have downloaded uh unzipped and installed the driver if you're so choose just double click on it it's fairly simple very easy to do same thing with the CPS double click the exe file there you go you will get this this is the daunting part this is the scary screen that a lot of people tend to get overwhelmed with but fear not we're going to take this one step at a time and show the easiest most simple way to set all of this up now before we get sucked into the computer here let's talk about a couple things you're going to need to do with your radio so the first thing that you're going to need to do is open and take the side door off here it's just a simple thumb screw you may need a screwdriver to open it for the first time but that's going to expose uh the ports where you're going to plug in your cable the other thing that you're going to need to do is unlock your radio and this comes into that sort of weird cultural thing where you may have a lot of questions but nobody's going to give you a straight answer so let me clarify something a little bit many of you may know that when you buy really any radio from China it's locked down they do this to get around the FCC or to make cooperation with the FCC a little easier and what they do is they make it so that when you turn your radio on you're not able to change any you're not able to change any of the frequencies you're you're only locked to to a certain frequency in this case this radio is seriously locked down every version that I've got from this you can't change any of the frequencies uh from the from the panel here you actually have to unlock it uh normally like your battle fangs they're going to be locked to a certain range of frequencies um but with every little radio even Japanese radios or higher higher grade American radios or something like that uh they have a little secret code to unlock them and for this radio what you have to do is look here on the side see if I can get this Focus just right you have to look here on the side and here's your push to talk and here are these two buttons on the top of the bottom of the push to talk you have to hold these down and then turn the radio on and when you do that wait for it to boot through its little menu and you can let go and now the radio is unlocked there's no indication that anything has happened but it is unlocked keep this in mind in case you find something gets a little wonky you pull the wrong settings or somehow or another it gets messed up you find you can't change the the frequency just remember that's the way that that is so plug it in with the UV 390 again to avoid hours and hours and hours of troubleshooting take your thumb and push on it really hard because it's really hard to get that connector in there with this specific model of radio the first couple of times sometimes you might even get an auto double click just like that and now it's seated just fine now with radio again turned off we can plug this into our computer now I've got the radio plugged in over here what I'm going to do is go to my computer and pull up device manager and from the device manager uh menu I'm going to uh make sure that Universal serial bus controllers is expanded and the one that says ports Comm and lpt is also expanded what we're trying to do is is find out how this radio is communicating with the computer and this is purely a troubleshooting step this radio is smart and it doesn't need any of this we don't need to know what comp Port it's on we don't need to check it and make sure the driver's okay it works right out of the box most of the time there are exceptions depending on your computer and situations and if you're trying to program other radios you need to do this step anyway so what I always do when I got a new radio pull up device manager plug it in turn it on and see what changes hopefully hopefully it will come in as what it's supposed to be this radio here will show up in your uh Universal serial bust controllers menu as STM device in dfu mode great that means it's working if it comes into something else you may need to run the driver unplug everything restart your computer and try again but now that this came in this was kind of a moot point but it's good practice it's always good uh practice to do so get into the habit of doing that either way we're all good to go now so once we have our CPS up and running here the very first step again with any new radio this is universal no matter what radio you use you always want to click read from the radio sometimes there's discrepancies between what the CPS software has as the defaults and what your radio ships with because again radios are going to be sitting on the shelves and maybe out of date slightly so what you want to do is pull it from the radio that way we're not messing with anything wonky here we don't need to cause any problems so now that we've read from the radio we can begin this process it seems a lot more involved please do not let yourself get overwhelmed we're going to take this one step at a time and do it in the most simple way possible the brief disclaimer with that is that since we're going to cover this simply we're not using a lot of the features of DMR DMR radios digital radios that use the DMR standard are not really intended to be used like this we may have our you know uv5 RS or Bal fangs and we might have our Quan Shanks here uh and really people are going to be using these radios these old school analog radios in one of two ways they're going to be talking from Radio to radio or they're going to be talking from Radio to repeater to other radios in the repeater network well DMR it gets really squirly CU there's a lot of other things you can do with DMR but if Fe not we're going to set up everything simply so that it's this is the most Bare Bones DMR setup that has ever been so now that we've read our radio the very first thing that we're going to want to do is save everything always save everything so click uh file save as and you can save it however you want as you can see here I already have two profiles for my personal radio right here uh one for one radio one for another radio for other you know depending on how you want to use it but uh that's what you want to do is