Prep Comms - Hurricane Helene: AAR Upstate SC pt2

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

After the storm, getting the generator going early and setting up the hand pump for the well made all the difference. A quick project with leftover well pump wire turned into a solid clothesline—an unexpected but handy addition that Carla LOVED. Through it all, AT&T held strong, and Starlink was exceptional. If you're interested, see below for a link featuring a free month for both you and me. It felt like living a real-life episode of "Prep Comms." The ZBM2 Industries antennas are outta sight—thanks, Deric! While the local 2m repeater was down, it didn’t hold us back; we had the gear ready, so radio wasn't top of my mind. That's one big lesson: when you’ve prepared well, the need for comms isn't a distraction, freeing you to focus on other tasks. The WLN KDC1 handheld radios continue to be incredibly reliable and cost-effective, with GMRS as our go-to system for family comms. It's a perfect service that doesn’t require any testing, making it ideal for family use. Though I used my ham radios sparingly, they came in handy for checking in on 40m HF (JS8Call) and daily Winlink check-ins over VHF Packet. Just North of us the Mt. Mitchell Ham Repeater was a true lifeline, saving lives daily. Be sure to watch KM4ACK Jason’s video, linked below, about the welfare nets on this repeater. Locally, our phones worked well, so ham radio took a backseat for us, though just 45 minutes away, it was a crucial lifesaver. Brother-to-brother comms on CB were also reliable, showing that there’s a role for every communication method. And while I stayed busy with work, the family stepped up; we learned countless lessons that we’ll carry forward. Although some coax-internet is still down, Verizon failed most while ham radio absolutely shined across North Carolina. The BTech 6x2Pro proved essential for both farm and fire department communications. This experience underscored the value of preparedness and inspired us to add an ECOFLOW 2700W solar generator to back up our primary generator. No matter where you’re starting from, take that first step toward readiness. Don’t be discouraged—I’m here to help! That Simple Pump from Scott Hunt (Practical Preppers) was a true lifesaver, keeping water flowing through it all. Men, husbands, dads—let’s get you started! Plan C Solutions and The Family Radio Guy are coming soon to help you and your family prepare for the upcoming unknown. And if you're looking for quality water filters, check out Hub City Mercantile for your Berkey replacement filters.   KM4ACK Helene Net Video! (Must Watch!) BTech 6x2Pro : https://amzn.to/4htGNTj Baofeng UV21: https://amzn.to/4fp4VFr BTech GMRS V1: https://amzn.to/3YZaPY5 Btech MURS V2: https://amzn.to/40v2Hzr WLN Micro Handi : https://amzn.to/4elglss Uniden Home Patrol Scanner Water Bob : https://amzn.to/4etzQiB Ecoflow 2700 : https://amzn.to/4f7OaOR Starlink (1 mo free for you and me) Simple Pump: Hand Well Pump        

back on the prep comms podcast caleb nelson k4 cdn we're going to continue the discussion here regarding storm helene tropical storm hurricane helene whatever we're going to continue the discussion here regarding Storm Helene, Tropical Storm, Hurricane Helene, whatever we're going to call her. She was a tropical storm, I think, when she impacted the upstate of South Carolina where I reside. And I kind of rambled through the last episode just kind of giving you a timeline of how things went down for us. We are in the northwest corner of the state of South Carolina. I'm about two and a half hours north of Atlanta, about an hour south of Charlotte. And if you go about 45 minutes northwest of me,

you'll end up in western North Carolina, who received the brunt of the storm from Hurricane Helene. I guess it was Tuesday or Wednesday that week, maybe even Monday, I text Carla. She's my wife. And I told her I'm really worried about the space between Asheville, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, Gatlinburg. Those folks, they deal with a lot of flooding because of the mountainous rivers and creeks as well as the slides and whatnot. Unless you've been under a rock, terrible pun for the last

month or so, you know exactly what I'm talking about now. Even I'll say this. So I had some anticipation of destruction for that area. Just knowing, you know, having lived here and being a weather geek my whole life. Um, I think as I was thinking about this this morning before the show, I believe that I misjudged the level of destruction on a scale of, I would say my preconceived notion of what they could anticipate was about a three, maybe a four, and on a scale of one to 20. And theirs was about a 19 and a half in some places. So I was way off. I've seen it bad up there before, but we've never seen it like that before. So if you know someone there, help them when you can. If you can't, find a good ministry that you can partner with. I'm talking like it will be multiple

decades before those people up there recover. I mean, as bad as Katrina was, and they're still residual 20 years later from Katrina, this could possibly be an even greater extended recovery because some of the property that was there doesn't exist anymore. Like Katrina, once the water went away, the dirt is still there. Once the water went away up in Batcave, west of Asheville, all that area up there, that dirt's not there anymore. It's in the Atlantic Ocean by now. So I don't even know how they're going to do it, honestly. There's a lot of poverty up there to start with. And then you do this.

