Prepping

This article is something of a shootout between my favorite (and cheap at $400) night vision scope and an interesting new digital night vision product that was made from a converted IR CCTV camera. In my experience, digital night vision normally isn’t worth the inflated pricetag. I’ve even declined to review the couple “clip on” models that I’ve tried because they were just too expensive for what you get. This product, called Digital Crosshairs, is also a clip on that uses your existing scope. But at only $400-$575, it is at least arguably worth the price.

Trapping is always a very sensitive subject. What is the purpose of a trap, whether for a man or animal? I think mostly it is so you can catch something or someone without having to be there. Sure, silence is also an issue. In a survival situation, silence is golden. In the mountains a .22 rimfire will echo for miles, and even in the flatlands, a knowing ear will be able to single it out in a suddenly very quiet, collapsed world. But though you can kill with both a bow and a suppressed firearm, you still have to be there. A trap, a good trap, removes that variable, and either stands guard for you or hunts for you while you are off doing other things.

After “winning” the midterm election in November, I think a lot of people who were about to take the leap into preparing for any kind of imminent collapse got lazy. I just took a trip to the Northeast US, and couldn’t believe how asleep the general population is up there to what is going on in the world around them. At Logon Airport, Boston, I encountered one of their State Troopers, who you would swear was intentionally dressed in a costume of a Nazi SS trooper, and who was sporting, right there in the airport, a front slung suppressed MP5 with a double pancake mag in it. His hand was on the grip and his finger was across the trigger guard. Yet nobody but me seemed to be bothered by such a thing.

First off, I wouldn’t expect many people to click on this article because who the heck doesn’t know what a rechargeable battery is. So for that reason I added to the title “Where There’s Smoke…,” implying that there is fire somewhere. I am not referring to literal fire, though some rechargeables have been known to cause them. What I mean by that is where you see a name brand on a rechargeable battery, be careful to not pay too much for the name, instead of getting the most milliamps-hours for your buck.

Our last visit to the topic of perimeter security took a look at a really nifty tripwire system I found on Ebay. It busts a .22 caliber nailgun blank, and you can hear it for miles on a quiet night in the country. It is extremely low-tech and electricity free, and it works. For this article I am following up with a couple of wireless options, one expensive and one pretty cheap, and both also work really well. Nobody wants to rely on batteries, but any tripwire system is going to have several basic drawbacks:

If you think about it, communication with the outside world is going to become really important in the weeks and months after a system collapse or major disaster. You may have food and water for months, but you don’t have it for years. And as I explained in my article on seeds, growing your own food just isn’t that easy. But as several commenters pointed out on the first radio article in this series, there is a strong argument to maintain radio silence. Any experienced radio operator can triangulate your position as soon as you press the send key, and in any survival situation, you can bet that there will be hostiles out there listening for where they can steal some supplies. Radio silence has to be weighed against the benefits of reaching out to the world outside.

Preserving BTUs is what survival cooking is all about. An armful of sticks can burn up in a few minutes and cook you nothing, or it can burn for two hours and cook you dinner, sterilize your water, and heat your bath. It all depends on how much oxygen you can keep from getting to the flames while the wood burns. Initially I thought “rocket stoves” were a gimmick, aimed at draining the well meaning survivalist of some cash and little else, but now I’m sold. The StoveTec rocket stove you see here in the pictures is currently $118 on the StoveTec website, and on Amazon, with free shipping. It works killer, and will likely cook your dinner every night for years, in return for a handful of small dried branches you pick up from the ground.

This is not a knife snob article. I am a big fan of cheap knives, and I don’t consider them really that inferior. To some degree, a knife is a knife is a knife. The point of this article isn’t cost or quality. My question is what style of knife or short sword is best for a survival situation. On one person you can carry a big knife and a little knife, and maybe an even bigger knife on your back, but coupled with a battle rifle, a pistol, ammo and supplies, a lot of blades sticking out of your form isn’t going to be a net positive. You have to choose, and choose well.

From what I can tell, nobody is going to send me a Facebook notification 24 hours before Russia, China, “terrorists” (ie. our own shadow government), or the US under official license launches a nuke. Radiation is silent once you are outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb, so unless news of the blast makes it onto Drudge, how would you even know that a blast has occurred? Up until now we have focused our attention on Geiger tube radiation meters, but I recently found out that those meters tend to BLANK OUT at radiation levels that aren’t even on the level of a CT scan. For this article I consulted with Shane Connor, owner of the famous radiation site KI4U.com. I bought potassium iodide from him and had him calibrate my Civil Defense meter back in the 90s. He is still doing it today, and he calibrated four meters for us for this article.