Shot Show 2024
Ammunition Advances & Ballistics, Prepared Civilian Radios, Situational Awareness
Team,
Next week, I am going to the Shot Show for the first time. I am excited. It has been on my bucket list for quite some time.
The Shot Show is enormous. A little bit of focus will make it more meaningful. I plan to focus on three areas:
Ammunition Advances and Ballistics
Radios for Prepared Civilians
Situational Awareness
In ammunition advances and ballistics, I am most interested in ammunition advances that improve accuracy and downrange energy. Accuracy is interesting because you must hit your target for anything else to matter. Downrange energy translates into longer range and improved terminal ballistics.
The history of the American firearms industry could be written in terms of these two goals. From the musket ball to the .277 Fury, the industry has been chasing accuracy and downrange energy.
Radios for prepared civilians is an interesting topic if you want to communicate with family or team members when conventional communications technology (e.g., cellular) is not available. Use cases for that include power outages (cell towers require power), back-country expeditions, remote job sites, and many more.
Radios for prepared civilians can be a very technical topic just as cellular technology can be a very technical topic. Cellular phones use packet-switched radios which are very technical but people use them routinely without a deep understanding of the underlying technology.
I think the “radios for prepared civilians” market has matured to the point where you can put together a working system without an engineering degree by selecting the right products. That assumption will be one that I will be testing a bit at the Shot Show. There are an encouraging number of manufacturers in this space who are exhibiting at the Shot Show.
Situational awareness items increase your knowledge of what is going on around you. Enhancement can be immediate environment or near/remote. Immediate environment situational enhancements include items like thermal viewers so that you can see things you could not otherwise see and hearing devices that let you hear things you cannot otherwise here.
Near/remote enhancements help you detect and understand events occurring beyond the normal range of human detection. Radio scanners are a form of remote situational awareness enhancement. ATAK is an example of enhanced team situational awareness across distant terrain or environments.
Binoculars and spotting scopes fit this definition as well. Binoculars and spotting scopes let you see things beyond the range of normal human vision. Cameras can be situational awareness devices as well. Most “security” cameras today depend on connectivity to the internet. That connectivity requirement is a weakness for preparedness. Again, there is an encouraging number of manufacturers attending the Shot Show in this space.
I plan to post daily reports from the Shot Show on what I find in these areas. Those will necessarily be high-level but I will follow up on them in the weeks after the Shot Show with more detail.
Let me know (email me at keith@kr007.org) if you have something interesting that you would like me to investigate while I am there.