Prep Comms - Shortwave Radio for Preppers

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the PrepComs podcast brought to you by Hub City Mercantile. Hey, my name's Caleb Nelson. My amateur radio call sign is Kilo 4 Charlie Delta November. And yes, that probably stamps my geek pass for the day. But it's who I am, it's what I do, and I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you about all things communications for preppers. Back in the 1990s, I finished high school. I was looking at what we were going to do for the rest of our lives, if you will. And I got into prepping.

Starting point is 00:00:48 I did. And it was nothing that my family had done in the past. It was just a realization that, hey, some of the stuff I had been led to believe as a young man through things like, I don't know, G.I. Joe cartoons. I don't even want to get into the politics of things, but there was a lot of propaganda that I picked up on growing up that kind of, you know, molded me and created this, uh, this outlook in my life. Well, I began to, to kind of realize that most of that stuff that I had been fed, if you will, all those years was somewhat true, but maybe not all the way true. And I learned that I could tune a shortwave radio and find some alternative news, some alternative views that maybe didn't always correspond with

Starting point is 00:01:35 what, I don't know, CNN had been telling me since we got cable in 1987, or maybe that the Spartanburg Herald Journal had been publishing for as long as I could remember, maybe there was a different view. Maybe there was a different outlook, a different viewpoint, if you will. And I found those on shortwave radio. Now, what does that have to do with being a prepper? Well, shortwave radio is not like the AM FM radio or the weather radio that I've just been talking about earlier. It's a little more powerful, if you will, if you're interested in learning about what's going on a little bit further away than your local county, your local state.

Starting point is 00:02:17 Shortwave radio can receive broadcast. Shortwave radios can receive broadcast from transmitter stations all over the world. They operate and receive different frequencies than your AM FM or your weather radios that we've talked about in the past. It's radio. That means it's radiated energy that is transmitted from a station and then received in the box that you have in your hand, that receiver decodes and plays it over the speaker for you. So it's the same as AM FM radio, that it is radio as we're used to, but the frequencies being a much lower frequency can travel much greater distances. Now that sounds kind of ridiculous because you're calling it short wave, but you're

Starting point is 00:03:05 telling me that it can go further distances. Yeah, I don't know why they call it. Well, I do know, but it's, it's the theory beyond the level of this program today. So you'll just have to go with me. Short wave radio travels thousands of miles. Your AM FM radio, you know, generally 30, 40 miles. Weather radio stations, 30, 40 miles at the most is the best. But if you are listening to Radio Havana Cuba on shortwave, that's a pretty good ways away. And you're still able to tune it, listen to it and enjoy their great music. You can do that with a shortwave radio. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode, maybe the next couple of episodes here, PrepCom's podcast. I've driven the point home, I believe pretty sternly with the AM FM and the weather radios,

Starting point is 00:03:59 how important those are to have available to you if you're a prepper and why. If you have any questions that still didn't make sense, please let me know. Thank you to those of you who have purchased those from our store. Sean left a great review, five-star review, said it worked as good as his Sony. That's fantastic. And I love ours. We have it here in the house and tune it on from time to time. So that's great.

Starting point is 00:04:26 We can listen to our local news. We can listen to local music selections, whatever. We can keep up with the weather, whatnot, locally. But if I'm curious about what's going on in China, or if I want to know what the Russian state media is saying about the war in the Ukraine, then I can use a shortwave radio receiver to listen to those things. And you're like, yeah, and I can use my phone. You sure can. As long as your phone has service, as long as the networks are resilient and you're able to get a hold of that signal from the tower that is connected to the internet and receive

Starting point is 00:05:02 all that you could stand. But you're a prepper, so you're probably thinking at some point that may or may not work. Maybe you're an AT&T customer and a couple of months ago it just didn't work. So that's what we're talking about shortwave radio for today. It is an opportunity. It's a way, it's a device that can receive long distance radio stations that may have information that you are curious about. Now I got into shortwave radio back in the 1990s as an employee of the Radio Shack, the Tandy Corporation. We had them in the store. Matter of fact, I still have the very first shortwave radio I purchased from Radio Shack on layaway. Isn't that amazing? I bought it on layaway.

