The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Making Emergency Comms Work

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/cypress_survivalist/https://www.facebook.com/CypressSurvivalistSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, Nic Emricson, or the Matter of Facts Podcast*We've talked through emergency comms options before, but way beyond the equipment is the planning, logistics, and techniques that make comms work in an emergency. Topics for tonight include setting up a comms plan, comms security, and signals intelligence. Firing up your Baofeng trying to talk to random weirdos after the flag goes up it not a comms plan. Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to MatterFacts Podcast. No offense, Nick, but if I'm not on the left, it feels weird to me for some odd reason.

All good. So we are streaming on a Wednesday, which is out of the ordinary. We usually stream on a Thursday. However, I was going to be childless tomorrow, so I decided to take Mama on a Wednesday, which is out of the ordinary. We usually stream on a Thursday. However, I was going to be childless tomorrow, so I decided to take Mama on a date, and then the event that was going to make us childless I think got canceled because the birthday girl got sick, so here we are anyway.

Ran over. It's also my Thursday because I took Friday off. Yep, raggle, fraggle. We had to pinch hit because I decided that Mama needed a date. And if any of you are married, like, you understand where we're coming from. Mama needs a date every now and then. It just, you got to do that. But anyway, admin work.

Thank you to the patrons. If you're not a patron, I'm not mad at you. I'm not even disappointed. I don't begrudge anybody that doesn't think that the show isn't worth a buck a month. But for those of you that do, I don't encourage you to get mental help, but you might need it. If you're interested in fun cheeky t-shirts and merch, those links

are down in the show description. Southern Hair and Gals Crafts is doing all of our merch fulfillment and production, so if you want to support us and a local small family run business, you can click those links. Cypress Survivalist, we're getting very, very close

to actually like legitimately starting to do advertising for our first event, which will be March 8th down in Southeast Louisiana at Fountain Blue State Park. I was talking to one patron who has already said

he's going to make the event, which would be cool. I mean, I'm going to try to make it to, I'm going to try to make it so that even for a person who's been in preparedness for a while, there's going to be something out there for you to be interested in something to grab your attention. Maybe even something that you hadn't thought about previously.

So we'll see. And quite frankly, if it's nothing more than an excuse to like sit around, be a site, drink bourbon and, and smoke cigars and hang out with me, that's worth a drive anyway, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't say I'm fun. Not even funny. But we'll find some issues to get into. So I have to fall on my sword before we get to the topic.

Again. I have to fall on my sword before we get to the topic again. I got to stop making the habit of telling Stuart he was right because his head's going to swell up and he's going to say, I told you so he's going to be freaking insufferable for weeks on the back of this. It'll be funny though. So one of our dear friends of the podcast, Stuart has been telling me for i don't know nick years

years oh as long as i've been in the page he's been telling me for years i need to get a 12 gauge he's been telling me for years and for years i have done my absolute best to put it off and to ignore him unsuccessfully i finally caved into all the peer pressure and bullying and I bought a Beretta a 300 and it took exactly, I don't know, a couple of weeks of like, you know, figuring out the manual of arms and learning it,

learning the techniques around it. One freaking range trip for me to admit shotguns are freaking awesome. And, uh, I'm not mad at stewart but i'm kind of mad at him yeah he's right a lot he's right way too much so so i i will wholeheartedly admit that part of what has kept me away from shotguns other than probably just lack of experience because like i've shot i've shot 12 gauges before like i played with 12 gauge pumps when i was younger shot like you know milk jugs and tin cans and nonsense like that did some skeet shooting and trap shooting with them and like i can shoot a shotgun i can lead targets i know what i'm doing but there was never anything about a shotgun that just like

called me and said, you need one of these in your life. That ended after one range trip and some measuring in my house, because I figured out that the distance from my bedroom to my front door is seven yards. And that's those, that's that target on the left side of the screen that's three shots at seven yards everything's in a nine ring at that range and the other target was at 15 yards which is the longest shot across my entire little house so from the bedrooms to the refrigerator and i can keep all my shots in an eight ring and that level of that level of control over the shot and the disbursement of the spread was something that like I really wasn't expecting and maybe that's my own personal blinders and you know my own ignorance but like now that I have realized that

I legitimately have a firearm in my hands that if I if I do what I'm supposed to do, I can make nine pellets smack a target pretty regularly at range. That's, I don't know, man. Like this is elevated it from, oh, it's a tool in the toolbox to now I am honestly questioning, like if I was going to grab a gun for bump of the night,

would it be that 12 gauge instead of grabbing my ar or grabbing like you know my nine millimeter pistol or something like that like that's a that is a earth-shaking amount of power and it's more controllable than i thought it was i think the thing you have to remember too is that a lot of people for bump in the night home defense stuff a lot of people survive being shot by handguns they just do this is something that a lot of us don't like to talk about you hear from er doctors all the time people survive being shot by pistols but what you don't hear a lot about is people surviving being shot by shotguns

what you don't hear a lot about is people surviving being shot by shotguns, unless it's birdshot at a fairly extreme range. Yeah. You know, shotguns take a piece of you and put it on the other side of the room. Yeah. Tends to be a considerable piece. Clint Smith said it a bit more vulgar than that, but yeah,

he did. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I, I am, I'm. Yeah, I mean, well, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I am I'm having like I honestly I was not I was completely no pun intended blown away by just how tightly this thing grouped with not remarkable ammo like this wasn't Federal Flight Control or any of the new generation of really tightly grouping 12 gauge this was like winchester military surplus nine pellet buckshot nothing special but the fact that federal eight pellet flight control is acting

like a slug at those ranges which but there was a guy there that had some at that class i took with trek out of an a300 and and you know like it was ridiculous. It was golf ball size holes where all the pellets are in one hole. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that, that's, that's been my recent experience with shotguns is I, all of my originally preconceived notions have been ripped away from me. And I, I'm, I will, I will admit it, Stuart, I was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong. Don was wrong. I was wrong. Don't gloat too much.

You crotch the old SOB. But I was wrong, and I'm man enough to admit I was wrong. It's like I told Trek at the end of his fundamental shotgun classes. It is no longer a question of if I would be comfortable grabbing a shotgun, it will absolutely do the job well and above what my handgun is possibly capable of. And especially because I'm in a really stupid state and I can't have a 30 round AR with a can on it. Well, shotguns it is. Yeah.

And to your point earlier that like survivability, like I've never been shot. Thank Christ. But yeah, same, but I am familiar enough with terminal effects of handguns and rifles to know that if I have to pick between getting shot with a handgun, a rifle or a shotgun,

give me the handgun twice because like even in the case of an AR, when we're talking about a tiny little 55 grand projectile going to like 3000 feet per second, that that can be very damaging. But the, I hydrostatic effects, but the idea of getting hit by nine 33 caliber pellets at once. No, not interested.