I mean, we're talking generational damage, not just to the dirt, but to the structure of the family, to the structure of the community. It's unfathomable. And this was one storm, just one storm. I'm still in shock and awe. And that's not why I'm here to talk today, but pray for those folks. Again, this is the PrepComs podcast, part two of the AAR, or After Action Report, that no one wanted to hear from my perspective here on the farm in South Carolina. So I've told you about how we got up. The storm was just rocking and rolling, blew the power out, had the generator running. We're pumping water by hand. Do you remember a couple of months ago when I had to replace my well pump and I was bragging about all the wire, the 300 feet of four strand wire I had pulled out of my,

my well that I was going to make antennas with? I didn't, but I made an amazing, oh, my wife was so happy with it. I made an amazing clothesline out of my wire from my well. And we washed clothes with the washing machine with the generator running and Eli, my eldest out there pumping water with the hand pump to keep it washing and rinsing and then hang, hung it up on the, uh, the clothesline. Yeah. It doesn't take much to make you happy when there's not much to do. So I want to talk about communications real quick and some, some big lessons that we learned, um, in our time through this recovery. I will say that at the end of each day, it was so beautiful.

There was no phones to distract us. Although AT&T never quit working, um, the digital, not digital, the, the internet part of the phone, the data, it was very spotty, very slow. So if we had the generator running, Starlink was running, the Wi-Fi, man, it was smoking. Starlink was amazing. And it would work as long as it was powered. Talk about that in a minute. Loved it.

If you're kind of rural, man, Starlink is hard to beat. We have the charter, the spectrum fiber there in front of my house right now, rolling this stuff in. I'm not going to save $80 a month to get on that because it quit working when the storm started and it took days to come back on. Starlink never quit. It's worth it to me. And it's hard to cut the wire between here and Elon satellites as long as I can see up north. So anyway, Starlink was amazing. I did feel like I was living an episode of my podcast, and I've said that before. I had radios everywhere. They ran all the time. The new BTEC radios have the USB-C charging, so that was really cool. I kept them

charging if they were sitting still. If I was in the yard, they went with me, of course. The ZBM2 Industries antennas are amazing. They drastically, drastically increase the capabilities of your handheld radios. I sell those in the store. They're U.S. made by a buddy of mine, Derek, a retired veteran of the United States Navy. Thank you for your service. You're amazing, by the way. And he's the reason this podcast even exists. So you can tell him thank you by purchasing one of his antennas. So communications here on the farm, I've already mentioned about the ham radio repeater going down. And that, I mean, that was a big deal. But at the same time, I wasn't trying to talk on the ham radio. I had trees down. I had in-laws to take care of.

I was running groceries and doing stuff to help my neighbors. Chainsaw going. I mean, frankly, guys, I didn't even turn a ham radio on. Once the repeater went down and the power went off, I went into family dad mode. And it was a day or two before I even thought about turning a ham radio on. So everybody has their handhelds. We have the UV82, which is my favorite handheld radio by Baofeng. A lot of people don't like it because it's kind of old school, and it's not very sexy or anything, but it's pretty solid. It's very solid. I also have the BTEC GMRS and MURS radios. Both of those are flawless throughout the time. The Baofeng we sell in the store is the

21. It worked great. Had some of those running as well as the old school WLN 440 only. I mean, it's the size of the first generation iPhone. It's a single band UHF, which means you could use it on GMRS, which we do as well as ham radio. Use those pretty exclusively because you can charge them with USB. They'll go for a very long time. They're plenty loud enough. When you're just operating on 100 acres or less, that's all you need. And guys, that's how we did. We ran GMRS exclusively during the storm. And GMRS is the General Mobile Radio Service that we're getting ready to launch into here on the program in a couple of weeks.