Starting point is 00:05:45 It's a DX392. It has a cassette tape recorder player built into it. I have listened to countless hours of propaganda from all over the world, including the U.S. on that rig. I've got a smaller one. I can't remember the model number there. I've got a few different Radio Shack branded shortwave radios that I've had for years and just love them. The 392 has got a, I've got a few different radio shack branded shortwave radios that I've had for years and just, just love them. The three 92 is like, it's got a handle on it. The big antenna,

Starting point is 00:06:09 man, it's just amazing. External antenna jacks. We'll talk about some of that stuff probably in the next episode, but I I'm trying to get you to see in this, you know, this foundational level that we're teaching here through prep comms at the beginning of why that is important to you. And you're prepping for something, or maybe you're thinking about prepping, or maybe you've been a prepper for a long time. And you're like, I don't really have my comms taken care of. I've got some, some throwaway walkie talkies in this duffel bag in the closet. I don't want to be a ham because it's, I don't want to be on a list and I don't want to have to take a test and all these. That's fine. That's fine. I'm not here to convince you of any of that.

Starting point is 00:06:47 You probably got a friend that you can lean on for that. But you're in your home, you're prepping for something, and you won't. Gosh, we've gotten so used to the Internet. You want your own Internet. And let me just say, back before the Internet was the Internet, we had shortwave radio. And, oh oh man, it was so much fun to listen to. I, I remember stumbling into so many amazing radio programs back in the day that it's, it's countless the hours that I spent listening to this information. And I found it so intriguing because I had come up, you know, in the 1980s and like GI Joe was

Starting point is 00:07:23 my favorite cartoon, love the action figure, star Wars, all that stuff. And, um, you know, in the 1980s and like G.I. Joe was my favorite cartoon. Love the action figure, Star Wars, all that stuff. And, you know, G.I. Joe basically was just a big psyop. I mean, it was like the greatest, in my mind, outside of the Top Gun movie or maybe Battle of Los Angeles, it was the greatest propaganda movement that I've witnessed in my lifetime. I mean, I was ready to be a G.I. Joe. You know what I'm saying? I wanted to be in the Sky Striker and be the pilot. And Josh and I were going to go to the Air Force Academy.

Starting point is 00:07:55 And that all stemmed from being raised by grandfathers who were World War II veterans and at the same time being fed propaganda to make me want to go sign up for the military. I didn't, by the way. But I did learn as I got older that a lot of that stuff that I had enjoyed, movies, film, cartoons, comic books, all those sorts of things, they were propaganda. And they still are. Matter of fact, it's pretty blatant now what it is. But the shortwave radio opened my eyes to see that what I had thought was like good or maybe it was proper or the norm. There was a whole nother world out there that was the other side of the propaganda. It was a different viewpoint. point. And, you know, in times of duress and an event or whatnot, we're going to be looking for and listening for alternative narratives. So the AM, FM and the weather radios we've already

Starting point is 00:08:54 discussed have us covered there locally. Now, that's not to say that your local radio station won't be full of propaganda. That's not to say that the weather radio won't be receiving alerts and whatnot from the federal or local governments with their twist on things. I'm just saying that we've kind of got that covered, right? The one great thing about shortwave radios with the frequency bands that they actually receive, the broadcasted information can come from thousands of miles away. That means other countries. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to rely on other countries to know what we're supposed to believe or what narrative we're supposed to follow. No, it just gives us an alternative to what we're being fed from home. And I know that I have spent many hours listening to foreign broadcast reporting on the same thing that CNN had been spoke speaking on just, you know, a few minutes earlier in a couple of days.

Starting point is 00:09:53 And their viewpoint was a 180 degrees from what I had been told as a citizen here, the U S. And I think that we've kind of lost sight of having an open mind in that regard, that maybe what we're being told isn't always necessarily the truth, or maybe it's a partial truth. The old saying is there's three sides to every story, yours, mine, and the truth. And so my truth here is we need an alternative. We need an alternative, and shortwave radio is that alternative. Now, I understand your phone is the most powerful device you've ever wielded in your hand. Your computer, your laptop, or whatever, your Roku TV, I mean, they all have plenty of information there.

