Radios For Prepared Civilians

Communicating when the SHTF

Radios for Prepared Civilians

It happened. The fecal matter finally hit the rotating airborne dispersion device. Cell phones don’t work, you don’t have a landline telephone, and you don’t have any way to communicate with the folks who are important to you.

That is the scenario that “radios for prepared civilians” addresses; for first responders, preppers, and any organization that needs to function without the current communications infrastructure.

Introduction

Radios implies radio communications and that is true as far as it goes. For many people, radio means audio – music or voice – being sent one way.

The word radio comes from the Latin word “radius” which means ray or beam of light or spoke of a wheel[i]. Modern radio is used to transmit audio and data. The ability to for a radio beam to carry (transmit) voice and data is what makes radio useful for communications.

Prepared civilians, for the purposes of this discussion, are people and organizations that are not part of the Department of Defense who are prepared for breakdowns of infrastructure. They are “preppers” in rural Montana, a fire departments in suburban American, a sheriff’s department in an urban or a rural county, a municipal government with a disaster recovery plan, or lots of other groups organizations that see a need for backup when everyday infrastructure isn’t working.

Why do we need a guide for civilians? The Department of Defense already implements radio communications that don’t depend on existing infrastructure because the war scenario probably means no infrastructure. There are many scenarios short of war that take out infrastructure. Fire; earthquake, simple power loss; there are a lot of ways for communications infrastructure to quit working.

This series is not a “guerilla’s guide to radios.”  There are quite a few of those online if that is what you need. This series is about backup infrastructure. You probably should read a couple of the “guerilla guides” but this series is about capabilities. Each team or organization will use those capabilities differently.

Communications means voice, data, imagery, video, and situational awareness. The most basic is the ability to communicate via voice when normal communications infrastructure isn’t working anymore. For most people, this means how do you communicate when the cell phone doesn’t work. Cell phones are so ubiquitous that we forget how fragile the cellular infrastructure is. Cell phones don’t work without cellular towers. The cell towers require power and they are vulnerable to physical issues (e.g., earthquakes, fire, flood, sabotage, and more). They are pretty much completely unprotected and will remain so.

There are more than 140,000 (one hundred and forty thousand) cell towers and more than 452,000 (four hundred and fifty two thousand) small outdoor cell sites in the US[ii]. It is not possible to individually protect that many sites.

Cell phones have built a dependency that will be painful if the SHTF. And the large stuff doesn’t have to hit the fan to cause a local problem. A transformer breakdown is sufficient. Transformers at substations are aging in the US. It is a problem hiding in plain sight.

Getting back to the requirements, line-of-sight voice communication is the most basic requirement. Morse code over the radio is even more basic, but only a very few people are going to learn code and set up AM radios to communicate long distances. International Morse Code (IMC) isn’t really the answer for team communications anyway.

The next level up from line-of-sight voice communications is to extend the range of the radios using antennas and repeaters. This level includes mesh networks. Some but not all the mesh networks available use license free frequencies and modulation techniques. Repeaters take a radio network to the next level but repeaters have specific legal requirements[iii].

In this series, I’m going to mention legal requirements when I know about them and I encourage you to follow them. Having said that, this series of articles is all about what happens when there is no infrastructure. If you follow the legal requirements, you will be well prepared to do what you need to do when the infrastructure goes away.

Then, we move into structured networks. Structured networks compartmentalize people. A structured network can compartment into teams or into a command and control hierarchy. Structured networks may include privileged communications which may require encoding or encryption[iv]. Required notice: Encryption intended to obscure the meaning of the message is forbidden by US law in amateur radio – see the end note.

Radio Networks In Real Life

I’m going to build several radio networks for prepared civilians using tools available to anyone in the US. I’ll document each radio network as I go, explaining the structure of the network, the equipment and how I put it together.

The first radio network will be a simple voice radio network using a repeater and home-built antenna for the repeater to extend the range. That network will look like the picture at the top of this page. Then I’ll do a mesh network using a “build it yourself” kit. Then, I’ll work up from there. Each network will take a couple of weeks to build so this is not “short attention span theater.”

Mesh networks have a lot of promise for extending range. I’m curious to see how they work in real life.

This will be fun.

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[i] https://www.etymonline.com/word/radio-

[ii] https://www.benton.org/headlines/us-cell-towers-and-small-cells-numbers

[iii] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2002-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2002-title47-vol5-sec97-3.pdf - lots of good reading here.

[iv] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2002-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2002-title47-vol5-sec97-113.pdf, paragraph (4)

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