Shoot me with the hand. Shoot me with the die, Bill. I'll ride that lightning willingly before I take a blast from a 12 gauge. He's right. Hey, Illinois semi-autos. We can only have a 10 round mag that's freaking disgusting or i can yeah i know it is and hopefully illinois has appealed it to the supreme court we're gonna see what comes down the pipe here in 2025 boys and girls this this assault weapon ban incorporates every single piece of wet dream legislation from new york to california and back

it's got mag limits it's got mag bands it's got semi-auto bands by name it's got restrictions on features kind of a stupid move. Can I just say that it might not be a popular sentiment with a certain population, but I kind of hope your governor chokes on a cannoli and dies. Someone's going to get really upset about that. Possibly YouTube. I don't care. Like, you know, what a freaking useless fat miserable sob look i'm just waiting for the corruption charges to come out about him just like blagojevich and just like every other governor in

my living memory except for oh right the one republican i'm a little concerned about the terminal elements um imagining me shirtless to be be perfectly honest. Hey, look, man, sometimes you got to sleep and you don't want to sleep, huh? Anyway. So the topic for today was the purpose of emergency comms. And we've talked about emergency comms a couple of times on this show.

Like, we've talked a lot about equipment and different things. And like, there will always be opinions on the show yeah like we've talked a lot about equipment and different things and like there will always be opinions on the usefulness of this versus that what i wanted to us to get into today was more talk about like the nerdy brain crap that makes emergency comms work because you know like you and i talked about as i was typing all these banners in, if you have nothing but a Bayo Fang and you, your comms plan is I'm going to press a button after the S the S has hit the, uh,

you know, the fan and I'm going to talk to people I've never met before and they're going to come help me out of my time of need. Like your comms plan is nothing. You don't, you don't have a plan. You don't, that's not even a,

it's not even wishful thinking. That's just, that's just not a plan. I don't have a plan. That's not even wishful thinking. That's just not a plan. I don't know. It's as good as a firearm with no training. I'm trying to be really polite and not say that's stupid, but it's kind of stupid. Kind of stupid. Well, it is. But unfortunately, a lot of modern advertising is here buy the solution to your problems well tools don't solve your problems until you know how to use them but true true so as we kind of go through this what what i wanted to talk through was a couple of like big chunks of information that we'll break down a little bit more as we go through, depending on like which way the conversation goes. And I don't I want to preface all this by saying that, like, I'm looking in the comments section and I can see the terminal element.

I see PCG. I see at least two people I know off the top of my head know absolutely as much, if not more than I do, about comms. They definitely know more than I do. Give them their due. Nothing I'm saying here is a state secret. None of it's CIA crap. It is a combination of knowledge I'm recalling from a very brief RTO training when I was enlisted and a lot of stuff you could Google. So like none of this is cool guy stuff. None of this is Phil's genius for figuring it out.

I'm just the guy telling you that you should look into all this stuff. The information is readily available, but I would comfortably say that nine out of 10 people in the preparedness world have never even thought about any of this. So consider this your polite wake up call. And, and almost all of this can be done on zero budget. No, it's all between the ears.

All of this, everything we're going to talk about is zero budget. It's, it's literally stuff you either know, having, having the equipment is not true. These implementations. Yeah.

But these implementations, like, you know, are talking about like there are aspects of this that are going to apply to radios, to mesh, to mesh networks, to cell phones,

to social media. It's just concepts. And that's, that's really what I want to try to hammer on people about. So the first thing that I always like try to explain to people is you need the bones of a communications plan. Now your comp plan in its most simplified terms is who am I going to reach out to? How am I going to reach out to them? How often am I going to reach out to them, et cetera, et cetera. What

are we going to talk about? All those are things you have to figure out before you need the comms plan. You need to know who's on the other side of the radio or the other side of the whatever, how you're going to talk to them. Y'all have to like, you have to meet each other. You have to get out of your mom's basement, meet each other, talk to each other, get to know each other, and then agree on these things because they're going to be really necessary, especially in the case of like, you know, power grid failure, natural disaster, things like that. Two things are going to happen.

First of all, battery power, which is what all your stuff's going to be running on, is precious. So you don't want to leave your radio fired up 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the battery dies. You want to turn it on when you need it, turn it off when you don't. when you don't. And even if you can run power with impunity, you're going to be, you know, the idea that two people are going to just find each other on the radio waves, and a lot of this is going to be centered around radios, but like the idea that two people are going to find each other by sheer luck on a common channel at a common time is minuscule. So these are the things you have to plan out in advance. I'm going to try to contact Nick in this way at this time per day, so on and so forth, so that we have a

reasonable chance of actually meeting up. So the first things I want to talk about are time interval length. So as an example, let's assume, let's go back in the military days. I am the RTO. I'm the guy with the big boy radio. I'm trying to reach out to a lot of lower elements or a lot of scattered elements. I tell everybody at the top of every hour, so right now it's like 5.15 p.m. Central Time. I would say that starting at 6 p.m. Central, I'm going to key up for, I'm going to key up and I'm going to transmit for 60 seconds at the top of every hour. If anybody has a report, that's when you key up,

you find me, we establish a comm, we transmit the information back and forth, and then we all shut down and conserve power. That is time interval length. Every hour, starting at this time, for this long. Once you know those things and you know the method of transmission, which is this radio in this band on this frequency, so on and so forth, now you have all the information you should need to make that contact and to make it repeatedly, to know that, okay, if I miss this person at 6 p.m. because I got a situation, I have radio silence, I had an equipment failure, whatever. I know that an hour later at 7 p.m. I can try them again and I can continue to try them every hour.

And you can modify this as needed, but it has to be information that has kind of worked out in advance. It's not something you're going to just figure it out on the fly. Know what I mean, Nick? Yeah, absolutely. We actually used that a little bit when I was in Boy Scouts, and they had the little handheld Motorola's. It was a 3-3-3 rule. When we were on dispersed campouts, it was every three hours on Channel 3 for three minutes.

It was very easy to remember. 3-3-3. Every third hour for three minutes it was very easy to remember three three three every third hour for three minutes on channel three and anybody in the radios were left on channel three all the time and we didn't do these dispersed camping trips regularly but you know we were we were spread out a little bit and always had somebody on fire watch and it was the people on fire watch that were managing the radios and it was just checking hey everything okay everybody okay does anybody need anything nope good all right good night we'll talk to you in three hours now it can be that simple if all you have is handheld motorola walkie-talkies with the with the fmrs basic channels uh if you have a variety of frequencies you talk on,

maybe it's so every three hours, but you're offsetting it based on whichever channel you have. So say at, at an hour one, you're talking on your GMRS frequencies on hour two, you're talking on the FMR as frequencies hour three, you're talking about, you're talking on your ham. If you have that luxury or if you're talking about you're talking on your ham if you have that luxury or if you're

talking to different groups com security is in about 25 minutes yeah we'll get onto that but no what i'm saying is like if you have different groups that have different radios for instance like you you don't want to have to be listening to two or three different radios at the same time because you're just not going to be able to manage it unless you have multiple people, but say like my, my local neighborhood here, a couple of people have FMRS radios already.

