Post by woodyz on Aug 7, 2013 16:17:44 GMT -7
Take either side or some from each, there is some good information in both views. JMHO
Communication Hi-Jinks
by M.D. Creekmore on August 29, 2011 • 32 comments
This is a guest post by Chris
[This is an entry in our non-fiction writing contest where you could win - First Prize a 10 Person Deluxe Family Survival Kit, Second Prize an Herb Seed Bank or Third Prize a copy of Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat. For complete rules and list of prizes see this post.]
I’ve been interested in disaster and prepping for many years as a result of my former job; I’ve had the pleasure of serving in the fire service and emergency management for over 20 years. Over these years, I’ve had the privilege of planning communications systems and strategies for many public safety agencies, as well as private enterprise and personal planning. What I have learned is there is no one-size-fits-all communications plan for everyone, contrary to popular belief.
Systems can be drastically different from one other-for multiple reasons-which turns out to be a huge problem. Perhaps you’ve heard the term “interoperability” thrown around a bunch of times. In public safety, this country has had HUGE problems with being interoperable; there are volumes written on how the police can’t talk to the firefighters who can’t talk to the EMS personnel.
I would image a lot of readers to the site -who are public safety personnel- can attest to some problem that they’ve either encountered or have heard of. Being on an emergency scene where you cannot communicate with someone is downright dangerous and unnecessary. Why, though, does this have to be? Wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to be able to talk to each other? You would think. Why do I bring this up? Because preppers, in a lot of cases, will not be interoperable with each other when they should be.
Over the years, our glorious FCC has set aside frequencies for public safety to use. Over time, these frequencies filled up. Some areas chose one frequency band, while other chose something different.
Some had a large amount of capital resources to build a decent system, while some had only shoestring budgets. Infuse the large companies trying to sell their snake oil communications systems and next thing you know, every department in your city is on a different frequency band. Add this; most public safety radios are only capable of using one band, and you now have someone who has to carry around up to three or more radios (should he/she even have access to them) to be “interoperable”.
There has been a push over the last several years to get public safety interoperable by setting aside an entire band of frequencies and attempting to migrate everyone there. This would theoretically allow agencies to communicate with one another, using one radio, on one band.
However, it is going so slow. Why? Money and ego. Simply put, communications equipment and infrastructure is expensive and can be time consuming to build, all the while companies are competing to put their stuff in over the others through the bureaucratic red tape of multiple government agencies. Not to mention some simply don’t want to do it. Sounds like preppers in a way, doesn’t it?
But really, what does this have to do with prepping and preppers? Simple: preppers simply aren’t interoperable. After reading multiple sites and multiple postings, there is a conglomeration of different communications ideas, some of which will work, some that might work, and some that are downright insane. As with the nature of prepping, many people who prepare are private about their activities, and rightly so.
Faced with the circumstances that may manifest, it might be in our best interest to be as private as possible. Yet, it is wonderful to see websites and forums flourishing trying to get people prepared and get upon the same page, which would allow for a natural form of interoperability.
It is a shame, I digress, that communications in the prepping community is one of those things that is going to follow the old school public safety sector; there are too many ideas and opinions on what to do and a lot of them are going to be incompatible with one another. There is no central coordination for preppers to coordinate communications amongst one another, and we also have the eternal caveat of communications gear is expensive and/or unobtainable.
Now let’s look at the quandary that public safety has gotten themselves into to see the quandary preppers are going to follow right into. Most public safety agencies have a “district” or area of which they protect. Fire district. Police beat. Response area.
Most agencies build their systems to reliably cover that district as reliably as possible. After all, when the system is being built, that is the area that most of their time will be spent in responding to emergencies and the area they find most important. They do not lend much thought about being called to help in adjacent districts for “mutual aid”, because it is infrequent or there are political dealings that get in the way.
Some agencies had the foresight to try and keep communications on the same band for the same type of agency. However, in a lot of areas, agencies didn’t even bother to think this far, and had problems communicating with one another once a situation escalated out of the control of one department. Once 9/11 came around, interoperability became the focus it is because it was painfully obvious that multiple agencies couldn’t talk to one another and became a life safety issue that prevented safe incident mitigation.
Preppers, by their very nature, mimic public safety in this area. There are preppers who have an area or a district that they intend to protect and want to reliably cover that area. They may not care about adjacent areas because of the nature of why a prepper preps; defense.