save it so I'm going to go ahead and save that there and the next thing that we're going to talk about before we get into the super scary encryption stuff is we're going to make some quality of life improvements these things will make your life so much easier and be less frustrating in the long run and that lies with the general settings page so getting used to this software takes a little bit of doing uh you're going to be a little bit frustrated when you find out that these windows just going to move around inside this this design Choice by the way was directly stolen from Motorola Motorola radio uh software looks just like this uh so or some very similar so uh this is how it's set up these little mini windows inside windows that you can kind of move around and looks kind of weird but in any case let's go down the list of things we're going to change on this page first things first right up here at the top we're going to give our radio a name now this radio name is really just um if you're a ham radio operator uh your call sign goes there if you're uh using this for LMR purposes or you're not really concerned about ham stuff you can put anything you want here so let's put CS2 A2 why not continue the formula now right here Radio ID this is one of those things that requires a little bit of explanation this is essentially your Radio's phone number and you can choose it to be whatever you want now if you're a ham radio operator this is where you would put your DMR ID for the network you want to operate on this is a DMR ID that it it's like linked to your call sign but again this is not for ham stuff this is for either extreme emergencies or for LMR guys who have their proper licenses to do whatever the heck they want with their radios what I'm going to do is just choose a random number in this case it's going to be a four-digit number I'm going to say it's let's say to maintain compatibility with other Radio Systems I'm going to go with 99 87 okay so that's this going to be this Radio's phone number essentially you can if you have another radio like in any tone or something like that and every setting is matched and you're all like linked up together you can go into this radio and say Hey I want to call like a phone call phone call this radio this number and this R Radio will ring so again we're we may be getting a little bit over our heads right now this may be a little bit overwhelming but this is setting us up for success for later if we want to do some more advanced stuff so make sure that you note the radio name and uh the uh number that you're using now please keep in mind if you want to get cute with it and you want to put your real name in the radio name spot up there at the top I would advise against that because uh if you're trying to be a little bit more private keep in mind that the radio name and the radio ID depending I'm not sure about this radio specifically but I'm fairly certain that on other radio the name and the ID are transmitted along when you push that PTT when you push the push to talk button uh that data is transmitted in the clear so it's not encrypted of course it has to be that way so that you can uh decode the signal right again we're getting ahead of ourselves but don't put anything personally identifiable uh in this block unless you're a ham radio operator and you have to put your call sign or something like that you know privacy is non-existent on ham radio but for other people who are on different stuff different licenses this is what I would recommend other quality of life things that you can change that are purely optional what I do is I go over here and uncheck power on voice that means it's going to not have that weird voice say power on or something like that now on the UV 390 it's still going to have that uh Power on like sound um but there's no way to turn this off so that that right there is what you're going to get no matter what uh but you can turn the voice off and in the same vein I would also go down to the bottom of the screen here and change the channel voice announcement turn that off too because you don't want to you don't want it to to announce to your channel one channel two when you're when you're changing channels here purely optional but it makes your life easier and it's less of a concern if you're in a uh more sticky situation and you needed to use encrypted radios or something like that another thing that you might want to change the default on the backlight timeout so when the the backlight times out uh is 10 seconds that's the default I'm going to change it to five so now that we've gotten our general settings changed uh we can click save now when we click that save button it's just saving that file that we created to our computer it's not going to the radio yet if you wanted to you could click write to radio and it will write that information to the radio now this is kind of a pointless step um but it it it may help you to kind of get familiar with how it works writing to this particular radio takes a long time uh even if you haven't changed very much so just something to keep in mind you might want to just get a whole batch of settings ready and then write once at the end either way you're still saving the file to your computer so that you can constantly change it or update it or whatever when you add in more radios uh later on I would note though uh if you're doing this and you make a mistake or something let it finish uh don't click cancel uh you can mess things up that way uh I have done that a couple of times it's just generally advised just let it finish its job let it finish writing to the radio and you'll be good to go the radio should restart or at least exit the uh PC mode at the end you'll get this right data success and there we go we just wrote to the radio so how do we set up our Network how do we make two of these radios talk to one another Well essentially the bottom line is they all have to share the same things okay you don't need to understand how all of this works you just got to make sure all the numbers match everything matches on all the radios so the only thing on this radio right here that separates it from say another radio that's very similar even from a different brand