And we're a small enough neighborhood that the FMRS radios intent, your bail fangs can be tricked into transmitting on those frequencies. Don't do it unless it's an emergency about FRs or gmrs frs and gmrs the bail things they may have changed it but their hardware is capable of frs gmrs and ham uv uh uh uhf if you're talking about like your unlock your wide UV5 FARs? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, they can talk on all of those. Don't do that unless it's an emergency. The FCC may smack your hand and say that you're a naughty boy. So I'm only going to address this one time.

So I have not been able to find an instance in history in which the FCC came down on an individual like a ton of bricks for transmitting frequencies they were not licensed to unless it was repeated and it was like blocking frequencies or if you start fooling around with emergency response frequencies or military. You do that and they're going to get really pissy really fast. We had a ham guy that was in our town about 25 years ago that was blocking out television signal stations with his base station. Just on purpose. Illegally broadcasting

copyrighted materials. Yes, the FCC will get very pissy about that. But I guess what I'm saying is I'm not saying this giving you license to go do it. I'm just saying that like, you know, if it's a freaking emergency, if it's a life or death emergency,

there's a very low likelihood that you're going to have any serious downstream consequences. Zero likelihood. Life or death emergency. There's zero consequences. You can use whatever you need to defend yourself or preserve your life. I want to address, even in my state, I want to address this before I move on.

Do you guys have solar panels to power your electronics? Yes, and you should, but that's a different topic. Anyway, so other than like time, interval, length, the other thing you need to figure out in your comms plan is purpose, which you brought up a very good use case earlier where it's a check-in. It's a, if someone just, just to let everybody know in a dispersed group, Hey, I'm still doing okay. And ostensibly, I'm not dead. And ostensibly in a case like that, if that is your use case for emergency comms, then there would also be a component of that that says, if you miss X number of check-ins, which is also driven by how dispersed is your group, like what time investment is going to be required to go find Nick. If Nick stops checking in,

if it's a day's, if it's a day's trip on foot, we're not going to make that willy nilly. And it also depends on like, how often are you checking in? If you're checking in every six hours and somebody misses a check-in, that's a long time to have to go to find out if someone needs help you know now you could potentially be 12 hours overdue before we start humping it

through the woods to go looking for you so yep it's this is one of those this is a judgment call at the end of the day but like it's a purpose the other purpose that's really common is just intel like hey this is the situation in my neighborhood this situation in your neighborhood we're all sharing information so we can kind of like extend the reach of our intel gathering boots on the ground um those are probably the most two common purposes i can think of but you have to kind of spell that out in your comms plan up front so that everybody knows this is what's being expected from me and this is going to be the consequence of not reporting in like, and it doesn't even need to be a static number. Like for instance,

we had that ice storm a while ago. I was checking in via text with a couple of my elderly neighbors. Now I'm going to be a little bit more ready to jump the gun and go and check on them physically if they don't check in with me because they are elderly, in fact. But if I fired off a text at 9.30 at night and they don't reply back within a reasonable time frame, it's 9.30 at night and they are elderly. They're probably asleep. Right. are elderly they're probably asleep right so the situation is going to dictate a little bit of of of how extreme you go with how much you enforce that comms plan yeah but these this is also why like everyone that's part of this plan has to kind of like agree to this up front because

if if some component of this comms plan is hey our last check-in is at 9 30 at night people that's everyone's opportunity to put their hand up and say, hey, I go to bed at 9 o'clock, so I'm not going to make that check-in. And then you either adjust the whole comms plan or you just make an exception for one person, but you know that information up front. And the thing of it is that if everybody kind of takes a hard line with that and says, no, no, no, if you miss a check-in, we're coming looking for you because it's 939. It's sub-zero temperatures.

You could be freezing to death in your house. Then at least that person knows up front, if I fall asleep at 9 o'clock and I don't check in with so-and-so ahead of time, I'm going to get a knock on my door. People want to make sure I'm okay. But that's why all these things come with a comms plan. And it sounds like it's really nerdy, pedantic stuff, and it kind of is. But you have to work all this out in advance so that everyone that is part of this plan is like to me, this is no different than like a home defense plan. Everyone has to know what the plan is. Everybody has to know what in advance because figuring this out post disaster is a much bigger problem than right now

when you can just put it right in a group text and wham bam get you know get everybody on the same sheet of music real fast exactly so now I'm going to do this in the order I put it into the banners which is not the order I originally wrote this in but yeah I mean ordinarily

we'd be talking calm security before it's signals intelligence, which signals intelligence is just the military term for it. Like this is the information that I can get passively by listening on the airwaves. And by the way, anybody that has a radio, you don't even need a license to just turn that thing on and start scanning frequencies and listening to the traffic in your area. And it can be really interesting, but you can learn a lot of, you can learn a lot of stuff real fast because I'm going to tell you that a cool thing about radios is that 90% of the people using them do not even think

about the fact that talking on a radio is like standing in the middle of an open field in the dark and shining a flashlight. Everybody can see the source of the light because it's a light in a dark field. But 90% of people using radios don't think about that. They just think I'm just talking on the radio, but you can hear that for miles and you can find out all kinds of interesting things because people have no radio discipline whatsoever. That comes later in comm security.

Actually, that's one of the ways that they find poachers quite a lot yep believe it or not yep this is also why when we get to com security which would be pretty short in just a minute and it's probably the it's probably the thing with the most little elements to consider is how to secure your communications. But scanning frequencies, which depending on your radio and the equipment and what bandwidths it can operate on, like you can scan all kinds of frequencies.

I'm going to tell you that the ones that I particularly tend to lean on are like your NOAA or your weather radio. Every single GMRS radio I have, from my handhelds to my mobile in my truck to my man pack, they all have the NOAA frequencies in them. A lot of them actually have like a weather mode where you'll just like press and hold a button and it'll flip to the NOAA stations. If not, just Google what the NOAA station frequencies are and manually program them.

You need to have that in every single radio you own if it's capable of listening because it comes in handy. I can remember a time when my wife and I, we were driving home from her sister's place and like, it was a, it was a really bad thunderstorm that was cutting through and it was coming up kind of like behind us as we were leaving that area. And it became obvious very quickly it was probably going to overtake us, and there was concern about tornadoes. So Phil being Phil, I turned my GMRS radio on in my truck. I flipped to the local NOAA weather station, so we spent the next 15 miles driving down the highway, listening for tornado sightings, listening for road closures,

listening for anything that was pertinent to our area. And that's the cool thing is that you can get a NOAA weather station almost anywhere in the country. Anywhere I've ever been, I've been able to find one of those seven channels that's lit up and talking. And it is an incredible, it's not who's kicking in doors or doing clandestine stuff, but it's great intelligence because mother nature can screw us over if we're not paying attention to what she's doing. Your AM airport frequencies, again, publicly accessible. If you have something that'll listen to AM stations, not all radios are capable of it, but I encourage you to have at least one in your inventory that does, even if you have to go out and get an airband radio.