They do not want people to hear what they’re saying or be able to understand it. Our thoughts as a prepper are more focused toward military thinking; we don’t want the enemy to hear us. Whether our location is an apartment complex in an urban environment, or a one-thousand acre ranch in Wyoming, the prepper wants to reliably communicate with others within his or her location first and foremost, whilst keeping the enemy uninformed.
That is all great, but what happens when it is time to reach out? What happens if other preppers are calling to “see who is left”? What happens if YOU need to reach out? The fundamental difference between preppers and public safety is: do you WANT to be able to communicate outside of your location? Will you need to? What happens when you need to barter or trade? The answer is inevitably yes.
I have always been an advocate of mutual aid. By its very nature, mutual aid is just that; aid that is both given and received when needed. Will preppers need it? Absolutely, but who knows when. What preppers should keep in the backs of their minds is not “hey, I’ve prepped for me too bad for you” but “wonder if I need a little help”.
All those preps are great until a lightning strike hits your bug out location and burns your preps to the ground because your fire protection equipment failed. One can go from being uber-prepared to screwed in minutes. And I will promise you, I can and will find a flaw in every prep location out there and show something that will exploit it, whether natural or man-made.
Nothing is certain nor perfect, no matter how “good” you think you are. There is no foolproof plan. Never has been, never will be. Even the most prepared person is subject to something that could wipe out their entire cache and be left with nothing. It has happened. It can happen to you.
Being prepared is preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. But not being so arrogant that nothing bad will happen. That is when your guard is left down and your weakness is exploited.
Furthermore, the equipment that many preppers use (in my study) are unreliable at best for what they’re trying to do. Communications equipment range of usage is subject to a lot of outside influences. A 1 watt UHF portable radio in the woods will be just about useless, but could be of great use in a small building. CB radios are subject to sky wave propagation that could clog your transmissions, but could be great in a moving vehicle convoy.
Fact of the matter is do you know what your gear will do? Do you have the knowledge base to use it? You’ve practiced mending, first aid, firearms accuracy, but do you use your radios, know how to use your radios, know the limitations of your radios and are they kept in check? Will they fit the situation you’ve asked them to fit it? Will you be able to use them outside of your safe area?
Let us look at what NOT to rely on, which has been brought to the forefront recently. Cellular telephones, or any telephones for that matter. Relying on them to work solely in an emergency situation is a recipe for disaster. Cell phones, as we all know, rely on infrastructure such as towers and public power equipment.
Storms, time and again, have wiped them out due to winds or flooding water. Furthermore, in an emergency, your non-prepared counterparts will be overloading the circuits trying to get calls out. There is also the risk of rouge government agencies simply jamming or shutting the phone system down for their own gain.
The incident with the BART Transit System in California recently should prove this. It has been done before, and will be done again. Same goes with the Internet and Internet access. The Internet depends on infrastructure that is susceptible to damage or also unscrupulous officials with a button to shut it down.
In my opinion, telephones and Internet should not be relied upon as a viable communications system for preppers. Most of us agree about this already, but I am almost appalled by the amount of people who still prep and think texting will get them together. All I have to say is, if it is working, great. If not, GOOD LUCK. You should be looking for communications gear that uses no infrastructure, or little infrastructure that YOU can protect.
Many preppers tout the usage of amateur or ham radio as a communications system. Of ALL the systems that are out there, I agree with this one the most. While these systems will not be the best for everyone, the pseudo-infrastructure is already there with hundreds of thousands of ham licensees with readily available equipment and will give you the best bang for your buck. Huge banks of available frequencies to use and radios that can be programmed from the field by entering some digits directly into the radios.
Getting a ham license before the SHTF allows you to practice using radio gear, using different frequencies to communicate with other hams to see how they’ll work, practice moving information, and learn how to build a communications system from scratch if need be.
Even if you don’t want to become an amateur licensee, it would behoove you to learn something from one of these people. Amateurs have the ability to get communications on the air with basic and minimal equipment. However, amateur gear can be expensive but worth every penny. Using this gear will provide you with the potential of an already existing interoperable infrastructure. The frequencies are already there. The gear is there.
Even though these systems are the most robust that are available to the common citizen, there is always the risk of the government shutting down communications across all frequency bands. All it takes is an executive order from the president, or an order from the Federal Communications Commission and all radio traffic can be effectively ceased.