is the radio name and ID that is different on this one they're all every radio has its own name and ID this is important the reason for this is because we have to set up we're not just setting up channels you know uh channels that we can change like on an analog radio we're setting up an entire ecosystem an entire network you have to remember with DMR radio it's not just radio to radio it's really meant to be connected to say uh the internet so that this radio will transmit to a a special thing called a DMR hotspot and that hotspot will be connected to say the internet and that internet will feed will go into a repeater network and all kinds of crazy stuff so this radio with the help of the internet you can talk around the world with ordinarily you'd just be talking you know radio to radio or you know radio to repeater to radio well a lot of those settings for those highly Advanced DMR ham radio specific uses we don't need and we're not going to use what we're going to do today is just set up basically a room a room in which all of these radios are going to be able to share basically like a party line so that when you key up on one radio all radios listen and vice versa right so that is the most basic way you can set up a network with digital radio and essentially the default settings in pretty much every single DMR software package are pretty much going to be good to go right out of the box but we do need to make sure that we make some changes the first hierarchy that we need to be nested under so we're not just creating channels here we have to create a Zone a Zone which is like a memory bank right so there is a a zone of of of channels and most of the time we just click right here on the left hand side we just have Zone one now this already comes pre-filled out so they've got 10 channels Channel 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and this is already just the default we're going to change all of this we don't need all this this is all too much we're going to delete all these but just know that you need at least one zone and almost all radios come with one zone created So within this Zone what we're also what we're going to want to do is create some contacts right we want to fill out our contacts list now with this kind of radio with your old analog radio you've got a radio I've got a radio you've got the frequency I've got the frequency we can now talk to one another but that's basically it we don't know who it is there's no data going back and forth and if somebody else hops on here um they can well they can hear everything that we say but they can also talk to us if they wanted to well um there's ways on analog radio of of making that not happen uh but by and large there's a better way on DMR and what we want to do is basically fill up our address book on this radio with all of the context we want to talk to so remember remember how I assigned a name and a phone number a a radio ID a a number for that radio at the very very beginning well if you have your radio and you've got your number and you've got a bunch of other buddies and you know their numbers you can plug them into your contacts list and that way you will be all in the same group so let's start from the very bottom and let's create some contacts so let's go over here to digital contact now we can see that we have uh this again this weird menu structure but we have contact name and in this spot I'm going to put let's say um since we're since I want to create an environment in which say all of these radios here see I've got these three radios and I want them all to talk together on a party line just like how this radio might work if I want them all to talk together I have to create a group call so I have to create a group net so that all these radios here they're all in the same room together they're all chilling they're all able to talk to one another otherwise they're not going to work so you have to create a group call first and that's what it's called a group call so we're all in a group together so we're just going to call it group one okay now we're going to give that group name we're going to give that group Channel a name a number right in this case let's say let's call it um um 4523 totally random doesn't matter we just need to know what it is so we can plug it in on all the other radios okay so now that's our group that's our group thing right cool right now we need to add in everybody else's phone number so let's go ahead and add another one and we're going to call this one Larry because this is Larry's radio right we want to be able to talk to Larry and what is Larry's phone number well let's say Larry's phone number is 9910 okay and instead of group call we want to make this an individual call or sorry excuse me a private call on some software it might say individual call but in this case we want to make it a private call this will become apparent later as to why we're doing it this way but for now this is what we've got so let's go ahead and put in another radio uh let's say we've got you know Mo's radio and his number is 9911 and let's go ahead and add in the third curly and make this one again a private call and let's make his number 9912 the reason I'm using these is because I already have these on some other radios like the any tone series they have to take uh call IDs within a certain parameter so I just stick with ones that I know that work pretty well so just to recap in our contacts list right here we have got four contacts we've got the group which is all the radios together and one big happy family here and we've got Larry Mo and Curley listed as private calls with their individual caller IDs you know reme radio IDs phone numbers whatever you want to call them Radio ID is a proper term their radio IDs listed now what is this going to do this is going to allow us to do something that we can't do with our bow fangs this is going to allow us to accept calls accept radio messages so that when I push this push the talk button I can choose to talk to just Larry on the same frequency or I can use I can say just Mo or just curly and I can send them text messages on the same frequency so we can all be on the same frequency but I will be able to send them