Communications Plan

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Captjim_NM

Captjim_NM

Awesome Friend
Neighbor
Joined
Jan 25, 2021
Messages
158
Location
New Mexico
Amateur Radio Call Sign
KA5SIW
Many preppers are looking for a communications plan. The second consern they have is evading detection. Direction finding of low power transmitters would be more difficult with a frequency hopping plan. Changing bands from VHF to UHF would further complicate direction finding. Say you have 10 people and 20 acres of land, your basic China HT will cover that area fine unless you are in the mountains. Just pick your frequencies, program the radios and you are set. I would recommend a good antenna 30 to 50 foot high and a 20 to 50 watt mobile radio to monitor the entire location. Besides this fixed station I would also have a scanner to monitor local law enforcement and a short wave receiver at the bare minimum. This fixed station would require power supplies and battery back-up and someone to monitor the radio 16 to 24 hours a day for emergency traffic. If you want to talk to someone outside your little group, you need license and learn about repeaters. Now if you want to talk to people around the nation or world you will need a HF station. The big question is how much land do you want to cover and how big is your group of people? Twenty or thirty people all showing up with different radios, batteries and frequency programs and expecting everything to work together would be a real mess. Compound this assortment of radios with different antenna connectors and handset/speaker mic connectors and you muddy the water even more. You can't load multiple programs in these radios. Once you load your prepper list of frequencies into the radio the existing frequencies are erased. I am not trying to rain on your parade, just open your eyes to the planning required for this to work. de KA5SIW
 
Glad to see others looking at this realistically. I see many preppers wanting to get a radio now that were not interested a few months ago. The problem is, getting a radio without planning what you are going to do with is is like buying a motorcycle before you know whether you want it for highways or off-road.

You aren't likely to interest everyone in your group, but you should strive for two (because two is one and one is none) who commit to developing a communications plan.

You need to asses your group's needs and goals in communication as a first step. I suggest an evolutionary approach rather than writing a fat check and hoping you made good decisions.

Receivers can help you gather information. Without Intel, you are really operating blind. I break this down into strategic and tactical. Strategic information will help you plan the next month, years, or decades and involves staying informed on what is happening all over the world so you can plan for any local effects in advance. Tactical intel is information for right now up to perhaps a month. This is local information and requires pretty simple tools.

Transceivers will do much more than give away your position. The possibilities for radio are limitless, so it may be best to build your group's capabilities on a tiered approach.

The Handy Talkie (HT) is the basic unit and your first purchase so you can get people connected who are close by. They can be cheap or expensive. Cheap ones can be bought in bulk, expensive ones "sometimes" last longer. The primary difference in transmitters is how clean a signal they produce. Receivers are rated by how sensitive they are for weak signals and how selective they are at filtering out nearby signals. The HT's you'll find are FM which is a full quieting mode. Combining this with the fewer interfering signals after SHTF means a cheaper radio will perform pretty well for you and is certainly preferable in some applications I can get to if there is interest.

Once you have become accustomed to the use of the HT's, you may want to expand your communications. The next step is with mobile radios operating on the same bands as the HT's you already have. These can be vehicle or home mounted. In either case, they offer superior power output and there are more antenna possibilities with a fixed unit. These radios can be configured as cross-band repeaters to relay your low powered HT signals to neighbors or family members who are out of HT range.

At some point, you are going to want to communicate beyond your immediate area and this is where HF radio comes in. My advice is to be thinking about uses for more distant communications while you develop your local communications.
 
Excellent post and advice. I would ask all you HAM radio experts / users to post informative information (in plain language) for all of us HAM illiterate folks. My volunteer work is 22 miles from home, what kind of system would I need to communicate with home? We are talking about heavily wooded mountain tops, both locations.
 
Get a copy of the ARRL Handbook and the ARRL Antenna Book. Read them both several times. Communications is a dynamic process. Each band on the radio has different propagation characteristics that change which makes each of them uniquely useful under various ionospheric and atmospheric conditions. There are also numerous techniques used to radio direction find, some better for some bands than others. The shape and orientation of the antenna and whats under it can affect where your signal goes (like straight up in a really handy propagation technique called NVIS). The few topics I just mentioned are covered in those books in great detail, and much much more (even stealth antennas). I've read both those books if you have any questions about radio stuff.

