What is Squelch and Why Should I Care?

Squelch is an important part of operating a radio, and if you're anything like me, I didn't really understand its purpose until I started dabbling in the radio hobby. Here I try to explain the basics of squelch in 5 minutes. I hope you find it helpful.
Rhode Schwarz video link:
• Understanding CTCSS an...

[@HAMRADIODUDE]

This video needs more recognition

[@TomtheDilettante]

Ha. Thanks man.

[@DheerajGupta1985]

Very Nice Explanation of traffic squelch.

[@hobojojo1757]

You explained this very well. The video is very well done. The only thing I would have added, is maybe to mention the importance and differences, between SQUELCH settings when running local traffic, as opposed to DX contacts. And also maybe the differences in these settings between the different modes... AM, SSB, FM, and digital. 73!

[@ThomasFMoser]

Very well done video, Tom, thanks so much. Never seen the squelches better "in a nutshell". Compliments! Have a great time, 73 to you from Germany

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thank you very much! Very much want to visit Germany someday. Thanks for watching and chiming in! 73

[@ThomasFMoser]

@@TomtheDilettante you are always welcome! Thank you and best! 🤗👍🥂

[@kb3hey]

Great video Tom! Straight and to the point! Loved the pizza scene! Keep them coming! 73s

[@TomtheDilettante]

ha..thank! Was fun to experiment with for sure.

[@manoffaith2501]

Excellent explanation of “squelch”.

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thank you :)

[@swisss1]

Well done video. I am brand new to amateur radio and high quality videos like this that are clear and concise are a huge help. Please make more!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thank you! And glad it was helpful. I'll endeavor to make more but to be honest, I'm still learning and tinkering myself :). I hope you continue immersing yourself into the hobby. It's definitely a bottomless pit of learning opportunities which is what I personally find so appealing about it.

[@rupunnb1458]

Brilliant explanation! I have been asking my teachers, this was excellent.

[@user-bg7uc4qq5y]

I'm learning the settings on my first radio and just turned the squelch down for the first time, I started hearing your voice coming from my radio! 🤣🤣

[@NukaVaultReadiness]

This is perhaps the best explanation for us who are not technically savy and still learning. Thank you sir!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thank you for the kind words. I'm still learning LOL. Whenever I manage to form a cohesive expression of what's going on in my head to explain it to myself I figure it might make for a good video. This just happened to be one of those cases. Thanks for watching and keep on learning :)

[@paulnapoli7325]

As did most people I know how to set and use my squelch , but I felt that your video was not only informative it was quite f&#*in hilarious as well and my daughter just purchased an 05 Lexus same as yours , for a birthday gift I gave her a set of weathertech floor mats and she could not be more happy with them cause they included the cargo mat. I would really appreciate it if you could make videos on the 470 as her and her boyfriend do a lot of the same activities as you do and also enjoy that it has high low range that your other outlander did not have causing you to be STUCK . OK well I’m Paul I’ll be watching from a distance Tanks !

[@nohrtillman8734]

Love your videos, Tom! CTCSS demonstration was perfect! 🤣

[@TomtheDilettante]

ha! glad you liked that bit :)

[@jonnybkuehl878]

Very good info. on how squelch works!! Thanks man!!

[@chipsterb4946]

Nicely done. Basic squelch is sort of the opposite of a compressor pedal for electric guitar (something I understand a lot better than radio at the moment). The best part was understanding how the misnamed “privacy codes” work. Thanks!

[@TomtheDilettante]

glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!

[@AnilKumar-zo2eu]

Thank you so much sir for your packaged information.

[@telepopstudios]

this guy is awesome! Keep doing what you are doing! I love the delivery of great info that i needed to answer a tech question. FOLLOW!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thanks for watching and the kind words of encouragement!

[@jeffreyyoung4104]

Excellent video! CTCSS is also called Private Line which was a Motorola version of the system. I have an antique CTCSS generator that was used in the early days, you had to manually select the tone pair for each channel you used! It is about the size of a one foot cube! One thing you should remind people of the danger of reducing the sensitivity of the radio by cranking the squelch too high on the analog signal strength system. Of course, disabling the squelch is one thing people do if they are in fringe radio reception areas, in order to be able to communicate when the signal level is too low to trip the squelch open!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thanks for watching. All good follow-up points as well. As I learn more and more about amateur radio I'm finding that there's very few areas where you can't easily go deep into a rabbit hole LOL. It's one of the reasons I like it. For this video though, my intent was to keep it to the bare bones basics. There seem to be plenty of folks that are just trying to understand concepts, terms, and basics and so far that's about the only area I'm qualified to help :)

[@jluke6861]

Thank you for your informative video.

[@clarenceclark8592]

You should put a series together explaining from cb’s to two way to ham to digital radio communications a lot of people want this knowledges do has no convenient place to get a comprehensive guid to comms good luck an good work

[@simonwinwood]

great content mate

[@Scp-681]

Great video! I was curious what the squelch toggle was for on my MBITR and Harris radios

[@jaym1301]

There's another kind of squelch called SELCAL for SELlective CALling, commonly used on HF aeronautical voice comms. The transmitting station targets a particular aircfarft's receiver by sending a pair of what sound to me like DTMF tones (digital tone multi freq, similar to the tones on a touchtone landline telephone though with many more tone pairs) to break the squelch on a particular targeted aircraft's HF receiver.

[@Malabus73]

Thank you this for educational video.

[@temporarilyoffline]

Good Info Tom! Thanks for sharing this.

