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Messages - Quietguy

#46
I tend to see them as more of a defensive tool than an offensive tool from a prepping standpoint.  I can't really visualize a non-government group flying through my semi-rural wooded area looking for targets of opportunity.  We're far enough away from metro areas that well-organized bands of zombies aren't high on my list of things to worry about.  I'm more concerned about small groups of desperate low-lifes who are the same ones doing petty theft now.

However, I can visualize using one myself to get above the trees and doing slow 360s to see what may be headed my way.  I have thought  about that a number of times... we are now in the time of year where I cannot easily see beyond the boundaries of my own property because of trees and warm weather vegetation.  More than once I've wondered what some random daytime noise was.  Even the road isn't visible around the curve in my driveway until I walk almost all the way down to it.  I have also thought about mounting a wireless video camera on an RC truck to drive around the property to keep an eye on things.  Just another thing on the to-do list.

But, that also works to my advantage - most people are reluctant to open the gate and come up a blind (they can't see around a curve) 500 foot driveway to get to us.  That might be one case where a small group might use a little quad copter - or RC truck of their own - to see if it is worth coming up the driveway.  But, they could learn the same thing by quietly walking up the driveway and looking for themselves.  I guess that's why perimeter defenses become very important.

Wally
#47
Technical Corner / Re: My BitX20 Choice.
May 27, 2015, 05:55:02 PM
Quote from: KK0G on May 27, 2015, 08:43:40 AM
Quote from: cockpitbob on May 26, 2015, 05:12:06 PM
.............. If we knew what we were prepping for we could say what "the best" is.  We don't, so we cover our bases.

Speak for yourself, personally I know what I'm prepping for - an earth invasion of highly trained, advanced extra terrestrials.............basically space ninjas.

Ahhh geeezze... you've been talking to RadioRay again.

Wally
#48
Quote from: K7JLJ on May 26, 2015, 08:18:31 PM
Quiteguy, how did the tilted verticals do?  I'm still considering that ezmilitary for this reason.

One article in the book describes some USMC tests run in 1989 with Camp Lejeune NC as the hub station and out stations in Cherry Point NC, Oak Grove NC, and Norfolk VA.  Two Humvees headed out, north and south, stopped and ran tests every 25 miles and had reliable comms with the hub and other stations out to a range of about 150 miles from the hub.  They estimated a reliable range of 200 miles from the hub.

The mobile stations tested two antennas: a 32 foot military whip antenna (AT-1011) bent 90 degrees using a whip-tilt adapter and a 32 foot wire.  Both antennas extended horizontally to the rear of the vehicle.  The wire antenna was supported 4 feet off the ground at the end.  They had 100% reliability in all cases. 

According to the article:

QuoteUsing either the 32 foot bent whip or the 32 foot wire produced identical circuit reliability results to the fixed station test over the many stops and checks that were conducted in the operational area.

They ran a second series of tests with the whip-tilt adapter on a different route after shortening the 32 foot whip to 16 feet.  They did both day and night tests, changing frequencies as appropriate.  The article says:

QuoteHeavy thunderstorms with considerable lightning were present during the test period.  Despite the lightning, the inefficient 16 foot antenna and the inherent high noise level of the frequency band being used 90% reliability for voice communications was still achieved.

They don't specify which frequencies were used, but I believe it's a safe assumption they were somewhere in the vicinity of 60 meters or longer.  They chose their frequencies to make sure they would get ionospheric reflection.

Wally
#49
Some years ago I was active at the state level ARES/RACES and put up an 80m NVIS dipole antenna specifically for the state net.  It was made from #14 stranded THHN electrical wire from Home Depot, and was installed about 10ish feet off the ground to a nearby tree.  Total length was about 135ish feet, cut for resonance at the net frequency, with about half running along one side of my shop and about half in the air to the tree.  I was able to run the Washington state SSB net a couple of times, with the biggest problem being the attitude of some of the net members apparently triggered by my obvious inexperience as net control.  I had good contact through a large part of Washington state and only needed fill a few times.