messages on the main frequency without bothering anybody else isn't that pretty cool otherwise when you're using something like a bow thing or something analog not only can anyone and everyone hear it that's you know you know you know something that you might want to consider you know just by itself but the logistics of being able to say all right we're all sharing this one frequency because that's what our license has or we've got five frequencies uh based on our license and we've got to make the best of the space we have right so you might want to do it like this which allows you to just ping each other on the on the radio on the same frequency without bothering the whole network right cuz it's kind of annoying to be sitting there in your observation post or whatever and say hey hey curly pick up hey curly pick up and everybody's radio goes off every time you hear that that's kind of annoying this allowah did not do that so by putting this in you'll be good to go now I should mention you don't have to do it this way what you have to do if you want a standard party line to put everybody together one big group you just got to have the group call that's all you got to have if you just want to have just the basics together and you don't know who you're going to be talking to perhaps you got to have the group call and whoever is on your network has to have the group call so I could have configured all of these radios as a matter of fact I don't think this radio right here has these three numbers in it I think it just has a group call in it so when a call comes in it will just say it's coming from the group call and it's not coming from Larry Larry's name ain't going to be on my screen here but this way it will be so you'll be able to see who's talking which is pretty handy so if you're chilling out in the woods or doing some kind of Secret Squirrel stuff out there in the middle of nowhere and you've got a hot mic somebody is sitting on their radio they got their fat rumpus sitting on their radio and they're holding down the push to talk and you can't figure out who it is well if you set things up this way you'll be able to look on your screen and see the name of whoever it is and if you don't have their name their number their Radio ID which will be required for the radio to function their phone number their Radio ID that they set up will be dis played on your screen so you'll be able to tell exactly who it is very handy feature this is why DMR might be a little bit more useful than something like this so now we've got all our phone numbers in there we've got all of our contacts we're all good to go now we can close this out again save it if we haven't done so already so what have we done so far we have set up our quality of life stuff we've made our radio work we have set a radio ID and a radio name uh we have done both of those and and we have set up some contacts well now comes the spicy part encryption I know a lot of people might want to plug their ears through this if you're a ham guy uh but encryption is fairly easy to do uh on this the legality of which again is on the user that's on you that's your that's your job to figure out if it's legal for you to use or not I'm talking about what's physically capable now here's the deal with encryption like I mentioned hams hate it they really like just it gets their goat when people talk about ion a lot of times but the Chinese are quite industrious are they not and they have figured out a way to Market these radios to two groups of people one the business people into the hams so the hams may never use the encryption part of this as a matter of fact it's hidden it's a secret menu in here that you have to actually unlock so what you want to do is go to your menu setting over here and click privacy setting now yours will not look like this when you download this software for the first time it will be locked now what you need to do is make sure that you've clicked this window here click controll shift and the letter P on your keyboard control shift p and you will get a popup that says the the advanced mode has has been activated close the software so you close the software shut everything down restart it load that saved file again and you'll be right here this is where you'll be uh and you will have these two tabs basic enhanced and and Universal like I mentioned there's a little bit of information Warfare going on with these radios sometimes and they all use different secret code words to refer to different things for most most of the time most of the time when you're talking DMR digital radios in the ham world you will see radios with a lot of code words in the description of the radios now fortunately tyt doesn't care and they say right on their cell page a25 6 bit encryption capable fantastic uh they're not they're dropping the pretenses but in the past it had to be a little bit little bit on the slide because we didn't want people or the companies did not want to advertise openly their radio did some uh did some encryption legally it's it's it's dubious with like FCC import laws I don't care either way I just think it's kind of interesting so we go with the the classic basic basic Keys it's like a basic PR y key it's um depending on your brand it may be uh rc4 encryption which is like you know what like 128 bit or something like that it may be just a simple voice inverter it might not be encryption at all it might just flip the the the audio signature around and any of this is easily crackable what we want in this case is universal tyt uses the word Universal that's their secret code word for aes2 56 and you can see right here once we click the universal tab it says right here in the software the first uh first key is aes256 it's name and there's a key value now this will all be filled with zeros when you first install it and uh you should be able to change this as you wish now this is where you're going to input your keys now keys and key loading is very very sketchy um or rather it's a little bit um there's a let me just say there's a long history there okay that we don't need to get into right now this is software level encryption and it loads via the CPS so you don't need a special thing for all my army