Starting point is 00:10:36 But if you're a prepper, so you're probably thinking about alternatives to those things. And I'm going to tell you, shortwave radio is the next thing that you have to think about. You really have to kind of give this some deep thought because the AM FM local radios are great. The weather radios are great, but they won't receive information from for all intents and purposes outside the boundaries of our nation. Okay. Unless maybe you're up North and you're, you know, you're getting into the Canadian, or if you're down south in Texas, you may be pulling some stations in from Mexico. But beyond that, you're not getting information from outside of the world, even from our nation's enemies. Now, I'm not saying that you need to just put all your faith

Starting point is 00:11:16 in them. But again, three sides to every story, it never hurts to know what the other side is saying. So shortwave receivers are built to receive the frequencies and transmissions from a long way away. In ham radio, we call that DX or DXing. Like the process of listening to long distance stations would be DXing, ING. DX is a long distance contact. And it's the same way in short wave listening or SWL. You may go online and you can type in SWL and more than likely you're going to find some sites about short wave listening. It's a hobby unto itself. And again, not everybody wants to be a ham. Not everybody needs to buy, you know, a $1,500 radio station. They're not even interested in getting

Starting point is 00:12:03 their license. You're just looking for a solution to listen. And that's where the shortwave radio comes in handy. I've had these things for years from my days back in Radio Shack. My mom's got a great little Sony unit that she purchased years ago. They're all over the internet now, especially on Amazon. And I'm sure we'll have some links in the show notes. There's some brand new ones that just came out recently. Um, they're, they cost about half of what a really good ham radio set would cost you that can hear the same things, by the way, we'll talk about that in the next program. Um, but, uh, you really need to give some consideration to a shortwave radio. Now with that statement said, I want you to hear me when I say this, that a shortwave radio is great. You can hear just about anything you want to with just about

Starting point is 00:12:51 any one of them on the market. I mean, the $12 or $15 ones, they're not going to be that great. Now, here in the States, we have a lot of noise, power lines everywhere, cellular. I mean, everything is radiated energy. And the radio set that you choose to use will need the higher and the greater purchase you make there be the better service you receive from that unit. But here's the thing. It's one thing to listen to music from Cuba or a radio broadcast from China, in English, by the way. There's another thing that I want to share with you about the capacity or the capability of a shortwave, a portable shortwave radio for you to have that you can hold in your hands, that you can sit in your recliner and listen to in the evenings if you choose. And that's a single sideband capable

Starting point is 00:13:47 SSB, single sideband capable shortwave radio. And this is the only one that I would buy. Honestly, if you can't afford one yet, don't buy one until you can afford one that is single sideband capable, SSB. Now, why am I telling you that? Well, here's the primary reason. In addition to listening to Radio Havana Cuba or the BBC, a single sideband capable shortwave radio will allow you to, oh, I don't want to get into theory here, but allows you to tune even finer, if you will, the frequencies that it will receive and listen to amateur radio operators. Oh, I lost you right there. You're thinking, I don't want to be a ham radio guy. I don't want to, well, here's the thing. A lot of national emergencies, a lot of emergencies around the world, hurricanes, earthquakes, and whatnot, are handled, the response for those are handled over high frequency or shortwave radio frequencies.

Starting point is 00:14:56 Now, your regular shortwave radio can hear that to an extent, but it will probably sound like Charlie Brown's school teacher. As a matter of fact, I want to play a little sample for you here. I heard some guys talking on seven megahertz the other day, and I think they were talking about their dog. And so this is, this is what I've got recorded, but I'll play it for you. And so what we're going to start with, we're going to listen to what would be a regular shortwave radio receiving this amateur radio operator talking to a friend of his about his dog. And then you'll notice something happens. I change it to the single sideband mode. Okay, so now the shortwave radio goes into single sideband mode or SSB. And by doing that, I'm able to fully decode what's being

Starting point is 00:15:47 transmitted. And you'll tell the difference. We go from Charlie Brown school teacher to a dude talking about feeding his dog a treat. Okay. This right here is an example of why I believe you need a single sideband Radio. We're just kind of sniffing around, and I holler at him and say, hey, bud, do you want a treat? You know, I start talking to him real sweet. He tails wagging. He was standing there at the gate. Open the gate. Got him in. Open the gate.

Starting point is 00:16:34 Got him in. Open the gate. Open the gate. But did you give him the treat? I gave him the treat. All right. Okay, so you heard the difference, right? It was wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Starting point is 00:16:50 And then you had someone that sounded kind of like me. And you could determine what they were saying. So that is the importance. And that's the primary reason I'm telling you right now that a single sideband shortwave radio is what you need. And they do cost a little bit more. And it will be a larger investment. And it might be a little more to determine or figure out exactly how to use it. It's a tuning knob, okay?