I also put up a 135ish foot dipole up about 50 feet, which has NVIS properties on 80m and have had a number of successful daytime SSB contacts with friends out to a couple of hundred miles.  In one daytime test at maybe 150 miles or so I lowered my output power in a series of steps to see how low we could go.  I was down to 10 or 20 watts on my Icom 706MkIIg when my friend had to break off the test and take care of something.  That antenna worked better than my 10 foot high experiment, maybe because it was in the  clear rather than running through trees and along a building.

Another time, our county EC/RO and I decided to try an experiment with a temporary 80m NVIS dipole setup for the state net.  He was scheduled to run the Saturday net, so we headed up to the local radio club (on 5 acres of land) and set up a temporary antenna.  I had pre-cut more of the #14 THHN Home Depot wire to about 135ish feet and strung it up using surplus portable fiberglass mast sections available on ebay.  I think I used two sections of mast for each support, which put the wire about 6 feet in the air, with a piece of coax run through the clubhouse door.  He was able to cover pretty much the entire state of Washington, at least as far as there were stations participating in the net.  The biggest problem with that experiment was stability of the mast sections - I needed to use a better anchoring system.  It has been several years, but I think I held up the masts with metal fence stakes driven into the ground, but the weight of the wire wanted to pull them over.  Subsurface rocks kept me from getting as much penetration as I needed.  I ended up with some paracord guys and accepted sag in the wire.  Later, a permanent NVIS wire was installed at the club.

I have not had nearly as much luck with 40m NVIS, presumably because of my latitude.  40m NVIS tends to work much better in, say, Southern California than it does here in SW Washington state.  However, 80m here is Golden if you can put up a suitable antenna.

if you can find the out-of-print book Near Vertical Incidence Skywave Communications Theory, Techniques and Validation by LTC David M. Fiedler and Maj Edward J. Farmer grab it.  It contains a series of articles on military testing of NVIS techniques.  They had excellent results using military HF whips tilted horizontal.

Wally

#50
Quote from: cockpitbob on May 04, 2015, 09:20:33 AM
Quote"We train [for] Morse code because the adversary still uses Morse code," said Germain
This is just hearsay on my part, but I read somewhere that Russian bomber crews use Morse code on their flights.  If so, that might provide some incentive for maintaining the capability for awhile.

Wally
#51
General Discussion / Re: Medy's Intro
April 24, 2015, 05:39:07 PM
Quote from: cockpitbob on April 24, 2015, 08:41:50 AM
Note the date on Medy's post. ;)   I think Polypricrs is a robo-member who replied to an old thread.
Ditto for new member PrettyOnly, who posted today in a couple of other threads.  I'm guessing they were attempts at posting link spam that didn't work.

Wally
#52
General Discussion / Re: New Russian EMP
April 11, 2015, 06:58:45 PM
They are moving back in, apparently they moved out in 2006 to save money.  At that time Russia wasn't playing the chess game they are today.  Moving back in may be one way we are telling Russia we are paying attention to what they are doing.

Also, military communications have some requirements we don't have - they need to be able to operate before, during and after an attack without interruption.  They have different priorities than we do.

Wally
#53
Antennas / Re: Will I be okay to encircle the house?
April 05, 2015, 05:39:24 PM
Paul, here is a little write-up on balanced feedline vs coax.  The thing to remember is balanced line is much less sensitive to mismatch (SWR) than coax is - coax works well for a mono-band resonant antenna or fan dipoles, but not multi-band single wire antennas.  Multi-band single wire antennas are not resonant in more than a few spots.  Pruning antennas for minimum SWR to use coax is a huge pita, and the results vary depending on whether your trees have leafed out yet or how much other vegetation, structures or obstructions are in the immediate vicinity.