And it's so easy. There's no test. There's 22, basically, it's so easy. There's no test. There's 22, basically channels you can use. You give the government $35 and you and your family can legally utilize these radios. Um, and that that's about it. No test. You only have 22 channels. So it's kind of like a CB radio. It's a UHF. So it's 440 megahertz. So you're not going to be talking, you know, without external antennas and all this stuff. You're not going to be talking eight or 10, 15 miles without higher power or repeaters or whatever. But, uh, for us, we just got on GMRS. We were out of everybody's way, uh, of the seven in my household, five of us are amateur radio operators. So we

could have done that. But we just left all of that wide open for anybody that needed to use it. And we utilized our GMRS licenses. Yeah, I didn't really see that coming before the storm. But at the same time, you know, when you're prepping for something, you're thinking, oh, well, it's going to be so bad I can't work. It's going to be so bad that I can't get to the grocery store. And it was bad. And the grocery store was cash only with no power. But at the same time, I still had to go to work. And we were

working and doing stuff. And my kids were going to work. And one of the things you don't think about is I may not be here at my house just sitting around, you know, eating bonbons and drinking sweet tea on the radio, operating a net or sending welfare traffic. Here was the extent of my amateur radio use during the storm. And so let me disqualify this by saying where we lived, we did have loss of life. We did have terrible damage to people's homes. The power lines were down all over the road. Trees were in the road. It was in places impassable for a week.

But it wasn't to the point like you've seen in Western North Carolina. So really, there was no need for me to be passing traffic really there was no need for me to be passing traffic. There was no need for me to, to be involved. There was nothing like that to do here. Now, if there would have been, that's a different story, but this, see, this is my story where I'm at, which means it's different from someone else's. And I'm not going to come on here and just be like, Oh man, ham radio saved the world. I mean, I spent so much time on ham radio. I'm not, I didn't personally do that. Now the guys on the, the Mount Mitchell repeater up, up that way above, way above me, they did, they spent days, 24 hours per day on the radio

and they were passing welfare traffic and checking on people and saving people's lives. And God bless them, man. I'm so thankful they did. And I'll link a video in the show notes to a video that Jason with KM4AKK, he put together, he did a Zoom interview with one of the guys who ran the net there in North Carolina, and they were doing the Lord's work. Ham radio did save lives. And I mean, it can and it, as long as it's done properly. And, uh, it was done properly. Even I'll tell you what else was done properly was folks who

didn't have a license, but had a radio. They got on the radio and took their turn and were able to call for help or send help or get help or whatever. And that's what this service is for in an emergency use it. And it was all right i'm gonna stop there before i get on my little trip but i am so proud of how those men and women in western north carolina stepped up and they they established these nets and they saved people's lives and property that's what amateur radio if you look at the definition, we call it a hobby, it's a service, and it's a reason. That's what it does. I love it.

I love it. So thank you to those guys. Please watch that video. I'll link it in the show notes. Jason did a great job. KM4A, CK. He's not really middle. I guess he's an eastern Tennessee guy, but he does a great job with his channel.

So I'll say this. I finally went up to my shack uh to to like get in there and look around and so i noticed that when i went in um you go in the door what is the first thing you always do you turn the light on crazy enough my light came on and then i realized that the air conditioning was running the little window unit was you know like on a kano so it comes on every once in a while to keep it as close to the current temperature as you can and the generator at the house that would not run my house was actually wired to run my shack it took me a day or two to tell my wife that i didn't want her to kill me i didn't intend for

it to be that way my electrician accidentally connected it the wrong way and he got down here and corrected it later but fact of the matter is shack, as long as my generator had was running, my shack had power, which was crazy. So I, uh, I logged in 40 meters, JS8 calls, said hello to everybody, you know, no power, whatever. And I was like, I don't need to do that. They don't need to know I'm good. So everybody knows I'm good. I logged that off. I did turn on my packet station, which is basically like sending a fax over the air on VHF, which is 144 megahertz for amateur radio operators. And I was able to a couple of times during the day, send and receive messages through packet radio. And that's kind of like, it's an old, old school email system. I'm trying to find the easiest way to explain it. It's a very old, like 1970s, 1980s technology and amateur

radio hobby. But you send these beeps and boops and bops over the air. And there's a device that receives it, kind of sits on it. It it's an email and then it can send and receive when someone else comes in to retrieve it so it's a really cool awesome service that i it's like my favorite thing in the hobby honestly um i set that up and let it run as long as we had power uh you know up there at the shack as embarrassing as that is but i did not ever power on my brand new Yaesu HF radio. I never did turn on my secondary station with my daughter's HF radio. I didn't turn any of those computers on. I didn't do any of that. Uh, it wasn't necessary for me. Uh, it could be different next time, but this time it wasn't necessary. I had my telephone working. I had the internet working in

the house with Starlink and we had GMRS walkie talkies around the, around the farm. So we were good. It was blatantly different than I had ever anticipated it being. It was, it was just, but see every situation is different. That's why we have to prepare for every, or as much as we can. I mean, you can't prepare for everything, but you do have to be ready. And that's one of the things that I love about radio itself is if the situation would have been differently, we would have responded differently. We would have reacted differently. But even then, we had means of communications, although it wasn't as bad as it was for other people. We still had communications.

