Major disaster comms options

[krokus]

That's interesting. I always assumed based on some educational thinking it was the chips that were fried. Thus vacuum tubes should hold up to an EMP or CME from the sun.

Yes, yet another subforum for SHTF would be nice.

I decided to start this thread, based on the above comment in another thread. For this thread, I am thinking large scale disasters, such as large volcano explosions, Hurricane Katrina, 2004 Tsunami, nuclear weapon detonation, 1993 Mississippi River flood, etc.

That opens up the discussion of infrastructure availability, or lack of it. One of the reasons that gets interesting, is that vacuum tube/valve gear tends to survive single event upsets, such as EMP, better. It takes a lot more energy to have the heater filaments operating. Would it be better to make an emergency kit, using something like a SOTA setup, and store it in a sealed and shielded container?

Lots of factors to consider.

 

[FFPM571]

wrap everything in tin foil

 

[R8000]

My advice ?
Stop listening to the prepper idiots. Just enjoy the hobby while your able to. Life is short.

Here's some EMP info from a real engineer...
EMP Video with shiny photos and animations!

 

[k6cpo]

My advice ?
Stop listening to the prepper idiots. Just enjoy the hobby while your able to. Life is short.

Here's some EMP info from a real engineer...
EMP Video with shiny photos and animations!

Best advice...

If we ever get into the situation where we're going to have to cope with the effects of an EMP, we're going to have a lot more to worry about. Any EMP detonation is going to be accompanied by other actions closer to home. You may not even have time to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

 

[mastr]

...If we ever...have to cope with the effects of an EMP, we're going to have a lot more to worry about...

Agree. My house is perhaps better equipped with radio equipment than many EOC facilities, but "comms" will be low on my list of things to deal with if/when there is an EMP event.

 

[FFPM571]

Dig your baofengs out of the garbage can buried in the back yard and get to yappin with who ?? no one knows

 

[krokus]

Part of the reason I am looking at large scale, is I remember stories of small towns affected by Katrina that were left stranded. They had no contact with the outside world, until a ham showed up. They had no idea the scope of what happened, nor why no assistance arrived.

 

[rescuecomm]

Look up wiki about the Soviet Project K nuclear tests. The US Starfish Prime test didn't down the power grid in Hawaii being 800 miles or so distant.

 

[mastr]

...I remember stories of small towns affected by Katrina that were left stranded. They had no contact with the outside world...

Either one will probably be useless after an EMP event, but for almost everything else, there are about 2 practical choices.

You could stick your HF (or maybe even 2 meter) radio, some wire, coaxial cable, and a few insulators in a Pelican case and after some set up time and effort eventually reach someone in the "outside world".

Or get a satellite phone, put it in a Pelican case, dial the appropriate digits and talk to the specific person you want just about immediately.

I have done both, and prefer the latter by a considerable margin.

 

[k6cpo]

Part of the reason I am looking at large scale, is I remember stories of small towns affected by Katrina that were left stranded. They had no contact with the outside world, until a ham showed up. They had no idea the scope of what happened, nor why no assistance arrived.

In some respects, preppers have the right idea. Too many people have gotten the idea that the government is going to come to their rescue immediately after a major disaster so they don't take any to take care of themselves. As I said in another post, they expect FEMA to be on the ground with 100 tons of supplies and 1000 workers within just a few hours. Nobody has any self reliance any more.

 

[GlobalNorth]

Conduct your own experiments.

Go out on a rural Interstate highway. Safely pull over to the shoulder and place the vehicle in park. Turn your 2 meter/70 cm mobile radio and try to make a contact for 5 minutes.

If you have a HF rig, 10 meter, or 6 meter try that. Do it weekdays,weekends, and during various hours 0300 to 0430 hours would be the most likely time to conduct a surprise strike against this country.

Now, factor in the number of people who will be trying to do the same thing on frequencies that will be saturated with ionized energy that start around LF and continue all the way to SHF if one country explodes a thermonuclear warhead over the center of the CONUS at several hundred miles AGL. If you lack ELF, VLF, SHF, and or EHF gear; you aren't going to be heard during any part of a nuclear war, even if the local auto club is till responding. Forget the police/sheriff/highway patrol. When I was around in the 1980s and the threat was real, I was going to drive at mach speed towards the local AFB to be taken out by the fireball/mach stem. Radiation poisoning is no way to die. Other guys were going to go home and be with their families when the warheads came.

If you are in a wildland fire evac, a tornado, hurricane, or a mass attack of cane toad-killer hornet hybrids, if you can't make a QSO during a normal day - your calls to fellow amateurs, scanner listeners, and good natured professional truckers are not going to be of help in the maelstrom of panic either. No one is likely going to be listening to aid others.

When society reaches a tipping point, every one of us is on our own and building a fort in your backyard with a cache of ammo, food, and water isn't likely to help beyond a limited type of crisis.

 

[GlobalNorth]

Look up wiki about the Soviet Project K nuclear tests. The US Starfish Prime test didn't down the power grid in Hawaii being 800 miles or so distant.

The Starfish Prime shot was over Johnston Atoll and had a yield of ~1.4 Mt. The altitude was ~250 miles and about 900 miles from Haw'aii. Kauai lost its long line microwave links to the rest of Haw'aii, hundreds of street lights were damaged, A great amount of H-EMP damage depends on magnetic lines of the Earth when and where the blast occurs. This was in 1962, long before the popular use of solid state devices and no integrated circuits were outside of lab settings. Enhanced H-EMP devices were not invented yet. Solid state SCADA now exists in every power substation and powerplant where it didn't in 1962. UHF microwave switching relays and stations now exist.