Just got a new radio toy today, an SVA1032x, Im gonna be building custom antennas with it, should be all set up in a month. Got tired of mowing grass and traded in the gravely lol.
 
communication with whom? especially post SHTF I dont know of anyone I would need to communicate with, I have an ordinary radio to listen to any broadcasts but thats about it.
 
I will add these books to my purchase list. Be prepared to answer a LOT of obvious questions. Thanks for the recommendation.
 
bigpaul said:
communication with whom? especially post SHTF I dont know of anyone I would need to communicate with, I have an ordinary radio to listen to any broadcasts but thats about it.
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A family member 100 miles away perhaps. Lets say we don't want to understand all the intricacies of RF propagation and just want a foolproof way to get an emergency signal out to someone you expect to be listening.

If I wanted to have contact with my parents 116 miles away, a weather balloon on a tether carrying a simplex repeater to 9,000 feet will provide me with a 116 mile line of sight radius.

$20 baofeng, $60 simplex controller, 1 gallon liquid latex $65 (because a single weather balloon costs that, why not make a few dozen), 3,000yd spool fishing line $40, and maybe a DIY antenna. Everyone with an FRS radio within 100 miles will hear you. If I do, I'll say hi.
 
nope, family all deceased, some friends in a city but they arent preppers. I just cant think of anyone.
 
it will give me an idea of what is happening. which is probably nothing this far out.
The British govt are not a proactive one, they only react when something actually happens and then very slowly.
 
BigPaul, for someone with no family or friends, you are absolutely correct. With all possible respect, this thread is for people who do have someone they are going to feel compelled to communicate with whether in the first days of a collapse or otherwise. In other communications threads you have made it abundantly clear that you have no intention of communicating (Internet chatter notwithstanding) which is why I keep wondering why you troll the radio communications threads. It is disappointing to have to wade through so many posts from people who have no interest in communications to get to the people who do have family, or who do have to work a considerable distance from home and/or family.

Amish Heart is right on point though that broadcast and other official emergency radio services will give you whatever line the government wants you to hear.
 
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its just that I keep hearing about communications on various forums I have been on in the past, not just now and here, and I could never understand who people were so keen to keep in contact with especially WTSHTF.
I understand hand sets and walkie talkies which seem to have a limited range and are probably only good for anyone out of the house "doing the rounds", limited range here because of all the hills.
 
BigPaul, since you have no family or close friends I can understand your confusion, but be assured there are many, many people who have strong ties to others. That's what the communications threads are for. Trying to convince a loner of the need to communicate is like trying to sell a photo album to a blind man. I doubt either is possible and am sure nobody here will try to convince you otherwise. I'm just confused as to why you always try to drag the topic off the original post.
 
firewallsrus said:
BigPaul, since you have no family or close friends I can understand your confusion, but be assured there are many, many people who have strong ties to others. That's what the communications threads are for. Trying to convince a loner of the need to communicate is like trying to sell a photo album to a blind man. I doubt either is possible and am sure nobody here will try to convince you otherwise. I'm just confused as to why you always try to drag the topic off the original post.
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well thank you for that, you have now convinced me that this subject is not for me and I will refrain from commenting further.
 
Captjim_NM said:
Many preppers are looking for a communications plan. The second consern they have is evading detection. Direction finding of low power transmitters would be more difficult with a frequency hopping plan. Changing bands from VHF to UHF would further complicate direction finding.
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I like the way you think. Here is an idea for cheap frequency hopping. Pick 31 random frequencies from the available bands. Program one frequency in the list as memory channel 1. Now repeat the process until you have the first 31 memory channels programmed to be seemingly random frequencies spread back and forth across both bands. All the group's radios start on the channel matching the day of the month. During a conversation, a word like "bump up" or "bump down" is the signal to go up or down a memory channel. After the conversation, all the radios are reset to the day of the month.
 
I too have no extended group to communicate with any more but I do see the value in two way radios as a source of news if the normal means are unavailable, but I would never apply for a ham licence as everyones addresses are kept in registers in places like Council offices, Libraries, State and National government agencies and in many cases online. So radios GOOD for INTEL, licences BAD for OPSEC.

Forunately many preppers now own stuff like the Baofengs UV5 or 8s and similar which can be tweaked to put out between 5 and 8 watts coupled with better antenna and using the 440 freq range designated of PMR / FRS duty, and use em like walkie talkies which more than meets my two way comms needs.