My brother and I, we talked on CB radio back and forth. We gave GMRS walkie talkies to my neighbors and my in-laws. So we had the ability to communicate, to talk around if we needed to. We checked on our neighbors. I was able to keep up with my brother who's a couple of miles away via CB, although our phones worked. So it was really cool. But the thing is, you just don't know. But if you don't have it before it gets here, like water in your bathtub, you're not going to have it afterwards. So thankfully, we thought through some of that stuff and made those changes and whatnot. One of the biggest things, again, the biggest surprise for me was I spent

virtually zero time on the air, on the ham radio frequencies. I never even stopped to listen to the health and welfare traffic on the Mount Mitchell repeater. I didn't have time. I was working every day, all day, coming home, running a chainsaw, running groceries, bringing gas cans home, moving water, hauling water, pumping water, taking an eight second shower. Uh, so I just didn't have time. I didn't do it. And I know a lot of people did. And, and I thank you. I just, it didn't fit where we were in the scenario and it just was, it an unnecessary thing um one of the couple of things just to mention here um the coax internet in our town a lot of it is still inoperable the fiber has done fared much better but it was very fragile on the front end ver Verizon was a joke and, um, it just didn't work there. I don't know if they didn't

have backup power or what, but it was no good, no good. Uh, radio played a very small part of our time off grid, but I know it saved countless lives in Western North Carolina where it shined again. Thank you for all the, the operators in western north carolina are those working around that area i know it made a big difference um i guess it was maybe sunday about halfway through the day uh the fire department was dispatched for a structure fire um it was way off the road and got over there and realized that we is too far down in the woods to get our engines so we had to call multiple brush trucks they called for the tanker hmm i got to drive the tanker i haven't driven in a while i loved it i ran the tanker ops for the operation uh with my btech 6x2 pro

and uh it worked like a champ so um no no one. Just lost basically an old shack out in the woods. But it was threatening some other older structures as well. So I ran a pump on the tanker, ran a tanker back and forth. One of the things that I did do, and I know I'm going along here again and I apologize. We decided that our generator was amazing. We loved it. It works. It works for our situation.

It's not a whole house. It doesn't come on when the power goes. It works for our situation. It's not a whole house. It doesn't come on when the power goes off and run on natural gas. It's not that kind of generator. It's a 5,500 watt generator. This is about all we needed to do. And man, it would have been great if I'd had the house wired properly. This story would be a little different. But one of the things that we found when we cut the generator off at night,

just so it would be quiet, you know, um, we kind of missed not being able to like watch TV right before we went to bed or maybe have a fan run in the house to circulate air. Cause it was hot. It was very hot. Um, so one of the things that I did and I have, I'm looking at having taken out the box yet. I bought an Echo Flow 2700 watt battery generator. And this is not intended to replace my 5500, 8250 starting generator, maybe a whole house down the road one of these days. This was basically purchased with the intent of having on hand. It came with a couple of panels that I haven't opened up either. I need to, though. It came with some panels, and it's a battery generator. It says it's 2,700 watts, and I guess that's all I can read.

It's 1,024 watt-hours, I guess is what that is. Anyway, bought that to have as like an overnight solution. So if we wanted to plug in our freezer overnight, or if we wanted to run a fan or have a lamp on in the house or something after we had DC the generator for the day, that's the reason in purchasing that, um, we'll just see how it goes. I'm, I'm quite anxious to get it out of the box and use it. I've just been so ridiculously busy and that's why it's been a while since I've been here on the show. Um, to mention, you can make all the preparations you want and it'll be different. And that's okay. You've at least made some effort. One of the things that we found as a family in

our daily debriefs, that sounds ridiculous, but I mean, it's kind of what we did every day, was that we were very disorganized. Now we've almost moved from the farm like three times in the last four years. One of the times we had to almost move was because we found mold in our house, and it was a very dangerous situation, so we had to leave. It's not been great, the situations we've found ourselves in since 2019, but we persevere. We overcome. One of the things that we've done is kind of pack up and

