Prepared families
House and vehicle radios, programmed for your area
Ipswich River Labs is a small R&D shop on the Ipswich River in Massachusetts. Some of our work ships as small-batch kits. The rest is built to order for our clients.
A codeplug is the file of channels, tones, and names that makes a radio useful. We are giving away the one we build for New England: GMRS and MURS channels named in plain English, plus a comms-plan card you can print, laminate, and hand to your family. The card marks which channels ride on the $35 GMRS family license and which MURS channels need no license at all. If you want to see how we build before you buy anything, start here.
Four product lines. All of them ship preconfigured on hardware you own, with printed documentation in the box. Nothing phones home and nothing needs a subscription.
GMRS and MURS handhelds that arrive working. We program the channels, name them in plain English, preset the volume, and print the laminated channel card that goes in the box. Each radio gets a bench test before we box it. Sets are sized for a household or a whole safety team.
$80–170 / radio · family sets $250–600 · codeplug & card downloads $5–15
Talk through your projectA complete repeater system, assembled and burned in on our bench, shipped to you in a crate. We commission it with you over video. You or your handyman put it on the mast. GMRS for families and farms. Part 90 DMR with lawful encryption for organizations that need it.
$1,500–3,500 / crate · annual care plans $150–400
Talk through your projectLoRa mesh nodes and driveway, gate, and perimeter sensors that report over your own radio network, so they keep working when the cell network is down. There is no account to create and nothing to subscribe to. Solar options for barns, treelines, and fence corners.
≤$200 / node · property sets $400–900
Talk through your projectAn offline map server loaded with data packs for your county, delivered as part of organizational repeater projects. It runs TAK and works with no internet connection. We also publish free regional map packs and comms-plan cards anyone can download.
rides inside Line A engagements · map packs free
Talk through your projectWe design and stand up systems, document them, and hand them off. You keep them.
We take on a small number of technology projects for farms, churches, camps, and small businesses. The work covers networks, servers, self-hosted software, offline mapping, and private AI: local models for document search and transcription that run on hardware you own, with no data leaving the building. An engagement ends with written documentation your own people can operate from, not a support contract you can't leave.
scoped engagements · fixed quote up front
Talk through your projectOur customers are prepared families, church safety teams, camps, schools, farms, and SAR and CERT units. In each of them, somebody holds the budget and owns the result. That is who we answer to. We do not sell tactical fantasy, and we never brand around militias or politics.
The same requirement runs through every buyer we serve: the kit has to work the day it is needed, in the hands of whoever picks it up.
House and vehicle radios, programmed for your area
Earpiece comms from the lobby to the parking lot
Coverage across the property that new staff can run on day one
Drills that work when the cell network is down
Gates, barns, and back fields on one net
Interoperable radios and printed maps for callouts
One workshop, one accountable builder. Kits are configured and burned in at the bench before they ship. Designs carry a published bill of materials, so what you buy can be repaired and modified without asking us. Five rules govern the work:
The first batch is printed integration hardware: enclosures, mounts, and cable management for gear you already have, designed for weather and gloved hands. Nothing is for sale yet. The list hears first, and everyone on it gets the New England codeplug now. See what's in the batch.
A codeplug is the file of channels, tones, and names that makes a radio useful. We are giving away the one we build for New England: GMRS and MURS channels named in plain English, plus a comms-plan card you can print, laminate, and hand to your family. The card marks which channels ride on the $35 GMRS family license and which MURS channels need no license at all. If you want to see how we build before you buy anything, start here.