Our Merkin cousins can utilise Ham radio much better than us over here, but I would again raise the issue of OPSEC both in licencing, and operations (after TSHTF) I would not set up and operate a BASE station at your home, BOL or retreat, nor would I leave large antenna in place. I think a "" mobile"" base station unit would allow more secure comms used away from home would be very useful.
 
May as well scrap the licencing system over here, all I ever hear is only old guys doing radio checks ans Russian taxi drivers with 200 watt burners . Satelite phones are gaining in popularity in some quarters.
 
Frequency hopping does not come without challenges ~ and it is more of a means to prevent eavesdropping than a means to conceal location. The days of the Realistic police scanner are gone. With moderately capable test equipment becoming cheap enough for the radio enthusiast, if you transmit, you can be found. And with frequency hopping, the frequencies are not in the same band so now you will need multi-band antennas with the same radiation pattern on all bands.

Anyone with a spectrum analyzer can drive around and find where the signals get stronger, even if they are not tuned into and listening to any of them. In fact, I was just watching the signals from my phone pop up on the spectrum as I was texting a friend yesterday. Yagi's are ok for VHF and UHF foxhunts but I think doppler shift and TDOA interferometer techniques are easier for VHF frequencies. Adcock arrays's and variable phase antenna arrays (like using a radio goniometer), are great for HF. The null of a bar antenna or loop antenna is very sharp, just like the adcock, sharper than the main lobe by far. Same applies to many antennas so by using a balanced loop antenna etc, you can get a very accurate direction using the null (when the signal disappears) in the patters as opposed to the 50° to 60° 3dB directivity of a 5 or 6 element yagi.

Using VHF and UHF for local comms is ideal since those signals won't go far. NVIS is great for lower frequency HF work because it goes up and comes back down meaning that instead of a dipole at a half wavelength above ground that illuminates two directions and travels (for the most part) along the ground hitting the ionosphere 800 miles away before refracting back down, NVIS antennas near good ground (10-20 feet) illuminates a 600 mile radius with no dead zones. Locating a signal that comes from above is much harder because less people are going to try to find the angle of incidence and make predictions about the amount of ionospheric refraction and ducting to guess where you are.

Use only enough power on a band that has just sufficient propagation to get the message sent.
 
BillMasen said:
I too have no extended group to communicate with any more but I do see the value in two way radios as a source of news if the normal means are unavailable, but I would never apply for a ham licence as everyones addresses are kept in registers in places like Council offices, Libraries, State and National government agencies and in many cases online. So radios GOOD for INTEL, licences BAD for OPSEC.

Forunately many preppers now own stuff like the Baofengs UV5 or 8s and similar which can be tweaked to put out between 5 and 8 watts coupled with better antenna and using the 440 freq range designated of PMR / FRS duty, and use em like walkie talkies which more than meets my two way comms needs.

Our Merkin cousins can utilise Ham radio much better than us over here, but I would again raise the issue of OPSEC both in licencing, and operations (after TSHTF) I would not set up and operate a BASE station at your home, BOL or retreat, nor would I leave large antenna in place. I think a "" mobile"" base station unit would allow more secure comms used away from home would be very useful.
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If you think there is a possibility of being obscure while communicating online then I don't know how to begin to explain how open people are. I don't know what part of the world you are in, but the fact that you are online means you are very trackable. I spent 30 years in data communications security.

HT radios can't be "tweaked" to put out more power and if they did there would be little point as going from the "out of the box" 5 Watts up to 8 Watts wouldn't even show up on an S meter. There are children (with entry-level licenses) using 5 Watt HT's to communicate with astronauts on the International Space Station. Whatever nation you are in, there are authorities who can pin down your location within less than a second if they want to find you.

As for OPSEC? There are a lot of ways of ensuring OPSEC and they are ALL relative. Every modern warfare unit uses communications which can be pinpointed using direction finding gear. I do agree that you would not set up and operate a base station in my home. I however would for many reasons you probably cannot imagine.

Other than plug and play handi talkies, someone without a license and practice would be very unlikely to be able to get a useable signal out for reasons spelled out in detail elsewhere.
 
BillMasen said:
, but I would never apply for a ham licence as everyones addresses are kept in registers in places like Council offices, Libraries, State and National government agencies and in many cases online. So radios GOOD for INTEL, licences BAD for OPSEC.
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The FCC has my PO Box in the next town for an address. I do not have a physical mailbox here.
 
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