We have been using the cheap and dependable BaoFeng UV5R in milsim games for ages.
They are easy to use, almost throwaway due to their low price and they have been ticking all the boxes at games for a long time now.
However, they are basically cheap radio ham sets that are useful to us, more by chance than design, but that arena is slowly changing.
Digital Mobile Radios (known as DMR) are entering the market.
Radios like the UV5R are analogue devices - they use relatively simple technology and are susceptible to interference and atmospheric noise. They are largely unintelligent in their abilities.
Radio manufacturers are slowly switching to producing digital handheld radios. Like all our mobile phones these days, they convert your analogue voice to 1's and 0's and send a digital data stream over the radio channel, which is then converted back to analogue voice at the receiving radio, so the recipient can hear your speech in his speaker.
New DMR radios like the BaoFeng shown here, are now available.
What's the benefit to us ?
- Better clarity and the ability to make intelligent radio calls - you can target individual recipients or selected groups, you can send short text messages and calls can be scrambled, providing a degree of security and preventing eavesdropping by the enemy.
Great, what's stopping us ?
- Well, at the present time, these radios are 2-3 times the cost of their analogue counterparts. Although the one shown above can also work in analogue mode, providing backwards compatibility, if you switch to digital mode, the people you want to talk to will need to also have a DMR and be switched into digital mode.
Realistically, are the players you wish to speak to, going to invest at these price levels ?
In reality, I also doubt that players will have the time to fiddle with the finer points offered by these radio's in a milsim game. Players are generally not radio hams and have not paid their ticket price to spend lots of time playing with radios !! - radios are simply a tool to fulfill a game objective i.e. comms.
In my humble opinion, the main benefit to milsim is the scrambling or encryption aspect, something not available on the common UV5R. Some milsim game organisers positively encourage their players to scan the airwaves and try to eavesdrop on the opposition. The DMR would bring in a level of reality to this scenario, in that most military radios are encrypted and comms are not sent in "clear".
However, an alternative view is that there are others ways of achieving secure comms.
The Squad Leader or his appointed RTO could carry a single second "secure" radio to communicate with command or other squads in secure mode. This can be achieved with a simple analogue radio with scrambling, programmed on a specific frequency. These are available for as little as £18 each.
No doubt, DMR prices will drop with time and eventually, makers will stop making analogue sets like the UV5R. Hopefully, this decision is still a long way away while people like milsimmers are still buying the cheaper, simpler, analogue sets. We will see..
