Rapid Radios discussion

[KM4GDU]

So I agree their website is a little misleading especially to us that know how things work.

We're going to be getting some and using it for my dad who's getting elderly and not having great ability to use a cell phone

That being said I hear a lot of people talking about it's not good for emergency when the great goes down.

Although that's true repeaters and linked networks that we all use will also be down.

The only real off-grid solution for emergency comms will be HF and local simplex.

However with it using all of the carriers available there's a really good chance that local emergencies or anything other than complete collapse of society there's going to be a cell signal and more or less is going to work.

The advantage is even though we're ham operators not necessarily everybody that we need to communicate is going to have a radio and know how to use it


So I think it has its place Even when I go hunting locally here my cell phone does not work and the rest of my family are not ham operators so we're a bit SOL

 

[tkbk13]

Apologies in advance if this is the incorrect forum or inappropriate topic. I also apologize if this topic has been discussed somewhere already, as I couldn't find it in a forums search.

Even as a ham operator, I like to use Zello and other "radio" communications on occasion. I recently came across this company - Rapid Radios. These are cell based, push to talk radios. According to the website and email customer service, they are encrypted (sure...) and work when most other cell carriers are down (like this morning). They say their tech is "different" than traditional cell technology but don't elaborate.

Does anyone here have experience with Rapid Radios? I like the concept, even if these would be unreliable in a complete, grid down scenario.

Buyer beware. Read all the fine print. Mine work pretty good as long as i can connet to a tower. When traveling or in the mountains if there is no cell service the radios (at least mine do not work).
Also in the fine print is a yearly $50.00 per radio sim card fee. If you dont pay the fee your radios will not work

 

[mmckenna]

Buyer beware. Read all the fine print. Mine work pretty good as long as i can connet to a tower. When traveling or in the mountains if there is no cell service the radios (at least mine do not work).
Also in the fine print is a yearly $50.00 per radio sim card fee. If you dont pay the fee your radios will not work

Yeah, this has been mostly covered above, but thanks for adding real world experience.

Too many of these companies hide things in the fine print and will creatively market their products to those that don't necessarily understand the technology. I looked into this out of a morbid curiosity and came to the same conclusion. No matter what they say, they rely on infrastructure to work, and if that infrastructure goes away, so does the functionality of the radio.

 

[dorcse]

Another option is to just buy your own PoC radios for about $55 to $100 each, sign-up for a Sim service like Simbase (a penny a day for Global+ service and a penny a meg. In the US you get access to all major carriers, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon). You need to buy a platform or use a free platform like Zello. I prefer RealPTT platform with a fee of $15 a year per radio or Global-PTT, which can be a free license or $5 per year per radio, depending on the seller/bundle.

I have 30 or more of these radios that I use for communication during multiple 5K and marathon road races each year. I used to set up a GMRS repeater and hand out traditional HTs, but I'm too old and far too lazy to bother now.

 

[GlobalNorth]

Marketing magic and junque.

 

[buddrousa]

What gets me is all the Talk Radio Host that claim they are FREE WITH NO EXTRA COST.

 

[BucksGuyUSA]

So many, many red flags.

They use all the trigger words to get the frightened people to buy these sorts of things:

"Crisis"​

"Middle East & Europe"​

"Cyberattacks on the USA"​

"WW3"​

"CAN NOT RELY"​

"…SELLING Fast, sold out MOST PLACES"​

"EMP Protection faraday bag"​

​

"Our partners" and they show the logo for US Customs and Border Protection. Would be interesting to know about that partnership. Usually the government won't endorse products.

"100% American Owned Business" That's a good trigger phrase to get people to buy their product. Yet they then say:
"The parts are sourced from Asia," Translation: Cheap Chinese product.

So, lets look at their claims:

"100% No Monthly Fees - Ever!"​

"Nationwide Range with NO MONTHLY FEES!"​

"No monthly fees, no contracts, and no hassle!"​

Plus radio programming and service for an entire year! For an extra year of service, this for $50 per radio (per year).​

"NO Licenses - Includes SIM card with 1 year of service per radio. Renew for another year for $50/year (no subscriptions/contracts/monthly fees)."​

So, what that says is they don't charge you a monthly fee. But you do pay "$50 per radio (per year)" So, instead of a monthly fee, they roll it into an annual fee. They ain't lying, they are just trying to get you to buy it thinking there is no ongoing fee. But I'm not sure how you'll pay the $50/year when the EMP hits, or when the zombies tear down all the cell towers.