During World War II, all ham radio operators were told to shut down for the war effort. It can happen again. However, at the point the government would shut down radio for a SHTF scenario, most preppers will be rouge and using it anyways, which brings up a whole host of new situations we’ll discuss at another time. This, however, is another cause to think of being interoperable.
So what does all this mean? In this article, I’ve cited several methods of communication, some of which are reliable and some that are not. There are choices to make in what you will use. In your planning, are you able to get your family all licensed in amateur radio (which takes a test to pass) and use those means? If not, perhaps a GMRS license (which covers the whole family under one license) might be better to use.
During an emergency, licenses get thrown out the window and it won’t matter, but licensing is important NOW in order to practice using the equipment. And some of these choices come with ready-made interoperability.
Once you get this far, do you want to or will you be able to communicate with other preppers in your area? Do you know what they’re using? Do you even know of other preppers in your area? Do you WANT to know if there are? These are the questions that must be answered if you want to become interoperable.
Like I’d said earlier, some preppers do not want people to know what they’re doing and I have no problem with that. However, others are building colonies and trying to coordinate. There is no interoperability board in the prepping community; this is something most of us do in private.
So for those of you who are concerned with being able to “get out” the type of gear you buy and the bands you use will be critical as well as doing the homework as part of your plan. Portable radios? Mobile Radios? Extra batteries? Chargers?
There are a lot of questions that you’ll need to answer to build a robust system. Having radios and equipment as part of your communications plan is great, but what is the plan to USE IT? And remember, if others are using the same gear and the same frequencies, where is your OPSEC now? See the quandary?
A good suggestion is if you don’t want to be part of a coordinated effort, then at least use the old school public safety community system: get radio equipment on multiple bands and have the OPTION to be interoperable. Have gear for your local and private communications. Use codes, sporadic techniques, scrambling, or whatever suits your fancy to keep yourself private.
In many situations, this is probably going to be the best bet; one never knows who is listening. However, keep your options open to be able to “get out” should you need to. For the rest of you in the prepping community, especially those with colonies, you will have to think a little more outside of the box in order to accomplish your goals. What good is a prepping colony if it cannot communicate within itself or with others? It is always better to have too much than not enough, but one will have to think of planning and goals.
Prepping means being prepared for everything and anything that comes along. Communications are no different. There is no magic communications system out there for every prepper. As much as I’d like there to be, it simply isn’t feasible due to the different personalities and locations.
Since there may never be a nationwide communications systems specifically for preppers, we should use what we’ve got to the best of our abilities. Thinking for yourself first in your communications system is perfectly fine.
What I am suggesting is thinking for yourself may involve others also, whether you want to or not. Interoperability is a two way road, but just because you’re not driving down it one direction doesn’t mean someone isn’t coming from the other.
Now if I haven’t made myself clear about how important I find interoperability to be, let’s talk about a couple of MORE reasons, which every reader to this blog will have to agree with at least one:
Reasons for Prepper Interoperability
Barter or trade of goods, services, and equipment
Emergency overrun of complex or BOL
Passing of situational awareness information.
Security of area
Weather information
Evacuation
Okay, so you’ve agreed with the need for interoperability. Now what? The situations we could be faced with are uncertainty on large scale, which are already making us think outside of the box. Getting two little toy radios from the local department store might work in your apartment building, but will they work in the complex? The CB works great in the convoy, but will it communicate to the colony 20 miles away?
What you need to do is think of the area and amount of people you need to communicate with. Figure out a plan then research what radio(s) will work in your plan. It will be a decent investment and is worth every penny. If you lack knowledge on radio, seek it. Find a ham radio licensee to teach you. Do homework and study on blogs. Ask questions. Once you’ve done that, make a list of people whom you’ve communicated with and pre-planned with.
If you’re involved in a colony and know of other colonies, make a list of frequencies upon which the two colonies will communicate with each other on for barter or other reasons. You don’t need to share your local frequencies in violation of your OPSEC.
In the end, there may not be a one-size-fits-all communications plan, but it could be with a little work. Preppers should get ideas, think critically, and communicate with one another before it all hits the fan. Whether a small private group or a large colony, helping each other to work together to become communications interoperable will help us all.
There is nothing more frustrating or dangerous than sitting in a place completely helpless because your gear is incapable of talking to someone else’s that could help. There is also no reason not to plan private communications that stay within your group.
I think that preppers can become interoperable with one another while maintaining operational security and privacy easily. Until then, preppers who want to be secret can remain that way, but should start thinking of another prep method: just in case I need to get a hold of someone else on the outside, how would I do it without disrupting my OPSEC? The answer is easy. Prep for it.
