Communications

As the empire begins to collapse around us, and the more aware among us begin to question if the American prosperity bubble will remain, it is pretty easy to freak out about being cut off from knowing what’s going on. When I first started looking at communications options for after the grid goes down, like [...]

TA-312 Field Phone on Ebay Swedish Field Phone $39.99 .5 Kilometer Military Phone Wire Communications are something that nearly everyone takes for granted. But after the grid goes down, it will be the first thing that you miss. I have covered the different frequency ranges for long distance radio communications several times, and I’ll get [...]

Communications is one of the few topics here that has no real end. After the collapse, or the big reveal as I like to call it, all of us are going to want for resources. You just can’t store enough food to last forever, and as great as “living off the land” might sound, it ain’t easy, even when you know what you are doing. At some point, whoever survives is going to want to connect with others who have survived. You are going to want to have an ear to the ground.

I’ve recently learned something new that I think I should share with you. It is survival computing. In general I am not a big fan of power inverters, and I think you should run as much off of 12 volts as possible, but there are a lot of benefits to having a laptop available, and phones and tablets are priceless if you have kids. I’m also going to cover a $25 low voltage/low amperage computer solution that is currently being used to build perimeter security systems, remote listening posts, and even balloon lifted radio relay antennas. This is pretty cool stuff.

A lot of these articles I write for those of you “in the trenches.” And by that I mean the people who have taken seriously the risks that we all face ahead, possibly this year, possibly even this month. Most things I write about I don’t expect a lot of you to go out and [...]

Xiegu X1M Pro Ham Radio $359.95 from Importer (note that the radio in the video has a PL-259 antenna jack and this is a BNC) $319 from Greece (Ebay – 2 left) – PL-259 $407 from China (Make Offer) – PL-259 (I have been in touch with the importer, and apparently the only way to [...]

About the scariest thing I can think of is to lose contact with my children in a world over the brink of collapse. Most young people don’t even have a land based phone line these days, so if the cell networks go down, that’s it. But there is a way, if you do it now, to establish a communications protocol with loved ones who are hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. As I’ve discussed a few times before in this column, the Amateur radio bands, otherwise known as the Ham bands, under 30 megahertz, are capable of reaching around the entire globe at certain times of the day. Full access Ham radios, covering several bands, or even all the Ham bands, sell for $300 to $10,000, but I found some small radios that cover only one frequency for as little as under $10. You have to still buy an antenna, but the overall cost could be as little as $50. As a bare bones mode of communication on a very tight budget I don’t think you can beat these little radios.

How important are survival communications? From a prepping budget perspective, I’ve asked that question a lot. And unfortunately, as with many subjects I’ve covered, there is a ton of misinformation out there about the subject. When you buy a “survival radio,” like the ones with the little solar panel and hand crank, you are buying a multi-band receiver, and you’ll pay more depending on how many bands you want. A basic radio, some even under $20, will be AM/FM, and most of them also have the NOAA weather channel, which is 162.4 mhz. Pay a little more and you may get some of the Ham radio bands, but you will seldom hear any traffic on those bands, because the included whip antenna is not made for those frequencies. Police, fire, airplane, and a hots of other frequencies that would be nice to monitor in a survival situation are not in those radios. Getting all of those frequencies, until now, has been very expensive. This article is about a newer type of radio called “Software Defined Radio,” or SDR-RTL, and it changes everything.