**UPDATE** Bumping to the top of the page.
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Request to our Comms guys - Patriots need your help: Most of you know I have been playing catch-up on Comms for WRoL/SHTF. My original paradigm never included having a Tribe, much less a Tribe that has members literally all across this nation, from coast to coast and border to border. Whoops. My bad. Looks like my paradigm, if/when SHTF is going to include a LOT of travel on my part, and long-range, secure Comms will be imperative.
As I enter this learning curve I have come to the conclusion, as I have stated elsewhere, .mil and .gov absolutely own this piece of the battlespace - not only radio, but also digital. OK - I accept that. But I am a guy who always looks for where there is weakness to exploit. I am also a hardcore Capitalist pig.
Some of you reading this blog have radio skills - mad skills. I personally see part of my role in this community of Patriots as helping my fellow Countrymen improve their economic position in life, which improves most other aspects.
So, here's where I am with Comms: .Gov and .Mil own the battlespace. By extension, they own the manufacturers of the equipment made for the civilian market to make certain no cool widgets and gizmos are installed into commercially available Comms gear, through the FCC and threats of prison, blah, blah...
You know I am an old-school guy, and I apply that philosophy everywhere it is prudent. I have my heart set on a KX3 from Elecraft as my first rig, with the bells and whistles, to travel with me so I can make contact when needed. As we know, .Gov and .Mil can DF you REALLY FAST and send a missile your way if they so choose. So if you crack the mike, you need to stay on the air as little as possible AND you need to beat feet and get out of that area ASAP.
So, the solution is Cold War Goodie #1: Burst transmissions. The ability to key in your entire message in your transmitter, then hit a button, and the entire message gets "burst" transmitted at a high rate of speed. In the Cold War they were working at 300 wpm. The receiver would catch the burst, and decode it so the message could be deciphered. With burst tech, the radio only had to be active for a quick second to send the message, making DF harder, thus the spy safer.
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| AN/GRA-71 CODER-BURST TRANSMISSION GROUP |
Cold War Goodie #3: Encryption. Not only did the agent in the field write his message in code, another magical black box further encrypted the signals - that were being burst and hopping all over bandwidth, making interception and code-breaking that much tougher.
I talked to one of the guys at Elecraft, and he wasn't really keen to build a small run (say 100 radios) with such features included. To be honest, I have ZERO idea what legalities might be involved. He seemed a bit nervous about frequency hopping and the FCC...
BUT: If I was a III Patriot with such skills, and I wanted to contribute to the cause and make a few bucks so I could buy more bullets and beans, I have to believe that one of you radio guys could homebrew either one black box to do all three functions, or separate black boxes, each tasked specifically. If you did it either way, you'd make your black boxes compatible with commercial, off-the-shelf gear so that no matter what rig X militia or Y Lone Wolf is using, they can talk to one another far more safely than they can under today's paradigm. You'd also make sure that computers and ANY vulnerable digital components were not needed to avoid all NSA dirty tricks.
Build your widget into a nice little black box (keep it as small and simple as possible for the guy who has to carry this stuff with him or hide it often), slap a "III Radio Company" label on the side, and I can promise you every blog in this community would promote the hell out of your black boxes. Keep your price-point as low as possible, while still making it worth your while!
Legalities? I can't help you there. While I know we already live in a world WRoL, there is no sense in getting yourself thrown into a cage if you can avoid it. But I'd be willing to bet if you designed it and for whatever reason your attorney told you not to sell the widgets, you could surely draw up a set of plans written at the 3rd grade short bus level so a guy like me could walk into Radio Shack and break the law - I mean, try my hand at building a widget. And I mean third grade short bus simple - some of us have never used a soldering iron. But most of us learn quickly...
For you Comms guys, especially those of you with the skills and knowledge to build such devices, I am going to ask you please and directly: Please do this for your fellow Patriots. If you have the skills and you are willing, but need start-up capital, I know you'd get support from our Patriots. Just send me your PayPal email addy and I'll start plugging you this afternoon.
Kerodin
III
Buy it overseas; save yourself a lot of trial and error.
ReplyDelete3 things jump to mind. 1) Can we even get it imported with the widgets we want? 2) Foreign source, can we trust it? 3) It doesn't help a Patriot who could make some bucks.
DeleteAny ideas about 1 & 2?
K
I used to work at a mfr of military RF commo gear, we made lots of encrypted products...NSA tracked every single chip in inventory, regular monthly audits, not a one could be 'lost' without severe consequences to mfr/license. I suspect if you tried to import any sort of truly encrypted radio product you'd have a whole list of alphabet agencies outside your door in minutes. One of the last products our department was prototyping was a hand-held DX'er/RDF. I have no knowledge of the particular circuit, but think about the intended use of the product. I assume the target customer was USSOCOM where much of our cool stuff went, but a lot of it was made with black (vs green) housings for who knows what agency. So in general I think the .gov folks would react the same way they would if you tried to import fully automatic firearms or explosives i.e. they'd react severely. Seems in the bigger scheme of things the group known as 'III' as armed with legal pistols and small arms is a low level threat, but would certainly get on the threat elevator if caught trying to obtain encrypted comms! You may as well declare a Jihad while you're at it LOL. Just my .02 of course...