Counterpoint to Communication Hi-Jinks
by M.D. Creekmore on August 30, 2011 • 29 comments
This is a guest post by Cliff C
[This is an entry in our non-fiction writing contest where you could win - First Prize a 10 Person Deluxe Family Survival Kit, Second Prize an Herb Seed Bank or Third Prize a copy of Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat. For complete rules and list of prizes see this post.]
I read the story entry “Communication Hi-Jinks” with interest. I feel the need to offer some counterpoints to what the writer stated.
The writer is a big proponent of using HAM Radio or GMRS. Let me give you a small lesson on why these are dangerous modes of communication. I spent many years (23 to be exact) in what was originally USAF Security Service, later to be Electronic Security Command and then later to be Air Force Intelligence Command. One of the side projects, that we started during the Vietnam War and carried through to Iraq and Afghanistan and other target areas was called C3CM (Command Control Communications Counter Measures).
With not a lot of training an operator can listen in on routine HAM communications, GMRS coms, cell phone comms, walkie talkies and just about any other wireless unencrypted communications. Depending on the level of encryption, many of those systems, including frequency hopping and binary codes can be broken in short order.
Now, this is where the counter measures come in. Say you and a few other preppers have established a routine HAM radion check in net on a daily basis where you discuss everything from how much food you have on hand to how much background radiation is going on. An operator may use a variety of means to disrupt your communications.
They may jam the frequency, they may take the frequency away from you but using a strong signal or worse of all, they can intrude on your net. With a little practice I can imitate the chatter of any station or imitate the fist of anyone using Morse code. I can enter your net, take control, issue bogus orders, order all clear when it isn’t all clear or warn of imminent attacks when none are coming. This will confuse and may even cause panic.
With a more powerful transmitter (available to the government) they can block entire frequency spectrums or take over command and control of local resources. During military exercises, it was not uncommon, to enter a net, assume control, either confuse the other users, force them to go to landline coms (which can also be tapped and intruded upon) or even worse, we assume net control and start giving bogus commands.
Call out the crash trucks to the active run way and stop all take offs and landings, during a simulated chemical agent attack, while agents are still present in the air, giving the “all clear” and having people come out of their chemical protective gear into a chemical environment, call out explosive ordnance personnel to defuse a non-existent bomb on a main through fare stopping all traffic for hours at a time, to things as mundane as changing the hours for the dining facilities or grossly over ordering food to be delivered to the control centers.
While these all seem to be military oriented the same thing can happen in a city. Control of storm, hurricane or natural disaster alerting systems can be taken over quite easily and misinformation passed easily. Or worse the entire system can be shut down remotely.
Preppers depending on comms from other preppers will never know if can trust what they are hearing over the radio. They can never be sure that the person on the other end of the radio is actually their friend or backup or instead a stealthy operator feeding misinformation.
How would you feel if you were a prepper and someone you’ve talked to for quite a while tells you that your whole stock of survival food was contaminated before it left the factory and under no circumstances should you eat it? How about if they tell you that the big berky filters are failing and people are becoming ill? How about a meet up being planned to share food or medicine and it leads you right in to a trap.
Bottom line, you have to be suspect of anything you hear coming over the airways. You can develop book codes for authentication and challenge and response identification but even that can be breached. Over the air radio communication is nice to have when you hear news but how reliable is that news? Do you really know who you are talking to? Do you really know who is listening in to your cell phone, radio communications or intercepting your emails?
I just offer this information as a counterpoint. There are ways to protect yourself or to mitigate some of the harm that can be done to you through bogus transmissions but you have to train and be prepared. Trust none of what you hear, less of what you read and listen to only those people you trust completely in face to face situations. Be paranoid. Government, military, invaders, whom ever are not your friends but they’ll be happy to be talking to you on the radios.
Just as an aside, we were able to intrude upon North Vietnamese and Chinese morse nets using regular HF radios and instruct them to turn off their radars prior to an Arc Light mission flying over. We were able to instruct the VC to prepare for site inspections by Chinese officials, taking time away from building defenses by getting ready to greet the brass that isn’t coming.