They're not that expensive. No, they're really not. It's like the old police scanners. Not many jurisdictions are still using unencrypted comms for their police and fire. Whatever you want to say about that, it is what it is. The government has made that decision that the police and fire can use encrypted comms. Some of them don't.

If your area doesn't, it'd be a good idea to know what frequencies they are on and listen only. That is one of the few times that people will come down on you with a hammer is if you start talking on police channels and it's not an emergency, you will, you will piss some people off very quickly if you do that and those people have the ability to wreck your entire financial and legal future so don't don't play that they do but yeah i mean i find that usually when you're talking about being able to listen in on like le ems fire frequencies that tends to be like more rural areas. My area.

Yeah. Like my area. First of all, most of the, most of the law enforcement out here, they use cell phones as a primary communication source. And there's no, there,

I, I have no ability to cut into that. I'm sure there's some nerd out there that knows how, but I can't pull that off. Oh, I'm sure if it's broadcasted in the airwaves, it can be intercepted. That's, that's just something you're going to have to accept but you know a lot of them still do use cruiserborne radios

but even a lot of those and even with them using even with them using that i mean a lot of them don't that's why they it's encrypted is because those radios are are boosting over the cell networks nowadays just because it gives better reception for them but um and on my area they they have not made the switch to cell towers for their radio in my in my area they're primarily using cell phones and when they're not they're using a an encrypted trunk system so there are you know there are ways there are ways i just haven't invested in those ways at this point so yeah that's just the thing now some of them even do a delayed broadcast over the internet so if you do have access to the internet there are some police departments i don't know if that's

required if they're using an encrypted trunk net i know yeah two towns over from me they do use an encrypted trunk net but they also do a over from me they do use an encrypted trunk net but they also do a delayed broadcast over their over their social media so you can listen into it if you feel like it no my area doesn't do anything near that cool so i just have to kind of wonder but the other thing is on top of knowing like where to listen is what information is pertinent to you so like like i was saying earlier, like, you know, weather events, tornado sightings, road closures,

flooding, any, anything that is going to cause an ambulance, a police officer, or a firefighter to be in your local area is probably something you should be well aware of. So like that is a lot of times like what I'm doing, if I'm just scanning frequencies,

or like, if I'm listening to the NOAA stations is I'm looking for information that I don't have access to use my eyeballs in my ears. But signals intelligence is like an amazingly simple premise of I'm just, I'm just listening to see what I can find out there. And it's more than just... Basically, anything that would make you go, huh, that's interesting, or oh crap, that's not good. You should probably record and take note of that. Yeah. Before we go to calm security, what radios do you guys have? That's the hardest question. What radios do you recommend? I mean, my recommendations are fairly simple, but I have my reasons for recommending what I do.

I have no recommendations for radios. I have a Yaesu Handy Talkie that's fairly old that I will be replacing soon with a base station. I have a couple of Baofangs as my kick around knocking the dirt radios because they're cheap. And when I inevitably run over them with my truck, I won't feel too bad. Yep.

And personally, that's how I lost my first one. Oh, you poor SOB. It fell off my back pocket. So me personally, like I have, I have said in the past that I tend to recommend GMRS to people and I'm not going to get drawn into the debate

about how much more capability HAM has. We've covered that before. All I'm going to say is that the overall majority of people, at least in the preparedness world, that have a HAM radio license only have a technician class, which means they can only play on UHF and VHF, which has a lot is the same, which has a lot of the same restrictions as GMRS does,

as far as like being able to be being line of sight and range and so on and so forth. That's very true. If you have a general license and you can play with like high frequency and you can do stuff like bouncing signals off the stratosphere, we're, I'm not talking to you, but I'm going to say that if all you have is a technician class license and the only thing you can talk on is UHF, VHF, the only thing you can do that I

can't with GMRS is talk to a different set of radio nerds and talk on VHF. But the reason I recommend GMRS is always because for a radio service where I can get one license, it can cover my entire family. It can cover most of my extended family. So I can take any of the handful of very cheap Baofeng GM-15 Pros that I have, and I got a few of them. I can pitch one of those to my parents. I can pitch one of those to my in-laws. I can pitch one to my sister, my brother-in-law. I can hand one to my daughter. I can hand one to all kinds of people.

And we can all piggyback off of my license and my call sign. So I can arm up a small army with radios very, very quickly and 100% legally, I might add. And that is why I always recommend GMRS. I'm not saying don't get into amateur radio, but I am saying that for the barrier to entry being as low as it is, I recommend people start there. Because you can get a license for $35 that'll cover your entire freaking family.

You don't have to make your wife hate you by making her study for a ham radio test and then go someplace to go take it. And you can get the job done. Because're going to, because at the end of the day, like I have no particular want,

no offense to anybody, but I have no particular want to talk to like 10,000 strangers in the local area. My comms plan is built around my wife, my daughter and me. Those are the people that I need to have comms with. So if I can't get my wife to get a ham radio license, then ham radio is useless to me.

It doesn't... Because not just do you have to get her to get the license, you have to get her to use it and to familiarize herself with it. And the ham radios can be more complicated than the GMRS radios and the

FRS radios. And that's that's the other thing is that with gmrs it's channelized i don't have to tell my daughter what frequency to go to i tell her press this button until you get to channel three problem solved it is it is a radio service it is equipment built for the layperson which most people are now your ham radios they can do that same thing. You can channelize your ham radio, which I have done with my two Bayo fangs that I use.

I've got my grandfather, I believe his ham license is expired now, but when it was not, we were using it between fishing boats, and it was channelized for just that reason. Yeah, I mean, that is a fair point. using it between fishing boats and it was channelized for just that reason. Yeah. I mean, that, that is a fair point.