guys out there you guys remember lugging around a fraking key loader and having to whenever you're uh you've got to carry around this brick right and then plug it in right to to fill your radios with the crypto with the keys here you don't need to do that you can do that straight from this uh some your Motorola guys out there that's how they still have to load their keys if they're running Hardware encryption there's benefits to doing it both ways this is what most consumers are probably going to use anyway so either way it's backwards compatible so in in any case if you were using an any tone system or a tyt system generally speaking you need to just make sure that they're somewhat cross- compatible for the most part even the cheaper uh Chinese DMR radios they're adopting at least Motorola tier 2 which is the standard for DMR again for you nerds out there DMR is just the code word for Moto Turbo uh because Motorola invented it so kind of an interesting history behind all of this uh if you're interested in learning about some of that however for us we don't need to we don't need to care about the history all we need to know is how to use the the stuff so we have to understand how this works what's going to happen is you load these keys this long long series of of characters and text right this 256bit encryption key that's going to go inside the guts of your radio and what's going to happen is if you've got two of these bad boys and they're working together and they're sharing the same key what's going to happen is when you do this right here when you push to talk on that radio this radio here is going to say to the network to whatever whoever can pick up and it has the has is the right talk group configured it's on the right frequency it's going to say hey encryption Code 4 and this radio is going to say okay I'll use encryption Code 4 to decode whatever you just said or whatever you're about to say and that's how it's going to work it doesn't transmit all these letters over the radio over the airwaves it don't work like that your radio says Hey use password seven and your radio says password 7even got it do they match okay well now we can hear each other the reason I use this long drawn out explanation is because you have to make sure they match you can't just put these in in any order so when you have the first row here I would advise starting with one key start with one key and see if it works put in your key here and how how how you do that is you just double click it here and you can uh put whatever put whatever you want to in there I wouldn't advise doing this because even as as random as this seems right now it's not it's not Rand and there's there are ways computers can figure out the width of the human hand and all kinds of stuff like that so if you want to be truly truly Anonymous look up how to generate a 256bit key and this will uh help you out but for now this will work this is a short code it's easily I can see there's many repeats in it it isn't is it's going to be easily crackable but still uh you want to make sure that you got a good key but for now this will work this will work now something to keep in mind is you need to know which key goes with which number so you need to make sure that number one is this key and if you're reloading multiples they all have to match you will save yourself many hours of frustration if you put them all in the same exact way so one thing to keep in mind is that in the world of commercial radio um things are a little weird with the keys they're a little bit more military thinking so you may be familiar with what I just did earlier and they I just I had my radio plugged into my computer and I clicked right well that wrote all the settings and all the contacts and such to the radio and that's all well and good here's the thing though keys are different and every brand treats them differently so for instance this brand uh you have to click right privacy to the radio and it will write the code to the radio separate from your settings now depending on which radio you use any tones can do this as well uh you can have it set up in like a more military Centric thing so that if you lose this radio or whatever and somebody captures it so I've captured it I've captured this radio well I can just grab my handy dandy programming cable and go over to my cool little field computer and pull the encryption keys from this radio right wrong and they make it so that you can't do that so every time you want to change the keys you can't pull them from the radio at least that's the settings on this one some radios you can some radios make it so that uh when you turn the radio off the keys erase so uh depending on your settings how you want to do it I don't know if you can do that with these but some radios do that and it's kind of an it's kind of an interesting thing so it's just kind of an extra Safeguard so what I'm going to do once I have my keys put in there I'm just using the one for now and it's a very poor key I just did it with my hands on my keyboard which is not good to do but for demonstration purposes let's go ahead and write privacy now you can see my radio just went into programming mode I don't know if you can see that or not and write data success now uh I can close this out and go back to say let's say my uh settings menu whatever now this radio has the key fill so this radio has two separate sort of ways of thinking about it one is all your channels and your name and all that kind of stuff and the other stuff is the encryption that you have to have both in order to make this whole system work encrypted so uh now that we have the fill we have filled our radio with the crypto now we can start editing the channels and this is where things get a little bit a little bit confusing a little bit overwhelming I know this may have been overwhelming so far but uh it won't be too bad I promise so what we're going to do is go to our channels here now I'm going to go in here and I'm going to delete all of these channels except for one we're just going to take it slow do it very simply just have one channel you never want to have one channel if even if you have one frequency you can set multiple channels right underneath