It can happen to them, it can happen to you. Think about how you will communicate, be aware that nothing is private and no one owns any frequency. There are highly talented operators among the good guys and among the bad guys and you’ll never know which one you are talking to until the crap hits.
www.thesurvivalistblog.net/survival-communications/
Communication Hi-Jinks
by M.D. Creekmore on August 29, 2011 • 32 comments
This is a guest post by Chris
[This is an entry in our non-fiction writing contest where you could win - First Prize a 10 Person Deluxe Family Survival Kit, Second Prize an Herb Seed Bank or Third Prize a copy of Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat. For complete rules and list of prizes see this post.]
I’ve been interested in disaster and prepping for many years as a result of my former job; I’ve had the pleasure of serving in the fire service and emergency management for over 20 years. Over these years, I’ve had the privilege of planning communications systems and strategies for many public safety agencies, as well as private enterprise and personal planning. What I have learned is there is no one-size-fits-all communications plan for everyone, contrary to popular belief.
Systems can be drastically different from one other-for multiple reasons-which turns out to be a huge problem. Perhaps you’ve heard the term “interoperability” thrown around a bunch of times. In public safety, this country has had HUGE problems with being interoperable; there are volumes written on how the police can’t talk to the firefighters who can’t talk to the EMS personnel.
I would image a lot of readers to the site -who are public safety personnel- can attest to some problem that they’ve either encountered or have heard of. Being on an emergency scene where you cannot communicate with someone is downright dangerous and unnecessary. Why, though, does this have to be? Wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to be able to talk to each other? You would think. Why do I bring this up? Because preppers, in a lot of cases, will not be interoperable with each other when they should be.
Over the years, our glorious FCC has set aside frequencies for public safety to use. Over time, these frequencies filled up. Some areas chose one frequency band, while other chose something different.
Some had a large amount of capital resources to build a decent system, while some had only shoestring budgets. Infuse the large companies trying to sell their snake oil communications systems and next thing you know, every department in your city is on a different frequency band. Add this; most public safety radios are only capable of using one band, and you now have someone who has to carry around up to three or more radios (should he/she even have access to them) to be “interoperable”.
There has been a push over the last several years to get public safety interoperable by setting aside an entire band of frequencies and attempting to migrate everyone there. This would theoretically allow agencies to communicate with one another, using one radio, on one band.
However, it is going so slow. Why? Money and ego. Simply put, communications equipment and infrastructure is expensive and can be time consuming to build, all the while companies are competing to put their stuff in over the others through the bureaucratic red tape of multiple government agencies. Not to mention some simply don’t want to do it. Sounds like preppers in a way, doesn’t it?
But really, what does this have to do with prepping and preppers? Simple: preppers simply aren’t interoperable. After reading multiple sites and multiple postings, there is a conglomeration of different communications ideas, some of which will work, some that might work, and some that are downright insane. As with the nature of prepping, many people who prepare are private about their activities, and rightly so.
Faced with the circumstances that may manifest, it might be in our best interest to be as private as possible. Yet, it is wonderful to see websites and forums flourishing trying to get people prepared and get upon the same page, which would allow for a natural form of interoperability.
It is a shame, I digress, that communications in the prepping community is one of those things that is going to follow the old school public safety sector; there are too many ideas and opinions on what to do and a lot of them are going to be incompatible with one another. There is no central coordination for preppers to coordinate communications amongst one another, and we also have the eternal caveat of communications gear is expensive and/or unobtainable.
Now let’s look at the quandary that public safety has gotten themselves into to see the quandary preppers are going to follow right into. Most public safety agencies have a “district” or area of which they protect. Fire district. Police beat. Response area.
Most agencies build their systems to reliably cover that district as reliably as possible. After all, when the system is being built, that is the area that most of their time will be spent in responding to emergencies and the area they find most important. They do not lend much thought about being called to help in adjacent districts for “mutual aid”, because it is infrequent or there are political dealings that get in the way.
Some agencies had the foresight to try and keep communications on the same band for the same type of agency. However, in a lot of areas, agencies didn’t even bother to think this far, and had problems communicating with one another once a situation escalated out of the control of one department. Once 9/11 came around, interoperability became the focus it is because it was painfully obvious that multiple agencies couldn’t talk to one another and became a life safety issue that prevented safe incident mitigation.
Preppers, by their very nature, mimic public safety in this area. There are preppers who have an area or a district that they intend to protect and want to reliably cover that area. They may not care about adjacent areas because of the nature of why a prepper preps; defense.