If you have a GMRS license and you have a ham license and you have a ham radio, I mean, it's not a hundred percent legal because technically you're only supposed to use GMRS equipment for GMRS frequencies, but comma, however, well,

it's a, it's a wattage restriction. Yeah. Like, like I think your GMRS radios are like a half water, a one and a half watt and the the low level handy talkies for ham are five watt they are a half watt on the frs frequencies two watts okay on uh so in one so using using my bail fang or no are they five watts

they're half a watt on the frs frequencies they're five watts on one through seven and on 15 through 22 you can blow 50 watts up which no handheld it's going to push 50 watts they're all like between oh no no absolutely not you're gonna have to have an amplifier yeah for sure okay so i think the bail fangs are five they're four and a half they're not pushing five watts yeah yeah they're not getting quite there as far as as what kind of GMRS is that that I have, so I have a whole gaggle of Beofane GM15 Pros. They are usually like two for 50 bucks on Amazon. They're cheap, they work, and I've knocked mine around enough to know that, like,

I wouldn't say throw it off a building, but they'll take a knock, and they're cheap enough. They're cheap enough that if you buy like a half dozen of the damn things, you should do that anyway, because you have friends friends and they want to have radios too. I have a Radiodity DB20G in my truck, which so far I've been able to make some contacts. I mean, I've been able to play tag with a repeater 20 to 30 miles away with that with a little 12 inch whip antenna. So like it definitely does work. And then that man pack is built around a Wuxin KG 1000 G plus, which is, in my opinion, like the GMRS radio to be in the mobile world right now until someone makes something better.

But I'm going to tell you, which they will. I'm sure they will i'm sure they will but i'm gonna tell you right now that for like 380 400 bucks that's how that is a butt kicking little radio and i have yeah i'm looking at a yesu mobile base station for my house to to mesh up with my big tv antenna that i'm gonna put a ham radio antenna on okay so back to the banner so com comm security is what I fully expect. We're going to spend the next 20 to 30 minutes talking about, which is why I saved it for last. So everything in comm security is built around the idea that I want to talk to Nick.

I don't want to talk to people I don't want to talk to. I don't want other people listening. And some of that is going to be impossible because it goes back to the flashlight in the dark concept where if you turn the light on everybody can see the light where the light's coming from well if you turn on your radio and transmit everybody can see everybody can hear you like there's no way to avoid that but there are ways to make make it more difficult for a person to hear you and there are ways to make sure that what they hear doesn't do them a lot of good.

And for anybody that thinks for a moment, all I'm talking about is like, you know, Mad Max stuff. I talk to my daughter about a lot of these things when we're at campgrounds and we start talking back and forth on radios, because I don't want anybody to know that there's a 12 year old girl broadcasting her location when she's by herself on a radio on an open frequency. And if that sounds paranoid, there are people in this world that have made me that way. Blame them, not me. And let's be honest here. Most criminals are opportunistic. I don't know how many of them have radios, but I don't want to find out either.

Poachers have radios, man. Everybody has radios. They're cheap. You can buy them at walmart you have to assume that anyone and that means all of the worst people as well as your local priest can have a radio yep so everything in comp security is built around those facets i want to talk to people i don't want people listening and i don't want them to be able to get signals intelligence from the things me and my buddies are talking about. So the very first thing that's worth pointing out is some kind of a protocol for authentication. Normally, when you talk to somebody on a radio, if you have a good signal, you can hear their voice well enough that between their voice and their accent, everything else, you probably will be able to work out who you're talking to.

Like I can hear my daughter's voice on a radio and I know that's my daughter. But if you're talking about, if you're talking through brush, if the signal is broken, if they're static, you cannot depend on that. So you need some method of establishing that the person I'm speaking to is, has, I've established their bona fides. A lot of times like with ham and with gmrs there are there are official there are official recorded call signs like for gmrs mine is wsak388 it's kd9dw it is it is publicly accessible information guys it's not like i'm giving

away state secrets like anybody can google right if you know my name you can find my ham call sign come on yeah and that goes for anybody that's actually i should have put that in our signals intelligence but anyway i digress oh yeah that's a fair also if anybody is concerned about the fact that your uh your call sign is publicly searchable you can actually use a po box as your your home address so that at least people can't search your search, your your ID and then trace back to your house. I don't worry about that because like there's only so many Ravalees in the world and I'm just not hard to find. But if that is a concern, that's valid and that's how you get around it. Use a P.O. box. But you need some kind of a protocol for authentication.

It's got to be something that you and the person you're speaking to can establish, can know in advance. And you can say, okay, if I use this code word, or if I use this name, or if I use this, whatever, this is how I'm going to be able to identify that the person I'm speaking to is the person I want to talk to and not some random weirdo. And you can make that as complicated or as simple as it needs to be, but you need some kind of way to establish that I'm talking to the person I want to talk to. This goes back to even pre-radio military security. Call and response. Anybody that's watched Band of Brothers, Flash Thunder, The Little Clickers, you know, people have been doing this for a very long time all you have to do is work in say a word into a sentence and they know the proper response yeah

and they just include that single word in the sentence so in another lifetime when i wrote a book there was actually one part of that where there was a group of people talking on radios and they were identifying not themselves, but the station they were transmitting from by the names of states. So Florida was the Southeast station and California was the was the South or no Florida. California was Southwest. Florida was Southeast. Florida was Southeast, but that way the, the state that they were calling from was identified into the RTO at home base,

what direction they were calling from. So that person knew that this intelligence report is coming from that direction. So they could kind of like a war game it out on a map. It's something that simple. And by the way, if it's going to be that simple, someone's going to figure it out sooner or later.

Oh yeah. You talk long enough. People are going to, people are going to figure it out sooner or later. Oh, yeah. You talk long enough. People are going to code break you if they speak your language. Probably. But things like coded names, coded phrases. Now, I will say that at least on GMRS, and I'm pretty sure on HAM, I think on HAM, actually, there are some frequencies you can use encryption. But on GMRS, it is strictly disallowed. You're not, as far as I'm aware,

you're not supposed to use any type of encryption on ham. Now I could be wrong. I could be wrong too, but I seem to remember that from somewhere that there, there was some exception. It's awful hard to prove if you're talking to your friend on ham frequencies and you're telling him about your ham sandwich, that what you're actually talking about is your Ford F-150.

And there is, there's no way to there's no way to legally legally prevent you from using a name or a phrase that means something else right and it's just good principle i mean that's why a lot of times like with when again going back to the campsite analogy with my daughter, it's I'm home or I'm, I'm at a place that means something to me because she and I've talked about that, but it doesn't mean something to somebody else who's not. So it's just, it's the,

so for instance, I'm at work broadcasted in the clear. I know where my spouse's work is. Random individual who is listening doesn't know number one who my spouse is number two where they work or number three maybe there are multiple places where work could be here's one of my ham nerds and i mean that with all the love and respect in the world i think the only encryption exception is for amateur radio is certain transmissions to satellites that might have been what i was

thinking of but i believe they do allow data transmission on some ham frequencies and they do allow digital like you can send text over ham yeah digital digital transition and but that's the provable difference between slang and code zero and yeah intent that's that's really what it is they have to prove that you intended to deceive well i mean the atf proves intent all the time it's constructive intent do we let's not go down that road i'm a tool maker i am constructive intent i mean come on any any piece of metal i can make into whatever i feel like assuming the dimensions fit within the bounds of that metal constructive intent is ass i'm a coon ass with a dremel right exactly come on guys teenagers have been making slam fire shotguns out of steel black pipe and roofing nails for oh god as long as

there's been 12 gauge yeah so the other thing is once you get past this idea of like authenticating who you're speaking to using coded names and phrases is having secondary and tertiary frequencies. There is no practical limit to how many of these secondary frequencies you could have. And you should have, I would say at a minimum three. There's a primary. There's if primary gets blown. I know primary, secondary, tertiary and emergency. Primary alternate contingency emergency pace plan.