different frequencies so um you just want to make sure that you start with one figure it out see what works and we'll see the thing things you can change on it on it later so what we're going to do is we're going to go through here and we're going to set up at least one encrypted voice channel that all of these fancy radios are on so very first box Channel mode digital we want to make sure that it is digital uh also we want to make sure in our bandwidth right here that it is set to 12.5 uh khz that's the standard for DMR uh analog radio double that uh so normally uh we want to in best practices in this case the software is forcing us to go with 12.5 KZ but in just in case it didn't that's what we would choose we want to set a name for this channel uh we're just going to say Channel One UHF okay cool next we're going to put in our receive frequency and our transmit frequency now if in all cases where you're going to be using this legally using LMR rules and things like that uh your FCC frequency manager will tell you what frequency to put here what frequencies you can use um if we're talking more of an apocalypse situation Whatever frequency works right um there are some best practices when picking a a frequency to use in a contingent situation but that requires talking at another time in this case I'm just going to leave it as a default because there's no frequency that I can pick that's not going to result in Outrage either way leaving it like it is is even still very very illegal because I can tell you this frequency uh is you know not not uh the right one right so uh in any case this is where you put your frequency you will know what frequency to use when the time comes uh you can put in prepper frequencies if you want whatever um but if you're trying to use this you know with encryption legally so on and so forth you will know what frequency to put there so I'm not going to rehash all that anyway put your frequency there I'm just going to leave it the same for the demonstration purposes the next thing you want to want to do is come down here and click your change your power level again best practices it's not just the rules you know I know a lot of people don't really care about fcc's rules and I get it uh but in terms of best practices you want to use what the least power required to make the communication possible so you don't need to go out there and start blasting out all over the airwaves all the time one it's poor opsc for one it's not good security practices and two is inconsiderate and and three um it's just not uh it's not good for your battery life either so if you can get away with going on low power go with that now I should note uh almost all CPS software packages they're just going to say low medium and high you need to go into your user manual for your radio and figure out what those values mean in this case I'm fairly certain that uh High means 10 watts on this radio I could be mistaken on that either way going with low is probably one watt or half a watt my guess is it's 1510 that's just my pure guess uh but in any case we'll just go with low for now just for the sake of argument now now we want to put in all of that information that we made in the beginning so here's where it all comes together right this is what I mentioned earlier everything needs to match you need to make sure your contact name is the same you need to make sure that your group list matches and you want to make sure that everything matches your color code think of this as like um PL tones or something like like that on analog it's not quite the same but you can think of it like that uh the repeater slot this is your time slot so like I mentioned uh digital signals use 12.5 khz right so you want to make sure that you're on the same time slot just make sure everything matches that's all you got to do really so we're just going to use color code one time slot repeat in this case this software says repeater slot one and right here at the bottom privacy SW which here we go we're going to check that box and have this other menu pop up and now that we have this drop down where we can pick Universal if you remember Universal was aes256 and another box just appeared which we can click that says privacy number well remember how I said uh you got to have make sure all the numbers match well this would be our code we just put in we just put in one AES key and if you remember that key was one so that needs to go here if you're using multiple Keys like if say you wanted to create another Channel that's exactly the same but with a different encryption key you can choose whichever one it is now in this case the default goes up to 16 but you can make it more than that I'm fairly certain either way uh that's pretty much it you're pretty much done um really all you need to do at this point is make sure you save your work of course and then write it to the radio so once you have written that to the radio you are good to go you should be able to hop right on in to channel one on your radio here and do the same with the other radios of course having make sure making sure that all of them have each other's call signs so one thing that gets a little bit frustrating if you're the radio guy for your group is say this radio this radio has you know Radio ID such and such well it needs to have contacts a B and C you know this R needs to have contacts b c and d this one needs to have a b and d and so on and so forth so it can get a little bit confusing that's why they even have a little tab on the radio to let you know which one it is so my advice it doesn't cost you anything in security take a sharpie or something or piece of tape put it on the radio as to what the number uh is is what the phone number is contact name doesn't really matter uh you can change that uh for each radio really this contacts list is just to make sure that your radio when it hears when your radio hears 9910 it's going to associate that number with Larry now you can change that Larry Larry's name to whatever you want it to be you can change it to be you know you know paint in the butt or whatever and you can put that in your own radio but if you don't have that programmed at all when Larry makes a phone call and all you