 All right, let's talk about communicating with the boys. Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense. And we're gonna talk about comm setup here today, specifically as part of a Minuteman setup and what that looks like, what would maybe make that different from a non-Minuteman setup or something like that. So first off, you might not even want to have a radio on your kit. I will put a link in the description or maybe put one of those fancy little cards in here before, but I've talked about this before about theory of radios in general, and if you, as an individual, should have a radio on your kit at all, that's a different discussion. I've done a different video on that, but let's just move past that. Let's say that, yes, you decide you want a radio on your kit. Now, in this example, what we're talking about is a radio on my rig to talk to other members within my team. We're not talking about a radio to radio back to a talk or to talk to a different team that's a mile or so away or to talk to some LP, OP that we put out there or something like that. We're not talking about any of that. We're just talking about radioing two members in my team who I'm probably not gonna be separated from by more than 50 to 100 yards at a stretch anyway, okay? So you gotta keep that in mind because that explains how this is set up because the first thing on here is a high loss antenna, okay? So this is just a bail fang, waterproof radio thing. It's the, what is this? GT3WP, if you can see that down there, okay? It's basically a waterproof UV5R is essentially what it is. And what I put on here is a high loss antenna, right? Just a short little stubby antenna that's gonna have a high loss. Now, why would you do that? I did that because I don't want my signal to go far. I don't want to be sending out radio signals, hundreds and hundreds of yards, maybe up to a mile or two, right? I don't want to be doing that. I want this signal to be very short range and to die out very quickly so that I can reach the people I need to reach and then try to reduce as much as possible our team radio signature, right? So that there's not transmissions going outside of where they should be. So that is why the high loss antenna is on here, okay? Is to, again, try to reduce that radio signature so that my radio is hopefully only going a couple hundred yards to my teammates and that's it. And then after that, you can't pick it up because it's just the high loss antenna is not allowing that. So that's the theory behind the high loss antenna. This is on a BNC adapter, so you could swap it out, right? So if you start to say, okay, well I only want to talk to my team, I pop this on and then I keep another antenna in my pack maybe that I can rig this up to a jungle antenna or a much longer antenna for when I do need to punch out to that LPOP or whatever, you know, you can do different things there. But I do like having the BNC connector so that I can swap those antennas out in general. Again, when we're talking about just inner team comms, this is the high loss antenna is gonna stay on there but that way, again, I have flexibility to swap out to other antennas. I'll put a link to these in the description box below if you're into that kind of thing. All right, now coming up from the high loss antenna, I think Minuteman kit should be set up in one of two ways, okay? The first thing I think you should go to is a shoulder mic push to talk mic, okay? I think that for a couple reasons. One, it's as much easier to mount on your kit, right? If I'm in a vehicle, if I'm on foot, whatever, I can always talk into this thing rather than digging my radio and actually talking into the radio, right? That's just a pain. So this just makes life considerably easier and you should have one of these. So, we're gonna, we set this up this way for a reason, right? So that if I grab this chest rig and I don't have my helmet, I can still have comms, right? I can still have comms with my teammates. If I didn't get my ears, didn't get my helmet, didn't get anything else, just got this, I can still run comms, no matter what, I'm equipped to run comms. That's important because as a Minuteman, right, you might have to throw on your kit at a minute's notice and you might not have time to get your other stuff or you might forget your other stuff or whatever and the reason I like this setup is no matter what, I have my radio, right? As long as my battery is charged, I have a radio that functions and I can use it. Now, what we wanna do is we wanna layer this system, right? And what I mean by that is to be able to take what we got here, this is totally functional, works by itself and be able to layer it into other systems so that we can increase our, should we say, security posture and we can increase our ability and ease of use of comms. So the way we're gonna do that is we're gonna take a little three and a half millimeter jack, right, we're gonna put it into our push to talk and then what we'll do is we will route this into our helmet, right? So we'll take this that gets routed up and then I have this little lead cord here coming off for my ears that gets plugged into there and then for me, this wraps around here and plugs into here. You'll say, hey Dylan, why didn't you just plug this jack right into that ear? Well, this ear is on my left side of my head, right? And I run my comms on the opposite side, right? So, excuse me, this is on the right side of my head. My comms are on the left side of my head. So it has to go around to the other side of my head and I've just found this is a simpler system rather than trying to route this whole thing through here. It's just easier to plug it right in here. That's what I do, you do you, whatever, okay? But maybe you'll just find ears that actually plug in on this side or you'll run your comms on the right side or whatever. Again, maybe you can figure out a better system. But here's the point. By plugging our ears, right, connecting our electronic ear pro to a radio, now we've increased our security posture and I put that in semi quotes because when my radio is on, it's gonna route directly into my ears, which means that I'm not blasting radio traffic out of my mic, right? It's just routing all the radio directly into my headset so that I can still hear it but nobody else can. Now, I think overall, right, that's the preferred way to go, right? If I get to have my full setup, I get to have my druthers, I get to get all my kit on, this is how I'm gonna run comms. I'm gonna run them plugged into my ears so that I can hear it no one else can and then I'm gonna use this push-to-talk mic to be able to talk to my friends, right? Now, at one point, I did have a cheapy head mic coming off here, that's what this Velcro was for. So it's a mic running right to my mouth and then I had a push-to-talk fancy push-to-talk button on my chest and then I could keep my head up and I could talk directly into the microphone. And that's a good way to go if you know that you're gonna be able to get all your kit on. I ended up moving away from that system for two reasons. One, it was just a cheapy Amazon one so it didn't work super well. But even if it did work all the time and it was perfectly reliable and I had an expensive $3,000 setup here or whatever, I still don't like that because it necessitates having the helmet. Now, do I always wanna have my helmet on? Yeah, preferably, right? However, being realistic, there might be times when I only have my chest rig, right? Or maybe I'm going on vacation and I'm gonna throw my rifle in my car and I'm gonna throw my chest rig in my car. Well, then I have my rifle, my chest rig, I'm not bringing my helmet, but again, my radio is still actually usable if I needed to use that for whatever reason. So I like the ability to have an independent system that's tied just to the chest rig, right? With just the push-to-talk mic and the actual radio. And then I like being able to layer that on top of my helmet or my ears so that I can plug it into my ears and then I can have a more integrated system and then again, like I said, hear my own radio better. Especially again, when things get loud, having those radio comms plugged into your ear pro is gonna help you a lot because you can still hear the traffic even when things are bad and explosions are going off and stuff like that. So, big fan of this kind of system. This is my current system of how I run comms and how I have everything set up. Maybe you have a better system, if so, tell me about it. But this is how I would suggest you do something like this, because again, it offers that layer, that layering system in order to make it effective for you and no matter what, it's always gonna work on your raygazes. So, that's how I currently run my communications and radio set up. I hope that's helpful. Hope that gives you something to think about. Do brave deeds and endure.