But the point remains, I would say you have to have multiple frequencies so that if there if there is cross chatter that you don't want to have to compete with, or if you have reason to believe that that frequency has been blown, someone's listening. You need some kind of a way to signal everyone else that you've jumped to the next frequency which is right here criteria to transfer frequencies sometimes that's a command sometimes it's it is um a time it could be a date and this is kind of what you were talking about earlier, where if you want to obscure your comms, you could literally say in the bottom half of the hour, we're going to, let's say for a moment, we had a really frequent check-in period. It was every five minutes. Bottom half of the hour, we're going to be on this frequency. Top half of the hour, we're going to be on this frequency.

Or before or after noon. Or you could even do talk on one, listen on the other, and swap those for the different people. So if I'm talking to Phil, I would be broadcasting on channel one and listening on channel two. He would be talking on channel two, listening on channel one. But that would only be possible with ham radios because like with GMRS, they're locked in certain frequencies. With FRS, they don't have that. Unless you have two radios. Unless you have two radios.

I mean, that can be kind of equipment dependent, but you can do, it can be something as simple as we're going to be on channel one on the first check-in. We're going to be on channel two, the second check-in we're going to be on channel three, the next check-in or it could be and rotate through.

And this, I don't think this happens near as much on like UHF VHF, but I do know that on like HF, depending on atmospheric conditions, certain chunks of the bandwidth become very difficult to access at certain times of the day. They do. So you could be in a situation where, hey, this is the time.

We're going to try to make this contact. If we don't make it here, your next attempt will be at this time on this frequency. So you could have all that built into your comms plan. It is a combination of using the available bandwidth so that we can make our contact without having to compete with other users. It is also a function of making sure we can make this contact in such a way that there are not people listening in that we can help because we're going to, and again, that can be

criteria. It could be a command where like you hear a certain word that is not something in common parlance you know disconnect you know disconnect jump to the next frequency and you know this could even be event based so for instance me and my wife's primary communication system cell phone no reason not to be your primary. Everybody's got them and they work. While they work, it's a perfect communication system. It's damn near instantaneous. It's with you all the time. And it has near limitless bandwidth as long as you're willing to pay for it.

But, okay. AT&T had an outage. We happened to use AT&T. AT&T had an outage we happened to use AT&T we went to our alternate communications plan which is an IM service that uses Wi-Fi

he was able to get a hold of me immediately the event that triggered it was not able to get a hold of me via our normal text messages or phone calls because there happened to be a cell phone outage. That's an event-based frequency change.

So, you know, it can be dynamic as well as, you know, scheduled. Yeah, but again, these are all ways that you know to engage those other frequencies or to engage those other communication devices. Like you said, go from cell phones to radios to mesh-tastic to whatever. Sooner or later, in a bad enough situation, sooner or later, your comms plan is going to run out if things get spicy. Oh, absolutely.

But the point is that the whole point of making a plan, the whole point of preparedness is that the first hiccup doesn't cause your plan to fall apart. Like you have planned for something to pick up and something to be engaged so that if you have to figure it out on the fly, you're figuring it out two or three steps down from normal operations. And the other thing that like we can debate this, how seriously somebody should take this in the civilian world, but a burn command. I think it needs to be taken very seriously. So in the military, the second thing I got taught about radios was that every radio in the military has a diagram that says, place muzzle here to disable radio. That was the second thing I learned about them. That was before, that was like right after how to turn them on,

was how to make them turn off forever. Especially when you're using like digital encrypted communications like the U.S. military uses. Especially when you're using sync guards, where if someone military uses. Especially when you're using sync guards. With sync guards, with their ability to frequency hop, the ability to cut into a sync guard's communication net is difficult. You need a certain level of technology to pull that off. But if you have one of the stupid things, it's really easy. You've got the radio.

It's like getting the Enigma machine off one of the subs. At that point, we figured out your game. We got it. Congratulations. Your encryption means nothing. I have your files. I would say that put this somewhere in your comms

plan as far as at what point and how. Destroy the comms plan. At what point and how destroy the comms plan at what point do you destroy your comms plan you if you there's part of me that says you should never have any of this written down but quite frankly for certain family members you're going to have to write some of this down because no one's going to commit all this to memory but at a certain point you need to have a command or a criteria that tells a person, I bash my radio on a rock until it stops turning on.

I pop the battery out. I throw it as far that direction as I can, throw the radio as far that direction as I can, and I eat the piece of paper that has all the frequencies written on it. Or if your frequencies are programmed into the radio, it'd be really nice to know how to quickly factory reset that radio to burn everything out of it. That's all. I think it's a three button combination on the Baofeng, so I have to look

at that again. It's equipment dependent, but the thing of it is, is that if you don't have a way to factory reset that radio quickly, like within 10 seconds. The 9mm reset. Yes, the 9mm or the rock reset, just battery as far that direction as I can throw it,

smash, hold the, hold the radio by the antenna and smash it on a rock or a tree until it, it, you don't think it's ever going to do anything. Sometimes the best solution is the most primitive one. Smash it with a caveman. It on the bunga,

but the point remains, you need a, you need a, you need some kind of way to tell a person, this is the point at which you're blown. Do not allow the comms plan and the radio and the communications device to fall into hands. We don't want it to be. And that doesn't always have to be a physical destruction of your comms. Sometimes it could be as simple as, hey, if you get the burn command, we are all radio silent for 24 hours, and then we will pick back up on a secondary

comms plan, say something written on the back of the first one, that is a whole different set of frequencies, that's a whole different timing, it's a whole different everything. But the point is that there has to be a point in this whole creation of this entire plan, and this has been like 45 minutes of us talking like nerds, but there has to be a point at which in the creation of this comms plan, the comms plan gets destroyed. It's burn. Someone knows everything. And this isn't, oh, I heard some cross chat or somebody was talking on one of our frequencies. That could be transient. You go to another frequency to try to get away from that. I'm talking about, okay, the last three times we checked in, we've got a,

we got a weirdo jumping on us every single time we transmit. So they now know, they know all of our frequencies. They know our timing. They know our interval. We've been cut. We've been cut into burn the comms plan. Yeah, essentially your communications are compromised. And one thing that I think we all need to admit to ourselves, that it doesn't really fit in here, yes, maybe no. Your cell phone, your IMs, your encrypted communications apps, they are all compromised. They are.