Funny how they don't answer the question here:

"Will this work in an area with no cellular coverage?​

• It will work better than a cell phone, that's for sure - we use ALL the carriers (not just 1, like a phone) plus it's a different technology than a phone call.. PLUS gets better signal - check out this video: "

Yet it runs on the cellular network: "Frequency Range: B1/3/5/8, B34/38/39/40/41" The only benefit I can see is that they are using a third party clearing house for bandwidth that will hop on any carrier that uses those bands. I would suggesting looking up those individual bands and see who actually uses them.



Dubious claim at best. It's transmitting, it can be tracked. It's running LTE, and LTE is encrypted, so they are correct there. It uses "IOT sim cards", so it is cellular and relies on their network. It's voice over IP using the cell network. It'll have all the same issues as running any sort of data over a shared resource. They really seem to like the press the privacy thing. Obviously aiming for a customer base, (probably not those on radio reference that are against all encryption) Since it's consumer, it's not going to have an prioritization over some teenager playing on social media:

"Are they private?​

• ...Lastly, you can NOT be tracked with this device. We have IoT sim cards with ALL the major carriers which are 100% anonymous and not linked to you in any way. They are totally private - and encrypted too."

Fine print:
"Nationwide coverage available when in range of LTE tower."



Rapid Radios (Rapid Consulting LLC) is a small American owned business located and operated in Ada, MI. We are a team of 10 individuals and radio enthusiasts with a passion for technology, communication, and emergency preparedness. Our team consists of ham radio operators, emergency preparedness experts, and more.

Oh, good Lord. "ham radio operators, emergency preparedness experts". That makes me feel so much better.


TL;DR version:
If you own a smart phone, you already have what you need. Don't fall for the marketing. You're paying $200 each, plus $50 for each "radio" for each additional year.
There's a ton of products on the market that will do all this, without the idiotic marketing hype.

Over a year later, and I want you to know that I've used your post many times to explain to well-intentioned but hopelessly scared people I know that these radios are cell phones with less features.

 

[buddrousa]

With a COST PER RADIO to use them.

 

[mmckenna]

Over a year later, and I want you to know that I've used your post many times to explain to well-intentioned but hopelessly scared people I know that these radios are cell phones with less features.

Some are not blessed with the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately these sorts of businesses prey on them.

 

[RayAir]

These low cost PoC radios have potential but you're not just using the infrastructure of AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile.

When a PoC radio powers on and connects to the LTE network it performs an Attach Request and authentication. The radio requests a connection to an APN (Access Point Name). The APN determines if the traffic is routed to the public internet or to the vendor's private IP address space. This is the vendor hosted PoC server cluster used for user accounts, group management, signaling, relay, logging, etc. Many of these are Chinese cloud hosted.

Any claims of encryption is likely transport encryption only where the server can decrypt.

I did some research on a few brands sold on Amazon.

Most of these are locked down and difficult to examine or modify with tools.

 

[RayAir]

I'm new to the thread. My dad just bought each person in our family one of these for Christmas. (Dad, please don't buy this stuff again without calling me first...). I work in the IoT embedded hardware industry, so I HAD to do some digging into this company. TLDR; I totally agree with the skepticism on this post, but these have their place for some applications.

When I saw that they didn't post the FCCID on the device itself (this device), which I am almost 100% sure is required by FCC regulations, I got suspicious. That led me to this thread, one on Facebook, and one on Reddit. I'll post my hardware trail below. Granted, some of these are assumptions, but they are good assumptions in my opinion. To be clear, I'm really only curious about the embedded radio module inside of this thing. The radio module is the entire basis around the FCC certification and is the primary component in this device. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with a radio module manufactured in China. There are plenty of applications that don't justify the political and security concerns. But if you're going to use a Chinese module, the backbone of this device, don't give me all this "made-in-America" marketing. As you all have pointed out already in this thread, their marketing is deceptive and preys on unknowing consumers - especially those experiencing a crisis.