[@TomtheDilettante]

Very much on the basic side for folks like you but based on some of the comments and questions I get, there definitely seems to be a demand for the basics.

[@temporarilyoffline]

@@TomtheDilettante I've started doing some more "basic" videos and they have been well received. We have to level up the next group of operators... or there won't be a next group of operators.

[@GadgitGeek]

Good information 😀

[@jasonefird5094]

Excellently said...

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thank you!

[@bradlafferty]

Excellent explanation. Succinct. Thanks.

[@TomtheDilettante]

Glad you liked it. Thanks for watching :)

[@camilo87]

I give you a like for how tidy is your workshop, i expect to have something like that some day.

[@creativekidblake]

Thank you so much man!

[@snort455]

Great content. Thanks for

[@TomtheDilettante]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@jijokoshyksjijo3989]

great..!!

[@hermannel1310]

Very informative video. Thank you. My question: Is the squelch totally disabled for the duration of a transmission being received, then enabled again when the transmission stops? i.e. The squelch setting has no influence on the transmission while being received?

[@TomtheDilettante]

Correct. For signal strength squelch, squelch will be effectively “off” so long as the incoming transmission is of sufficient strength to keep it off. It does not impede a transmission in any way unless signal strength falls too close to or below the set squelch level. hope that helps!

[@lalaland322]

cool video!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thanks!

[@FinalFormation]

This make sense! So it’s essentially a noise gate.

[@Andreharview]

Great vid! What program do you use for your SDR

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thanks! I use SDR Sharp (SDR#) currently since it was free ;). That and an RTL SDR and a Nooelec NESDR Smart dongle.

[@improvisedchaos8904]

Nice channel DevilDog

[@alerey4363]

I understood most of the squelch explanation; however I got baffled by the number of acronyms in the radio jargon; I guess now I need a tutorial on that 🤣

[@TomtheDilettante]

Thanks for watching, and sorry if some of the content got lost in the jargon. Any particular acronyms or terms you think yourself or others might benefit from further elaboration?

[@YU5CF-sv2cq]

nice and good video . 👍👍👍👍 Yaesu FT-70D that is a ham radio correct?? thx

[@TomtheDilettante]

Correct. The FT-70D is an amateur radio (ham radio) handheld transceiver (HT). It's a dual-band radio that functions on the 2m and 70cm amateur radio bands.

[@jakep5121]

Lights behind the pegboard... nice!

[@TomtheDilettante]

I wish that were a well thought out aesthetic choice, but alas, that's just pegboard over a window LOL! I've been contemplating painting them black or covering them up, but folks seem to dig the effect.

[@jakep5121]

It looks great. I just might continue my pegboard over my window now too. Appreciate the honesty. It really does looks well thought out.

[@charleswoods2996]

Ahhh! The Marine Corps symbol explains the sharp PSA voice that makes me imagine you casually twirling a sniper rifle while you're speaking. KD8EFQ/73!

[@TomtheDilettante]

LOL! I'd be too afraid to twirl a sniper rifle. The glass alone on such a rifle is worth more than most things in my shop ;)

[@Howeverwhatabout]

The background ‘Musak’ was overwhelming which was a real shame.

[@MichaelOfRohan]

Where tf has this guy been? Is thid Daves amazing brother in law?!?!

[@nohrtillman8734]

Annoying that they market Privacy Tones and Private Line (PL) like that. Gets people thinking they are on a secured special ops channel or something. Really should be called Selective Squelch in that you selectively hear incoming transmissions. Any radio receiving without a CTCSS or DCS set “hears” everything. Not as private as people may think.

[@TomtheDilettante]

"Selective Squelch" would be a much better term. I was ignorant of all this before I started learning about radios. I thought it's called "private" so it must be private. Stupid me :P. Nothing private about it as you said. The closest I get to "private" is more aptly call called "obscure"...and that's to use Yaesu radios and their digital mode (C4FM) on simplex frequencies. I figure eavesdroppers would need to have Yaesu equipment, have to have stumbled across our frequency, and actually give a crap about anything I had to say LOL.

[@miata350]

So it's basically a noisegate

[@busyonthefarm]

Oohrah

[@TomtheDilettante]

Yut! LOL

[@DD-Aerial-Photography]

You know, you would of heard yourself the 1st time asking if you wanted pizza. That's the thing most people don't understand, they believe they can't be heard. It's the complete opposite, you can ve heard, you just can't take to them.

[@TomtheDilettante]

Not if I had a receive squelch set to only break with a cross tone. You may be thinking that you can listen to to any transmission regardless of tone use on the transmission side, which is correct. But my example is correct in demonstrating receive squelch. In my case I have receive squelch set to not hear every transmission. Hope that makes sense.

[@DD-Aerial-Photography]

@@TomtheDilettante yes, I agree if you use it as squelch.

[@amudlifecrisis]

You should have been Avi, lol!

[@TomtheDilettante]

Ha. Nah. Pass. I hate troubleshooting electrical gremlins. I prefer things that require a hammer ;-)

[@jamesrafael6794]

Whats a discriminator?

[@Howeverwhatabout]

Please loose the infuriating background ‘Muzak’ I had to turn off which was a shame, it made you impossible to understand and you clearly had all the answers I was looking for. Thank you anyway.

[@jmullner76]

+1 on the green pepper and pepperoni... but you can do better than Papa Johns.

[@TomtheDilettante]

Lol! I was ad libbing. No idea why papppa johns came out of my mouth. Haven’t even had that since I was a college kid in the 90s lol!

[@simonwinwood]

hahahaha