We have to assume they're all compromised. I mean, look at the, what was it, the U.S. government just said that china has compromised all cell phone traffic in the continental u.s and that you shouldn't send text messages anymore that was news i mean yeah yeah we come on they build all of our cell phones man they don't have to build all of our cell phones they've got 300 of those little egg heads in a freaking room that do nothing but like try to hack U.S. government equipment. I mean, the only secure communications is in-person physical communications, and that's only as secure as your perimeter. So I'm going to tell all of y'all something before we go to this very last banner. Something that was told to me by somebody far older and more experienced and smarter than I am in almost all disciplines.

And it's important to have people like that in your life because they can tell. Was it Stuart? This one was not Stuart, although Stuart would probably agree with this guy. Probably would. So he said, whether we are talking about communications, gun safes, home security, home hardening, self-defense, anything, everything in life, there is nothing proof there is only resistant yeah so he's that's fair said if if you if you let's say your concern is i want to make my guns and my safe theft proof that's not possible you can make them theft resistant you can make it hard

you can make it take power tools and noise and time, but you cannot make it impossible. And he said the same thing applies to your security. So you can have a computer that is locked down. It can have all the VPNs, all the firewalls, all the whatever. You could even go the extra step of saying this computer is never connected to the internet. never connects to the internet, there's still ways into it. Someone who is motivated enough will kick in your front door and take the hard drive out of this stupid thing. So his point of view was always that what we have to understand is that we are making things resistant. We're not making them proof. And the resources of a state or government agency, and not necessarily one of our government agencies, but a foreign government agency, are infinite. So even if you make it to where, like, Johnny Crackhead down the street can't get you guns,

if the ATF wants in your safe, they're going to get in. If you make it to where, like, Johnny Hacker can't get into your computer and do stuff, if China wants into your computer, they're going to get in. Because they will lock 3,000 eggheads in a room and tell them, break into Nick's computer no matter how long it takes. And they'll get in sooner or later

because there's no way to stop them. They will. Even with encrypted hard drives, encrypted operating systems, it doesn't matter. It's only a matter of time and resources. Because let's be honest, I'm not that clever yeah well i'm not i'm not i'm not more clever than 300 people but that's the point is the weight of numbers is going to win even if you are that clever you are not more clever than the stubbornness of a government agency they will they will they will spend

they will spend lifetimes and fortunes to get the end result they want. So just keep that in mind. All this stuff we're talking about is to make it to where it's difficult for somebody to cut into your comms. We're inconvenient at minimum. We're not making it impossible. We're just going to make it tricky. and the other and and for most threats that you or i or or anybody in this in that's watching now are going to face that's probably good enough you know you're you're 12 year old at the campground for the average criminal that may want to do harm to you or your daughter that's good enough

because the opportunity won't be presenting itself in a very clear matter. Yeah. And the last bullet point I had in here was ciphers. So we talked earlier about how speaking in code and encrypting your transmissions is frowned upon by the FCC. I've used my air quotes. I've given my disclaimer. Technically naughty. You will be on the naughty list if you do this but ciphers have been around as long as people have been speaking to each other pig latin is a cipher uh your standard alphanumeric poor one yeah your standard alphanumeric where a is one b is is two, so on and so forth. Simple substitution ciphers.

That is a cipher. Making an anagram in a controlled fashion, not just a random one, although it could be random depending on how inventive you want to get. There's a million ways to scramble information. I would say that for

a group of people trying to control information, it probably doesn't make sense to make the entire message a cipher. But if you have a specific piece of information, you don't want to speak out loud so that anybody can hear it, perhaps consider applying a cipher to that. And if it is something that is vaguely pronounceable, then pronounce it, then spell it. And then people are going to be listening to your message. But the minute they hear something that sounds like blah, blah, blah, blah, they know, listen to the spelling.

That's the information I need to record. I need to apply this cipher to decode it. And that can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it. Like I go back to the principle that a sync ours operates on where it frequency hops, but in order to jump into that frequency, in order to jump into that series of frequencies, you have to know at what point do I intercept the first frequency in the

series? So you need a time hack. In addition to all the frequencies, you can do something very similarly where you integrate, say the time of day into your cipher so that there is some component of this that regenerates every hour. You can do that with a book cipher based on the page or the chapter, I'm sure. I mean, book ciphers have been around for a very long time. But one thing you got to be really careful about that, especially with the modern cycle of iterating books and reprinting books, you must have the same edition and the same printing of book.

So your King James Bible from 1985 that's been in your parents' bedroom for many, many years and your King James Bible you bought at Barnes & Noble yesterday. Does Barnes & Noble still exist? Yes. I was there a couple of days ago. Good. Anyway, then it fits. The Barnes & Noble book you bought at Barnes & Noble yesterday is probably going to have different kerning or different spacing or whatever that's going to result in a different

answer to your cipher. Joe Oliveira bringing up the Navajo Code Talkers, which boy would I have loved to have been a fly on the wall when those poor japanese sobs were trying to figure out what the hell language these these crazy americans were speaking ah it's a language with no written written words yeah fantastic although god the comments picked up the same thing that i've been thinking about which which is AI might crack it. It's very probable. Because the problem, but again, what we're talking about.

It has infinite attention span to focus on. Yes. But again, what this boils down to is, is that it is a tool in the toolbox to help you secure the information. If you've applied everything else, and you've tried to make it to where you're not being listened to, if this is like the last thing in your toolbox to try to control the release of certain information, like it can't hurt to try.

But it is something that if you're going to utilize a cipher in your comms plan, you have to know about it and agree to it ahead of time. It has. And you better have a pretty good reason for it. Just because like the ham clubs get really particular about people breaking FCC rules a lot of times. Well, yes, the FCC is probably not going to come down on you because your child told you use your ham radio. But the local ham club is probably going to be mad at you, And they're probably going to try to stop you from transmitting in the

future. Yes. And it's also worth pointing out that like some of them are very ornery. Most of the stuff we've talked about up till now would not raise many eyebrows, having multiple frequencies, even something as,

as extreme sounding. Some people as having a burn command that doesn't, when you, when you say that over the radio, that doesn't immediately raise alarm bells when you say that over the radio, that doesn't immediately raise alarm bells. A cipher will the minute a cipher is immediately. Okay. I need to know whatever that was.

So it's, it's a double-edged sword of the minute you start speaking. It's so earlier when we talk about coded names, like if, if I use a code name and Nick uses a code name, like people are just going to listen to us and think, well, they're nerds. And we are. But the minute you start talking in a cipher or the minute you start like using really heavily coded messages, someone is going to take notice of that. And their curiosity is going to.

It's like buried treasure, man. Doesn't matter what you buried. And here's the thing. You could be passing information back and forth about freaking baking recipes. It doesn't matter. It's the fact that you're trying to obscure the information that someone is going to pay attention. And they're going to start digging. Because why wouldn't they?