LANL and LLNL have done a lot of work in the two intervening generations since then. So have the Soviets/Russians, the Chinese, The North Koreans, the israelis, and many others.

Nuclear hydrodynamics have had a long developments since 1962 and we can not look at the wayback machine to predict what the results may be in the proximal future.

 

[rescuecomm]

Conduct your own experiments.

Go out on a rural Interstate highway. Safely pull over to the shoulder and place the vehicle in park. Turn your 2 meter/70 cm mobile radio and try to make a contact for 5 minutes.

If you have a HF rig, 10 meter, or 6 meter try that. Do it weekdays,weekends, and during various hours 0300 to 0430 hours would be the most likely time to conduct a surprise strike against this country.

Now, factor in the number of people who will be trying to do the same thing on frequencies that will be saturated with ionized energy that start around LF and continue all the way to SHF if one country explodes a thermonuclear warhead over the center of the CONUS at several hundred miles AGL. If you lack ELF, VLF, SHF, and or EHF gear; you aren't going to be heard during any part of a nuclear war, even if the local auto club is till responding. Forget the police/sheriff/highway patrol. When I was around in the 1980s and the threat was real, I was going to drive at mach speed towards the local AFB to be taken out by the fireball/mach stem. Radiation poisoning is no way to die. Other guys were going to go home and be with their families when the warheads came.

If you are in a wildland fire evac, a tornado, hurricane, or a mass attack of cane toad-killer hornet hybrids, if you can't make a QSO during a normal day - your calls to fellow amateurs, scanner listeners, and good natured professional truckers are not going to be of help in the maelstrom of panic either. No one is likely going to be listening to aid others.

When society reaches a tipping point, every one of us is on our own and building a fort in your backyard with a cache of ammo, food, and water isn't likely to help beyond a limited type of crisis.

Having some supplies beats starving to death in the immediate aftermath. Although without an excellent fallout shelter, there's a good chance of dying from acute radiation sickness. That's why when I hear the political heads declare that the US will never first strike and initiate a nuclear war, it gives me a feeling that all the expensive weapons testing was a waste.

 

[vagrant]

It sounds like I would have fun camping for a week or more. Anyways, people come, people go. Nothing new about that.

 

[Boombox]

My suggestion: make sure you have a working AM, FM, SW radio. Being able to hear information will be more important than talking to people, at least in the short term.

If an EMP hits, it may not strike the entire country to the same extent -- depending on altitude of detonation, local terrain, distance from the detonation, and other factors, of course. That means that there may be working communications infrastructure in parts of the country that could be heard in other parts of the country that were more affected by the EMP. So, in my view, a working receiver would be probably more important for communications, at least short term, than being able to talk to someone.

I think it would be more important to have spare food, medicine, etc., and a means to protect one's self and one's family than radio or other communications. You can't eat a radio.

 

[MTS2000des]

My suggestion: make sure you have a working AM, FM, SW radio. Being able to hear information will be more important than talking to people, at least in the short term.

Key word short term. Terrestrial broadcasting is becoming less and less viable, as the corporate owners strip out local staff and replace with sat fed canned music and stop sets from Dallas or LA. None of this will help you when the tornado comes through or the flood waters rise in Omaha.

The local branches of these corporate owners invite you to "download our severe weather app" which will be utterly useless when the serving cell sites are offline or backhaul to the cellular network is taken out, or the non-replaceable battery on that flagship $1200 smartphone is dead.

 

[R8000]

You can't eat a radio.

Don't give him ideas! My god man, we have people who eat laundry soap now.
I'd hate to think what one would do to "make more radios"

 

[smittie]

Out of the list of five illustrative catastrophic events, everyone seems focused on the one relatively least likely of the five. That's funny.

GMRS/FRS radios are my first choice among friends and family in the case of the far more likely disasters. I have a mobile GMRS radio in the truck. My wife carries a GMRS handheld in her car. Bubble pak FRS radios are pretty readily available. They can communicate with the higher powered GMRS mobiles in the vehicles. A lot of people already have FRS radios that they use for business or recreation.

If there is a nuclear strike, there will be far bigger problems to be concerned with than which radio is best.

 

[rescuecomm]

Out of the list of five illustrative catastrophic events, everyone seems focused on the one relatively least likely of the five. That's funny.

GMRS/FRS radios are my first choice among friends and family in the case of the far more likely disasters. I have a mobile GMRS radio in the truck. My wife carries a GMRS handheld in her car. Bubble pak FRS radios are pretty readily available. They can communicate with the higher powered GMRS mobiles in the vehicles. A lot of people already have FRS radios that they use for business or recreation.

If there is a nuclear strike, there will be far bigger problems to be concerned with than which radio is best.

Depends on who's left in tge area. Having GMRS portables to use local is a good idea. I have the AM/FM/SW receiver and the portable radios.

Just a observation about transmitting after an attack. Do any of our suspected adversaries monitor GMRS or cellphone sites for post attack activity? Assuming all satellites were wiped out, I guess they could just make a solicitation call for insurance and if someone answered, then send another missile. LOL..

The old CONELRAD program people had it easy compared to all the RF emitters in use now.

 

[smittie]

Depends on who's left in tge area. Having GMRS portables to use local is a good idea.

Again, nuclear attack is the least likely disaster. If there is a nuclear missile strike, quite honestly I hope I am standing exactly at ground zero.