Hardware Trail:

• The Rapid Radio Push-to-Talk (PTT) Nationwide Radio is a white-labeled version of Quanzhou Global-PTT Co., Ltd.'s radio (product link). This is my first assumption, and I think it's a good one because 1) look at the photos and 2) the Quanzhou Global-PTT Co., Ltd. device has a legitimate paper trail with the FCC. That means we are getting closer to the source.
• Inside of this device is a module manufactured by the same company, called the GP1 or GP2, depending on the geography. Based on the supported bands on the Rapid Radio device, I think the GP2 module variant is used inside.
• The FCCID of the GP2 module is 2BGSE-GP2. The information can be found here: link. Again, unless an end-user device like this is so physically small that it is impractical to print a label on it, you are required to print the FCCID of the device. The typical place you would find this is underneath the removeable battery plate. There is a label there on the Rapid Radio Device, but it only lists the model number and the Serial Number. I'm pretty sure, but I'm not willing to say 100% sure, that this is not allowed. The problem is that they have the FCC logo printed on the label. But if you print the FCC logo, you must have the FCCID present and visible.
• The FCC allows a company to perform a "Change in ID", where a company can white-label a module or device and apply a new FCC on the identical product. This helps companies obfuscate the origin of a device or a component. In friendlier terms, it prevents a company's customer from searching the FCCID on a device and finding that it's not manufactured by the company they bought it from. This is very common, and not considered nefarious. Quanzhou Global-PTT Co., Ltd. received a "Change in ID Authorization" from a company called Shanghai Notion Information Technology CO. LTD. Here is the link to that document: link.
• The module from Shanghai Notion Information Technology CO. LTD is called the M12. The FCCID is 2AR45-M12. The information is located here: link.
• This module uses an ASR1606 chipset (images). ASR is a Chinese company designing and building telecommunications chips. Some industry knowledge here: historically, ASR was practically non-existent in the US. Module manufacturers would literally make one product version with ASR for Rest-of-World and an identical one for the US market with a Qualcomm chipset. I actually thought that there was some sort of ban on ASR for the US market. So when I saw that the Rapid Radio device had one inside, I thought to myself, "ohh buddy, these guys are in some deep crap.." But it turns out I was wrong. The ASR1606N is actually approved on AT&T and T-Mobile's network, clearing the way for module manufacturers to embed the chipset. Hey, this crazy rabbit hole actually helped me learn something new! ASR is typically much, much cheaper than Qualcomm.

My thoughts:
The hardware trail is both legit and absurd. The one question I have is, "why don't they add the FCCID to the label like they are supposed to?" The only answer I can come up with is that they are trying to hide the true manufacturer of the device and radio module. It has "CHINA" written all over the hardware trail. Again, like I said before, that's not inherently a bad thing. It depends on the application.

I actually think the device is pretty cool. My dad goes fishing up at our mountain cabin and gets terrible signal on his cell phone, but he tested these out while he was up there and they work great. I could see this being a great senior citizen product for keeping in touch easily with a caretaker. Finally, setting each employee up in a company fleet with one of these would be beneficial in certain scenarios. The use cases are there and there's a fine market for these. I pass no judgement on anyone using these. Honestly, I'll use it when my dad goes up fishing alone and I want to have a way to contact him.

But man, don't feed me **** and tell me it's chocolate. Don't bait customers with terms like "WW3", "Emergency Use", and "Cybersecurity Threats" as a reason to buy these radios. Don't make me feel like I'm being patriotic by buying you're radio. The U.S.' #1 cybersecurity threat, country-wise, is China. These are Chinese-effing radios.

I won't add any more on the topic that these are not actually for emergency use and that they are totally dependent on the cellular networks being up and running. You guys covered that pretty well.

I just started digging into a mid-tier PoC provider's gear. They claim enterprise grade security, 100% untraceable, and E2EE. I already found several issues:
-All signaling control and metadata sent in the clear (User ID, token, Radio name, Group name and ID)
-Upon login from the PTT app it sends your email address (user name) in the clear and it sends your password as an MD5 hash with XOR obfuscation.
-GPS coordinates are periodically polled and sent in the clear
-No evidence of E2EE, but the voice is encrypted, set up similar to a VoIP server
-Once you're authenticated to the server that's all the auN there is, no ACLs, no cryptographic separation between group IDs
-Possible to eavesdrop on other users with a little effort
-Hardcoded addresses for servers in assets/fitter.json
-Radios are polled for member lists and sent back to server in the clear

Need to go through the APK with JADX next. An initial DEX scan showed crypto primitives for RC4, DES, and AES.

I think these are fine for general chit chat, but far from the 100% privacy and E2EE claims made by the company.