They do not want people to hear what they’re saying or be able to understand it. Our thoughts as a prepper are more focused toward military thinking; we don’t want the enemy to hear us. Whether our location is an apartment complex in an urban environment, or a one-thousand acre ranch in Wyoming, the prepper wants to reliably communicate with others within his or her location first and foremost, whilst keeping the enemy uninformed.
That is all great, but what happens when it is time to reach out? What happens if other preppers are calling to “see who is left”? What happens if YOU need to reach out? The fundamental difference between preppers and public safety is: do you WANT to be able to communicate outside of your location? Will you need to? What happens when you need to barter or trade? The answer is inevitably yes.
I have always been an advocate of mutual aid. By its very nature, mutual aid is just that; aid that is both given and received when needed. Will preppers need it? Absolutely, but who knows when. What preppers should keep in the backs of their minds is not “hey, I’ve prepped for me too bad for you” but “wonder if I need a little help”.
All those preps are great until a lightning strike hits your bug out location and burns your preps to the ground because your fire protection equipment failed. One can go from being uber-prepared to screwed in minutes. And I will promise you, I can and will find a flaw in every prep location out there and show something that will exploit it, whether natural or man-made.
Nothing is certain nor perfect, no matter how “good” you think you are. There is no foolproof plan. Never has been, never will be. Even the most prepared person is subject to something that could wipe out their entire cache and be left with nothing. It has happened. It can happen to you.
Being prepared is preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. But not being so arrogant that nothing bad will happen. That is when your guard is left down and your weakness is exploited.
Furthermore, the equipment that many preppers use (in my study) are unreliable at best for what they’re trying to do. Communications equipment range of usage is subject to a lot of outside influences. A 1 watt UHF portable radio in the woods will be just about useless, but could be of great use in a small building. CB radios are subject to sky wave propagation that could clog your transmissions, but could be great in a moving vehicle convoy.
Fact of the matter is do you know what your gear will do? Do you have the knowledge base to use it? You’ve practiced mending, first aid, firearms accuracy, but do you use your radios, know how to use your radios, know the limitations of your radios and are they kept in check? Will they fit the situation you’ve asked them to fit it? Will you be able to use them outside of your safe area?
Let us look at what NOT to rely on, which has been brought to the forefront recently. Cellular telephones, or any telephones for that matter. Relying on them to work solely in an emergency situation is a recipe for disaster. Cell phones, as we all know, rely on infrastructure such as towers and public power equipment.
Storms, time and again, have wiped them out due to winds or flooding water. Furthermore, in an emergency, your non-prepared counterparts will be overloading the circuits trying to get calls out. There is also the risk of rouge government agencies simply jamming or shutting the phone system down for their own gain.
The incident with the BART Transit System in California recently should prove this. It has been done before, and will be done again. Same goes with the Internet and Internet access. The Internet depends on infrastructure that is susceptible to damage or also unscrupulous officials with a button to shut it down.
In my opinion, telephones and Internet should not be relied upon as a viable communications system for preppers. Most of us agree about this already, but I am almost appalled by the amount of people who still prep and think texting will get them together. All I have to say is, if it is working, great. If not, GOOD LUCK. You should be looking for communications gear that uses no infrastructure, or little infrastructure that YOU can protect.
Many preppers tout the usage of amateur or ham radio as a communications system. Of ALL the systems that are out there, I agree with this one the most. While these systems will not be the best for everyone, the pseudo-infrastructure is already there with hundreds of thousands of ham licensees with readily available equipment and will give you the best bang for your buck. Huge banks of available frequencies to use and radios that can be programmed from the field by entering some digits directly into the radios.
Getting a ham license before the SHTF allows you to practice using radio gear, using different frequencies to communicate with other hams to see how they’ll work, practice moving information, and learn how to build a communications system from scratch if need be.
Even if you don’t want to become an amateur licensee, it would behoove you to learn something from one of these people. Amateurs have the ability to get communications on the air with basic and minimal equipment. However, amateur gear can be expensive but worth every penny. Using this gear will provide you with the potential of an already existing interoperable infrastructure. The frequencies are already there. The gear is there.
Even though these systems are the most robust that are available to the common citizen, there is always the risk of the government shutting down communications across all frequency bands. All it takes is an executive order from the president, or an order from the Federal Communications Commission and all radio traffic can be effectively ceased.
During World War II, all ham radio operators were told to shut down for the war effort. It can happen again. However, at the point the government would shut down radio for a SHTF scenario, most preppers will be rouge and using it anyways, which brings up a whole host of new situations we’ll discuss at another time. This, however, is another cause to think of being interoperable.