have is just the group if you don't have anything in your radio you're not going to hear Larry you're going to hear the message but just not going to it's not going to decrypt or anything uh but if you have the group name and Larry hops on your your your network but you don't have Larry's phone number ahead of time it's just going to show Larry's phone number okay so you'll be able to change that you can even change that in your radio if you so choose but in any case that's really the basis for setting this up this is using decently good practices um to to get us set up for some things that might be a little bit more complicated in the future again once you get a good code plug you can save that and then export that as well um or you can just hand jam it in most of the time if you're using encryption legally you're not going to be putting in a whole lot of frequencies but again if you were to pull up say your channel your channel list and you wanted to add another Channel you could do that and because these are M multi-band radios here um um they do analog as well so if you've got a buddy across town and all he's got is a bow Fang and a frequency and a time of day to call you you can still contact him on this you just switch to his channel uh you program in specifically the data that he's given you and you can uh have that set up so that's why a lot of people they'll set up on this one radio compartmentalized from each other they'll have say two or three contacts that have that share an encrypted uh Channel right and then channel two will be like a larger like group of neighbors and then channel three will be like like a maybe a Statewide Network and then all the other channels be like the standard like prepper channel so again there's a lot of different ways to set these up generally speaking I would advise if you're just getting started set up one group set up one group and don't worry about any of the contacts just do one group and see if you can get it to work okay see if you can get the keys to load and you can get everything to work um because that's the hardest part uh really speaking so one thing that you may have to tweak I'll mention it now I know this is kind of a random note but one thing that you may have to tweak a little bit is go back here to general settings and right here it says TX transmit Preamble duration the default here is 600 milliseconds uh you may have to lower that or extend it uh it's it's up to you it really it gets kind of complicated explaining what that is uh but basically there is a short period of time from the time that you press this button to where the transmission is actually going through and being decoded on the other end this lengthens or shortens that time 600 milliseconds is uh fairly standard I think I mean it's the default on a lot of software packages but anyway you may have to change it uh it's up to you I wouldn't worry about it right now just get it to work uh with these $120 radios and you should be good to go so again you can set up scan lists as well all you got to do is go over here to your scan list and then add in all of these channels to your scan list and you can scan through uh these these channels you can do dual monitoring you do all this other advanced stuff but again this is just the beginning this is just a start showing you how to get familiar with some of these terms like group list and channel and digital contacts and radio ID and keys and key loading and wrri the keys and you know storing the keys and so on and so forth so just something to keep in mind is that again we're using this or I'm guessing that if you're watching this video you're probably not really interested in the ham radio side of things so when it comes to ham radio and DMR there's a lot more to learn there's a lot more to do but most of the time you're probably just not going to use it so again these are the basics this should get you going pretty good and um this is a fairly solid radio to use um again I will have much more content on a lot more of these other things but this should get you started right out of the gate the only thing that you got to provide is a frequency you got to choose your frequency and that will either be chosen for you or in an apocalypse situation where we're not caring about little paper licenses anymore um you've got to uh just pick one that works for you so again Sky your limit hopefully this has been helpful for a lot of you I know that a lot of this can be very overwhelming and it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to learn and it takes you a long time to learn it trust me I've been there but hopefully this will clear the air on some of these things that you may be too afraid to ask uh to be honest um because let's let's be honest when it comes to encryption and and some of the more contentious topics the ham R committee isn't exactly the friendliest uh source of information but this will get you started right out of the door it's a lot simpler than what you might want to think it is and once you understand the basics you can move on to more expensive cooler more tactical uh radios that operate basically the same way let me put it to you this way with $120 radio you can learn everything there is to know about Motorola and high Terra and some of these other high very expensive you know th000 plus radios you can learn the basics of right here so again this is a perfectly acceptable operational radio uh so is the anone the anone is just perfectly fine you you will um you people may give you grief about using an analog radio I personally don't because radios have different uses right so if this is all you can afford okay that's that's fine there's no there's no shame in that uh as long as you recognize the vulnerability and you you you take steps to reduce them with this same thing there's no shame in going with these over a two2 or $3,000 Motorola there's there's no shame in that at all um and these are you know um very op operationally capable uh in their own right so again hopefully this has been helpful um I will have much more to come on this but for now this will get you started so thank you all for watching and we will see you next time and as always hide in the shade