If they're doing the smart thing and they're listening for signals intelligence, they're going to be surfing the airways. And if they're smart, they're not going to be talking to you they're just going to be listening like understand that of everything we've i've put in here ciphers is the one thing that you i i would tell a person like have have that in your comms plan i wouldn't use it unless you have to unless you feel like you have really good reason to use it because the minute you start doing it, someone's going to, someone's attention is going to be aroused.

And if, if you are going to use it, you need to use it sparingly. Yes. Because the more you use a cipher, the more likely it is that someone will be able to guess or brute force their way through it. And understand that in the days in the world of AI, that could be once. Oh, yeah, it's probably once.

Especially if it's a simple substitution cipher. With AI, I guarantee you it is once. And the only the only thing that so the only thing that makes a cipher, I think, still a useful tool is that the time it takes to break the cipher can make time sensitive information useless by the time you break it. So like that's worth pointing out. I just say like it's a tool in the toolbox, but you'd better you better have a reason for using it. And you have better have, you better have a, you might even want to have like a, a cipher that kind of consumes itself over time or change itself over time. Because if you use the exact same cipher more than once, you're blown.

So, so was there anything we talked about, Nick, that like, you felt like I left out? Cause I, I literally wrote all this down last night while I was trying to go to sleep, and this is a lot of old RTO knowledge,

and this is a lot of crap you could Google off the internet. Nothing here is, look at me, I am a radio master. It is literally all stuff that's accessible. It's out there. You know, I don't think you missed anything in key any key point keeping it obviously keeping it uh equipment agnostic yeah but i think one thing that that is worth reiterating is something i brought up earlier your comms plan should include your most basic forms of communication up to your most

eccentric so your cell phone uh your snapchat if you're still using that email potentially um because yeah maybe snapchat servers are down whatever maybe at&t is down maybe snapchat's got a hack fire off off a Gmail. Maybe Google will figure it out before Snapchat figures it out. Who knows? But that can go up to and including non-transmitted messaging systems. So dead drops. If you guys are in a local area and you need to pass a message, and you need to pass a message and you need to pass a message in a semi

covert way you can do that through dead drops or flaggings of whatever kind so hey hang this in a certain location means there's a message or means I need to talk to you so say you you happen to have a house on a hill like I do, and you can hop up on your roof, take a look at binoculars over a long distance. You got a buddy three blocks over, you can see the top of his roof and maybe like his old TV antenna. Hey man, hang a blaze orange flag if you need help up on the TV antenna. It can be that simple. Now if the TV antenna got knocked down by a hurricane, well, that's out the window. But there are some things you just can't be ready for.

But, you know, aside from working in, I would say, your everyday communications into this communications plan, the most important thing is to have some stated plan with even if it's just your immediate family that's it that's all i mean i i would also point out that like i would venture to say that even before you start approaching neighbors and friends and like-minded folks your family should be the first people you rope into this comms plan, because what is the whole point of us doing all the crazy things we talk about on this show, if not to protect and look out for our loved ones? So that like that is why my wife and daughter are part of that comms plan. When when when AT&T service went down not too long ago, my wife and I were talking back and forth on signal. Exactly.

She's got Wi-Fi in her building. I got Wi-Fi in my building. It was quick and dirty, but it begs the question. It works. It begs the question of what would happen if my home internet had gone out here? What happens if her internet goes out there? That's why we started having these bigger, these bigger conversations about,

you know, like, Hey honey, I need to get a radio in your Jeep and you need to be able to talk to me. And it's not, it's not because we have the expectation of being in a situation where we need to be able to talk back and forth at the moment at a moment's notice, but is because if

i lose contact with my wife while she's at work and i'm home the only way i can re-establish that that communication without a radio or cell phone or whatever is a four and a half mile you know hike across town and if i'm in new orleans i'm an hour away. So it gets to be that situation where it's like better to have it and have it in place. And for her to know, if I pick up my phone and my phone says SOS and the cell towers are out, the very first thing I need to do is I need to go out to the truck, get the radio fired up and try to reach Phil. and try to reach phil if i don't get in touch with i don't get in touch with phil i need to try again every hour on the hour until he happens to have his radio on and then we can re-establish communications because i could be in a situation where she doesn't have service up here but i'm in new orleans and i do have service who freaking knows right those are all things you just you owe it to yourself and your family to kind of work all those situations out and have a plan together. And that plan, especially where severe weather comes in, because it would not take much to take out a cell tower in the local area.

But people that are, say, in the town over for work like myself, that tower might be fine. You're not going to even know anything's wrong. She's just busy. She hasn't texted me. Yep. So I didn't really intend for this to be like an hour and 10 minutes, but I should have known that you and I could talk about it for that long. It's an important thing that needs to be discussed, Mark.

You know, as much as we try to keep it hardware agnostic there's a certain limitation to that eventually you're gonna have to start getting into hardware and we did have a couple people asking what radios do we recommend and honestly it comes down to make your comms plan first and then let the requirements of your plan dictate your equipment yeah i mean that's a good way to go about it because i mean i'd be the first to admit that I would, if my wife and daughter both had technician class ham, ham licenses, I would have jumped in. I'd have jumped head first into ham. Ham would have been where I'd have put all my time and effort. But part of my comms plan includes who's involved in it. And, uh, it has to, it has to include the abilities of the people you're trying to talk to. Because if one of your kids is an eight-year-old,

you're not going to get your eight-year-old to have a general class ham license and be bouncing signals off the stratosphere, unless they're some kind of whiz kid, which congratulations if they are. Yep. Well, before we sign this one out, I got to give a shout out. Joe said that his son is going to be a combat engineer, ships out to BASIC on June 16th. Because your son

is officially official, he is now included in this brotherhood of dysfunctional morons that all signed a blank check to serve their country. So tell my brother I said hey and he's going to be in my thoughts and prayers and I look forward to the next time I bump into him.

And for anybody that listened to this and thought these guys are talking out of their freaking head, this is nonsense. Then, you know, you can leave comments and you can grill us. And that's your opinion. And that's OK. Yeah. Harass me in the comments. I will ignore you. But on the other hand, if this kind of resonate with you and you thought this nerdy stuff actually seems interesting, then, you know, leave us comments and tell us, hey, more nerd stuff.

I mean, we can't always talk about fun stuff. Sometimes it's got to be like, you know, administrative work and things like that. That's true. I mean, eventually we're going to run off, run out of ammo to blow doors off of stuff, which of which i will have to order some of those frangible slugs to try blowing up some doors yeah i got two boxes showing up tomorrow i just don't have any doors that i can blow up without my wife getting pissed at me i got one of our patrons that might have a range we can shoot some doors at so maybe we'll be able to make that work out this summer oh oh yeah we might be shooting doors all right let's go ahead and sign this out

before i get into trouble matter of fact podcast going out the door good night everybody thank you for sticking around thanks for the comments and talk to you another week bye everybody later guys We'll be right back. Thank you. I'll see you next time.