So I’m gonna share a story. In this story I’m a fucking idiot. But I hope that it serves as a warning to someone so they can learn from my dumb mistakes. So I was going out to see some mates the other day in a big state forest near Melbourne.
Decided to take my car (a mid sized AWD SUV) rather than the wife’s small FWD sedan. This proved to be a very good choice. Mind you, my car may be awd but its for like a slightly damp soccer field carpark, not what I accidentally forced it into.
I set google maps on car play and off I go.
Traveling into the park with basically no phone coverage everything going fine till suddenly get told to turn off a decent gravel path onto a side road. No warnings or anything, and again maps said go this way. So I did. It looked OK to start with, but by the time I realized I was was in trouble it was too late.
The road degraded to a goat track and I start sliding down it with no chance of turning around and no phone data to be able to reroute anyway. Maps said I was 10 minutes from meet up point so I decided to push on not really having a choice.
Soon enough i come to a patch of very wet deep tyre tracks. so long as I stick to the high ground I’ll be fine. You can see where this is going, cant you? Yep. She slid straight off the highground into foot deep giant puddles of mud and immediately got bogged.
Chucked the car in mud mode, managed to reverse 2 feet before I couldn’t go any further, put the car back in drive and took off at speed but just got stuck in the same spot again and this time couldn’t reverse.
Now I didn’t panic. That probably saved me. It woulda been easy to accidentally dig her in. My hear beat about 170bpm, but I got out and as calmly as I could assessed the situation. No phone coverage. I walked ahead a bit to make sure I was ok to proceed assuming I could even get out of this mess. I could. Even better there was a downed tree. I grab some branches and stick them under the wheels as best I can. it took about 15-20 minutes. With a dashboard full of warning lights I jump back in and take off slowly, feel it grab some traction in my best Jeremy Clarkson impression scream “SPEED AND POWER” and fucking launch the SUV out of there.
Slowly I proceed to the meet point passing a proper 4x4 who looked at me with shock and horror on his face. A poor little SUV so far out of its depth it wasn’t even funny and an idiot who almost got himself in serious trouble.
I meet at the meeting point and my friends laugh. They approached from another direction and has 0 issues on a smooth gravel road. They all used Google Maps too, it just sent them in a different way for some reason.
So. What did I learn and why am i telling this story? a few key points:
- If your going bush, even on GOOD roads make sure someone knows where you are
- If you start to get into trouble: Reverse. Even if you have to reverse 500m! Dont commit to the fuck up assuming it’ll get better.
- Google maps has no concerns about sending you down tracks that even a dirtbike would struggle with 0 warning.
TLDR: I’ve become one of those “I was just following the GPS” people.
They both allow dropping the tramsmit power below 4w, but who knows what they level actually transmit at. If i were using them for anything more than listening to air-traffic control and the occasional road trip i would be a lot more concerned.
My point about the power was that all else being equal, more power is more range. And given the illegal radios way out power yours, but still dont get decent range is a good indication of how bad their antennas are.
Almost every radio reviewer tests line-of-sight range, which is almost always pretty good, so it ends up being meaningless.