unpack, pack up and unpack, pack up and unpack. In doing so, our stuff has gotten scattered everywhere. So we have spent a lot of time that I could have been podcasting, but we have spent a lot of time working on organization for our stuff. Whether it's next year's winter clothes or last year's summer socks or whatever, we have made some great strides in recovering and making some sense of our stuff, especially our preps. And I'm talking about, uh, we have a water bob goes into the tub that you, you fill up before the power goes out. So you'll have a clean, you know, water that's not been in the bathtub. It's been in this big, you know, multi-liter bottle looking thing that fits the tub. I'll link it in the notes. We couldn't find it. We couldn't use it because we didn't know where it was. We struggled finding our coffee

pot percolator. My neighbor needed to use it. I couldn't find it. It took me days to find my percolator. Are you kidding um some of our other stuff like small lanterns little battery powered stuff we had it all together it was all together we just didn't know where the together was about three or four days into the event we did start finding this stuff because we began you know earnestly searching um so organization really uh plays a huge part in this and And I know, man, I know there's some of you guys that's got the Instagram pantries. And I know a lot of that's not real. But even if you do great, if you don't, we have a hand pump here, a simple pump we bought from

engineer 775. I'll link it down here. Scott Hunt from Practical Preppers. He's an awesome person. He's a brilliant man. And we're so thankful that years ago we got our money together and bought a simple pump. That was great, man. It was awesome. But you know what? We never thought about having like water on hand, like portable water. So we've made some changes.

We bought some stuff to take care of that to keep, you know, some gallonage here in the house. You know, we've been doing this for 30 years and you ebb and flow and life happens and then your finances change, your situation changes. Um, one of the things to say, I guess, in closing all this is if you are new to prepping, or maybe if you're old to prepping, maybe you're scared to start prepping because I've just blown your mind with what happened. Here's the thing. If you do one thing, you've done more than most. And that was one of the most shocking things through this whole situation that I found is how many grown men had no clue what to do. And have you ever seen me? I am nothing to look at. I mean,

I am no athlete. I have no build. I have a father figure and, um, chicken legs. And I was so shocked and disappointed on how many men were unable to know what to do next for their family. I mean, like even with, with groceries or having a gas can or having a spare propane tank. And I understand it's hard right now. The money stuff is weird. It's really hard for a lot of people to pay their bills. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking about the seven figure people that I know that walked around like zombies that had no idea what to do next. And, you know, guys, we can do better than that. It takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of effort. You're not going to do it

overnight, but it can be done. And that's one of the things that we'll be getting here to pretty soon is we'll be launching out. We've started a consultancy. It's Plan C Solutions. Plan C Solutions has been established to help families prepare for unknown events. And part of that will be an item or a department called the Family Radio Guy. And I will be the Family Radio Guy. And that will be kind of a spinoff of the PrepComs show. And it's more family-, um, more soccer mom oriented, I guess. And we're going to try to help folks get their communications plans together

to get them educated and empowered to be able to operate and not just fall apart when the storm hits their storms every day. They don't have to be natural storms. They can be a diagnosis. It could be a loss of life. It could be an accident. It could be anything. And I'm not saying that we have to walk around in fear, just anticipating bad all the time. That is not at all what I'm saying. But bad stuff happens. And when we're not prepared for it, we take it on the chin. Now, we've been prepping for almost 30 years, and even then, we had some shortcomings, and it was because we were unfocused or out of focus or distracted or trying to catch up from the past or whatever.

But the thing is, guys, if you'll do one thing today, you'll be that much more ahead of your neighbors, which doesn't make you smarter or better than your neighbors. It actually helps you. It actually allows you to help your neighbor. And that's what we're called to do. Love our neighbor as ourself. I got to go. I'm sorry. I've taken so much of your time. I hope you've enjoyed this breakdown next time. I may, I may have a little bit left over. I don't know yet, but, uh, I do know that we're getting into M U R S F R FRS, and GMRS radio operating systems coming up very soon. I appreciate you listening. Remember, if you need a water filter, whether it's a whole

house system or it's a gravity fed countertop or under sink, I have those. It's my business, hubcitymercantile.com. Hubcitymercantile.com. Link in the show notes. We have all the British Birkfeld filters. If you have a Berkey, you need replacement filters. I've got them. Have you noticed that everybody online is now selling these white filters instead of the black filters? There's a reason. I've been selling the white filters the whole time. Check me out, hubcitymercantile.com. I would love to try to earn your business. Western North Carolina, we're still praying for you guys. And if you're listening and you can help, whether it's hands-on or if it's money, if it's donations, whatever you can do, help your neighbors today. I'll catch you next

time, guys. God bless. Thanks so much for listening. 73, y'all. Outro Music