So what does all this mean? In this article, I’ve cited several methods of communication, some of which are reliable and some that are not. There are choices to make in what you will use. In your planning, are you able to get your family all licensed in amateur radio (which takes a test to pass) and use those means? If not, perhaps a GMRS license (which covers the whole family under one license) might be better to use.
During an emergency, licenses get thrown out the window and it won’t matter, but licensing is important NOW in order to practice using the equipment. And some of these choices come with ready-made interoperability.
Once you get this far, do you want to or will you be able to communicate with other preppers in your area? Do you know what they’re using? Do you even know of other preppers in your area? Do you WANT to know if there are? These are the questions that must be answered if you want to become interoperable.
Like I’d said earlier, some preppers do not want people to know what they’re doing and I have no problem with that. However, others are building colonies and trying to coordinate. There is no interoperability board in the prepping community; this is something most of us do in private.
So for those of you who are concerned with being able to “get out” the type of gear you buy and the bands you use will be critical as well as doing the homework as part of your plan. Portable radios? Mobile Radios? Extra batteries? Chargers?
There are a lot of questions that you’ll need to answer to build a robust system. Having radios and equipment as part of your communications plan is great, but what is the plan to USE IT? And remember, if others are using the same gear and the same frequencies, where is your OPSEC now? See the quandary?
A good suggestion is if you don’t want to be part of a coordinated effort, then at least use the old school public safety community system: get radio equipment on multiple bands and have the OPTION to be interoperable. Have gear for your local and private communications. Use codes, sporadic techniques, scrambling, or whatever suits your fancy to keep yourself private.
In many situations, this is probably going to be the best bet; one never knows who is listening. However, keep your options open to be able to “get out” should you need to. For the rest of you in the prepping community, especially those with colonies, you will have to think a little more outside of the box in order to accomplish your goals. What good is a prepping colony if it cannot communicate within itself or with others? It is always better to have too much than not enough, but one will have to think of planning and goals.
Prepping means being prepared for everything and anything that comes along. Communications are no different. There is no magic communications system out there for every prepper. As much as I’d like there to be, it simply isn’t feasible due to the different personalities and locations.
Since there may never be a nationwide communications systems specifically for preppers, we should use what we’ve got to the best of our abilities. Thinking for yourself first in your communications system is perfectly fine.
What I am suggesting is thinking for yourself may involve others also, whether you want to or not. Interoperability is a two way road, but just because you’re not driving down it one direction doesn’t mean someone isn’t coming from the other.
Now if I haven’t made myself clear about how important I find interoperability to be, let’s talk about a couple of MORE reasons, which every reader to this blog will have to agree with at least one:
Reasons for Prepper Interoperability
Barter or trade of goods, services, and equipment
Emergency overrun of complex or BOL
Passing of situational awareness information.
Security of area
Weather information
Evacuation
Okay, so you’ve agreed with the need for interoperability. Now what? The situations we could be faced with are uncertainty on large scale, which are already making us think outside of the box. Getting two little toy radios from the local department store might work in your apartment building, but will they work in the complex? The CB works great in the convoy, but will it communicate to the colony 20 miles away?
What you need to do is think of the area and amount of people you need to communicate with. Figure out a plan then research what radio(s) will work in your plan. It will be a decent investment and is worth every penny. If you lack knowledge on radio, seek it. Find a ham radio licensee to teach you. Do homework and study on blogs. Ask questions. Once you’ve done that, make a list of people whom you’ve communicated with and pre-planned with.
If you’re involved in a colony and know of other colonies, make a list of frequencies upon which the two colonies will communicate with each other on for barter or other reasons. You don’t need to share your local frequencies in violation of your OPSEC.
In the end, there may not be a one-size-fits-all communications plan, but it could be with a little work. Preppers should get ideas, think critically, and communicate with one another before it all hits the fan. Whether a small private group or a large colony, helping each other to work together to become communications interoperable will help us all.
There is nothing more frustrating or dangerous than sitting in a place completely helpless because your gear is incapable of talking to someone else’s that could help. There is also no reason not to plan private communications that stay within your group.
I think that preppers can become interoperable with one another while maintaining operational security and privacy easily. Until then, preppers who want to be secret can remain that way, but should start thinking of another prep method: just in case I need to get a hold of someone else on the outside, how would I do it without disrupting my OPSEC? The answer is easy. Prep for it.