Starting point is 00:17:16 But it gives you extra capabilities. And again, I know not everybody wants to be a ham. And not everybody wants to listen to ham radio operators talk about giving their dogs treats. I get it. But in the case of an emergency, and that's what we're planning for, right? We're planning, we're preparing for an event. That is what you will have the capacity to do is to receive those types of things as well. So not only can you with a shortwave radio, single sideband capable, listen to news and music from all over the world, you can also, when it's single sideband capable, tune into amateur radio operators or even the military that utilizes different parts of the HF frequency

Starting point is 00:17:58 spectrum. You can tune those through the single sideband capability of that radio. So in all honesty, if you have a shortwave radio that's not single sideband, look, I'm not going to beat up on you. I mean, you're way ahead of your peers. But if you're in the market or you're thinking about adding to the redundancy of your preparedness, you've got to really seriously give thought to the single side band capable shortwave radio. And that's just one example. I mean, I could, I could sit here and play

Starting point is 00:18:32 samples of digital modes and Morse code and all these things that you could listen to in addition, but you just need to understand that when you have the capability, it expands what you're able to hear. So for instance, there's an earthquake in Nepal. We have a hurricane down in the panhandle of Florida. We have some sort of military action on the northern border. A lot of traffic will be through the amateur radio operators and they will be talking about these sorts of things. I mean, anytime there's a hurricane, they stand up a hurricane net where they take reports in. There's a maritime, uh, net that goes on every single day, a couple of times a day. If you can find it on those, on those frequencies, and you can tune that with a single sideband radio.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Uh, I don't want to listen to those guys. It's okay. It's okay. I'm not telling you that you have to. I'm just telling you that these types of radios have the capability to tune those frequencies and to decode those types of transmissions and signals. Now we're going to talk about this in a much deeper, deeper field as this show progresses, right? It won't be the next episode. We've got a lot of foundation to lay here, but at this point, if you're curious about what's going on

Starting point is 00:19:52 around in the world, you don't want to be, you know, hamstrung by your phone or your computer's capabilities. A shortwave radio with single sideband reception is what you need. All right. I'll put some links in the show notes of items or models that I would choose that I've actually used. I've had my hands on proven track record. This is the radio my mom has. This is the radio I recommended my aunt by those sorts of things. This is the radio that I have in my house. Check out the show notes. It'll all be in there. I think I've got a video or two that I'm going to put in there as well from some, some really smart online guys to help you have a better understanding of single

Starting point is 00:20:29 sideband. But here's the deal. The single sideband shortwave radio is the next step in your communications process as a prepper. If you don't have one, you really need one. Is it more important than a $28 walkie talkie? Well, it just depends. Who are you going to talk to on the $28 walkie talkie? You don't know, but you can listen to what's going on around the world with a shortwave radio. Again, this is a foundational show. We're talking about it as low a level as we can to help begin some understanding for you, the prepper, as you're trying to make the best decisions you can, not out of fear, but out of understanding and the reality of the world we find ourselves living in.

Starting point is 00:21:12 All right, that's all I've got this time. Sorry I've gone a little long, but I love shortwave radio. If you have questions, please find our private Facebook group, sign up. We'd love to have you in there. Remember, everything's at prepcoms.com. My name's Caleb Nelson, K4CDN. I appreciate your time. Have a great day. 73, y'all. God bless. Hey, before we go, did you know that we have communication solutions in the Hub City Mercantile Store? Yeah, it's a real-life brick-and-mortar store here in upstate South Carolina. We stock and sell all of the British Birkfeld stainless steel water filter parts, elements,

Starting point is 00:21:59 also the underhouse and under sink, and even the shower filters. But in addition to that, we have communication solutions. Yeah, we have handy talkies. We have AMFM weather band radios. We have the Wilcom's roll-up J-Pole antenna, as well as the ZBM2 Industries QD whip antenna in the exclusive, exclusive color here for the show. It's beige, but it's not, I don't even know what we're going to call it. We used to call it beige. It's going to be Bage for a while,

Starting point is 00:22:25 but if you're looking for something to enhance the capabilities of your handheld radio, make sure you check that out in the Hub City Mercantile store. Corey made some great roll-up antennas, the Wilcom roll-up, if you're a ham radio operator looking for a solution, a portable solution, or maybe even an anti-HOA solution for your mobile or handheld radio, yeah, you need to check those out. It's all in the store. HubCityMercantile.com. you

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Prep Comms - Shortwave Radio for Preppers

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Prep Comms - Shortwave Radio for Preppers

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