DeleteSo .mil and .gov not only owns that particular battlespace, they have every nook and cranny covered.
DeleteBurst and freq hopping seem most beneficial to the FreeFor element, especially if he is using OTP - encryption would be redundant. Redundancy is good, of course, but in this case the gain would probably not be worth the cost.
Could a burst unit and/or a freq hopping black box be built without special secret-squirrel widgets? Could the circuit be put together from radio shack?
look in the forum here http://www.radiofreeredoubt.com/
ReplyDeletemay help answer questions
Thanks, Anon. I added RFR to my "Patriot Links". I tried adding to the blogroll as well, but blogger doesn't see a feed to latch onto. I'll get you on my sidebar too.
DeleteK
K. I agree with your analysis on coms and often wondered myself, being rather ignorant on the technicals, how we would communicate effectively on any level under a duress situation such as marshmellow law. My goodness, if they shut down coms for a bit, there would be heads popping by those who live on facebook, twitter and such who just blather on with useless tidbits of thier daily lives. You are on to something here.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely right - if the masses lose their phone/internet they will begin to melt within hours. This is why my sudden launch into Comms. I never planned a paradigm where I would be working with Patriot cells - but that paradigm changed this summer with CQB classes and Brock's PatCon and the Idaho event.
DeleteSo, now I am spooling up, but I am way behind the curve. The good thing is that even good, new gear is not that hard on the budget. The hardest part is getting caught up on the "How it all works".
I've been assured that it isn't that hard to get good enough to make contact with allies, but it's also one of those endeavors that you can continue to learn new things for a lifetime.
There is another way.
ReplyDeleteBrevity codes.
Innocuous-sounding chatter, right out in the open, that mean specific things to your Tribe.
Works right up until they make ham radio illegal.
After that, we need low-probability-of-intercept methods, as K proposes.
BTW, my background is in ELINT: electronic intelligence. Also a ham radio operator for 22 years, and professional electronics engineer specializing in frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum wireless design, at the circuit-board level.
BE: Thank you for weighing in. I've been thinking about making up a set of brevity codes and handing them out to allies at PatCons along with OTP details so we can begin practicing while the world is still spinning properly.
DeleteI am still the slowest man in the room regarding comms and Ham/Amateur. But I have learned that .gov doesn't like encryption (in the hands of mere citizens) even a little bit, commercial makers seem to have no interest in burst CW capabilities, and while there is spread spectrum/freq hopping, they keep it on a short leash.
I've started to scratch the surface with some of the computer software that can work with radios and noticed at least one program offers variable keyer speed up to 99wpm - but am I right that any radio using a computer should be considered compromised by .gov because of the computer side?
Next question: If we were to get an engineer (hinthint) who knew how to make add-on black boxes (or simply make the schematics so that a guy with a Radio Shack nearby could build the real thing when needed) for use in a WRoL/SHTF paradigm with the ability to be used on most hams - both the transmitter and the receiver would have to have the same black boxes in place, or the machines simply won't talk to one another?
Is building such black boxes (or the schematics) very difficult?
I'm bumping this thread back to the top because I think it is really important.
K
http://www.nabishi.com/
ReplyDeleteThis is quite relevant to the discussion:
ReplyDeletehttps://danmorgan76.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/a-boogyman-behind-every-tree/
Especially the comments after the article.
Agree, excellent .
DeleteHere is my thinking, and my concern: Every Patriot out there has researched how to do X and Y in case the coming event lasts longer than it should, and people have to start scrounging for alternatives. Lost your AR-15? They have made arrangements for back-ups.
I can't find *any* such support for the Ham/Comms sphere. If I need to send a 50 word OTP on today's commercial equipment, which while low power, would be in the open and I could be on the air - well, WAY too long. And since we know Ham will become essentially the only real mode of long range comms (and short range in many cases) we need a small library of widgets that our guys either have tucked away in a safe place (assuming it is legal to own a burst unit or encryption unit, etc) or at least the schematic so he can buy all the parts he needs now to be assembled at a later date.
Anon (comment above) sent a link to Nabishi - they have an encryption widget for voice in SSB mode. What I can't find, anywhere, are schematics (or suppliers) that will allow the guys in Ohio to build a burst widget that can work with the unit built by the guys in Florida, or Texas. Right now militia units simply aren't going to buy Nabishi encryption boxes (especially with such narrow utility) - assuming we could even get them imported.
I can't imagine a useful, modern burst widget would be very difficult to build - or am I wrong about that?
There are very powerful microcontroller boards that have the input and output capabilities you need and are totally programmable. The arduino is very popular and we'll supported with both software and hardware.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.makershed.com/Arduinos_Microcontrollers_s/43.htm
The very first one listed, the Yun, could take a USB input (stick or card) and output the compressed signal on one of its I/O pins.
VJ