Counterpoint to Communication Hi-Jinks
by M.D. Creekmore on August 30, 2011 • 29 comments
This is a guest post by Cliff C
[This is an entry in our non-fiction writing contest where you could win - First Prize a 10 Person Deluxe Family Survival Kit, Second Prize an Herb Seed Bank or Third Prize a copy of Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat. For complete rules and list of prizes see this post.]
I read the story entry “Communication Hi-Jinks” with interest. I feel the need to offer some counterpoints to what the writer stated.
The writer is a big proponent of using HAM Radio or GMRS. Let me give you a small lesson on why these are dangerous modes of communication. I spent many years (23 to be exact) in what was originally USAF Security Service, later to be Electronic Security Command and then later to be Air Force Intelligence Command. One of the side projects, that we started during the Vietnam War and carried through to Iraq and Afghanistan and other target areas was called C3CM (Command Control Communications Counter Measures).
With not a lot of training an operator can listen in on routine HAM communications, GMRS coms, cell phone comms, walkie talkies and just about any other wireless unencrypted communications. Depending on the level of encryption, many of those systems, including frequency hopping and binary codes can be broken in short order.
Now, this is where the counter measures come in. Say you and a few other preppers have established a routine HAM radion check in net on a daily basis where you discuss everything from how much food you have on hand to how much background radiation is going on. An operator may use a variety of means to disrupt your communications.
They may jam the frequency, they may take the frequency away from you but using a strong signal or worse of all, they can intrude on your net. With a little practice I can imitate the chatter of any station or imitate the fist of anyone using Morse code. I can enter your net, take control, issue bogus orders, order all clear when it isn’t all clear or warn of imminent attacks when none are coming. This will confuse and may even cause panic.
With a more powerful transmitter (available to the government) they can block entire frequency spectrums or take over command and control of local resources. During military exercises, it was not uncommon, to enter a net, assume control, either confuse the other users, force them to go to landline coms (which can also be tapped and intruded upon) or even worse, we assume net control and start giving bogus commands.
Call out the crash trucks to the active run way and stop all take offs and landings, during a simulated chemical agent attack, while agents are still present in the air, giving the “all clear” and having people come out of their chemical protective gear into a chemical environment, call out explosive ordnance personnel to defuse a non-existent bomb on a main through fare stopping all traffic for hours at a time, to things as mundane as changing the hours for the dining facilities or grossly over ordering food to be delivered to the control centers.
While these all seem to be military oriented the same thing can happen in a city. Control of storm, hurricane or natural disaster alerting systems can be taken over quite easily and misinformation passed easily. Or worse the entire system can be shut down remotely.
Preppers depending on comms from other preppers will never know if can trust what they are hearing over the radio. They can never be sure that the person on the other end of the radio is actually their friend or backup or instead a stealthy operator feeding misinformation.
How would you feel if you were a prepper and someone you’ve talked to for quite a while tells you that your whole stock of survival food was contaminated before it left the factory and under no circumstances should you eat it? How about if they tell you that the big berky filters are failing and people are becoming ill? How about a meet up being planned to share food or medicine and it leads you right in to a trap.
Bottom line, you have to be suspect of anything you hear coming over the airways. You can develop book codes for authentication and challenge and response identification but even that can be breached. Over the air radio communication is nice to have when you hear news but how reliable is that news? Do you really know who you are talking to? Do you really know who is listening in to your cell phone, radio communications or intercepting your emails?
I just offer this information as a counterpoint. There are ways to protect yourself or to mitigate some of the harm that can be done to you through bogus transmissions but you have to train and be prepared. Trust none of what you hear, less of what you read and listen to only those people you trust completely in face to face situations. Be paranoid. Government, military, invaders, whom ever are not your friends but they’ll be happy to be talking to you on the radios.
Just as an aside, we were able to intrude upon North Vietnamese and Chinese morse nets using regular HF radios and instruct them to turn off their radars prior to an Arc Light mission flying over. We were able to instruct the VC to prepare for site inspections by Chinese officials, taking time away from building defenses by getting ready to greet the brass that isn’t coming.
It can happen to them, it can happen to you. Think about how you will communicate, be aware that nothing is private and no one owns any frequency. There are highly talented operators among the good guys and among the bad guys and you’ll never know which one you are talking to until the crap hits.
www.thesurvivalistblog.net/survival-communications/