Take a look at this article for some background:
http://www.qsl.net/kk6mc/FeedLinePrimer.txt

Wally
#54
Antennas / Re: Will I be okay to encircle the house?
April 05, 2015, 02:00:28 AM
Ditto what KK0G said; you may have to play with lengths and feedline configurations to get it to work on 40 meters but it should be fine on 80 and 20.  An alternative is a fan dipole.  Several years ago I put up a coax fed #12 stranded wire fan dipole with 80/40/20 meter legs with a center point up about 50 feet.  It worked very well until it deteriorated to the point where now only the 135ish foot 80 meter legs are still in the air.  It still works fine on 80 and 20 but doesn't want to match on 40 because of the length.  I put it up quickly so my lengths were not cut precisely, I got it close and let the antenna coupler take care of the difference.  I will be replacing it in the near future, but it worked fine for a long time.

Wally


#55
Antennas / Re: Will I be okay to encircle the house?
April 04, 2015, 05:37:11 PM
I have not tried it so I can't speak from experience, but a few years ago I mentioned doing that to another member of this forum.  He advised me that when he tried a loop around the eaves of his house his family objected strongly to the interference to their personal electronics when he keyed up.  It seems field strengths inside the loop were relatively strong and his experiment was quickly abandoned to preserve household harmony. I was after mounting convenience and didn't need the stealth feature so I dropped the idea.

FWIW and YMMV,
Wally
#56
Tactical Corner / Re: JadeHelm 15
March 24, 2015, 10:59:13 PM
Stars & Stripes ran an article on it Friday:
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/army-special-operations-command-pushes-back-against-alarmist-claims-about-upcoming-exercise-1.335949

I usually tune out when the claims of "FEMA Camps" start because FEMA has a hard enough time getting bottled water where it is supposed to go after a disaster, how are they going to put thousands of armed citizens in "camps"?  I attended a presentation given by a FEMA Region 10 (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington) senior official at an EmComm conference a few years ago.  At the end of his presentation he put up a slide of graffiti on a wall that said "fema wants to rule the world!".  His comment was "They can't even get my travel vouchers right, how are they going to achieve this goal?" 

Scenario training is getting difficult because of all the political correctness these days.  BlinkyBill has a good point, you have to have an adversary to have semi-realistic training but identifying an adversary gets you accused of "desensitizing" the trainees towards that group.  You can't use any minority/disadvantaged/underprivileged/protected group as a result.  A few years ago the University of Florida attempted to deal with the issue by developing a training scenario involving a Zombie attack - and the national news media made such a mockery of them they actually cancelled the training.

Wally
#57
Quote from: EmComm Writer on March 14, 2015, 11:13:10 AMI've been out of the loop, so to speak, for the last year or so, and am I'm looking forward to digging back in and learning more :).

Hey Andrew... welcome to the group.

Wally
#58
Quote from: ciphercomms on March 12, 2015, 05:08:48 PM
$120 a year for an Amazon/Kindle subscription is not exactly 'free'...or am I missing something ?

It looks like the offer starts tomorrow (Friday). 
Quote
FREE from March, Friday, 13th – March 17th!

Wally
#59
QuoteIt seems to me that it is far too easy to be complacant and lazy when the knowledge is staring back at you so vividly as to it being blinding.

It seems to me you come to conclusions that are not supported by my post; either that or you are following the time-honored tradition of the straw man argument.  Nowhere in my post did I address my level of preparations, nor will I on a public forum.  My point is preppers should focus on the scenarios most likely to confront them - the ones which can happen at any time and any place.  Once those are under control then they can address the finer details.  If Grand Fenwick invades New York again and takes out Wall Street with DE weapons, which is technically feasible, the US would be in a world of hurt as the financial markets unravel.  It is the financial fall-out that preppers should be looking at, not how many computers are toasted.  Likewise, if a DE weapon is used on power grid control centers, the loss of the grid will be of some significance to the average prepper.  The details of why the grid went away become somewhat academic to we the consumer - the issue of surviving without the grid becomes of prime importance.  The only difference to me whether I lose the grid due to an ice storm or a DE attack involves what time of year it occurs and how long will it be out.

QuoteI agree that going as far as stockpiling calcium carbide and getting a lamp is a bit of a stretch

The issue of obtaining a calcium carbide lamp and calcium carbide is beside the point - my objection is to justifying it by claiming a HEMP (the kind most preppers/survivalists are considering when EMP is mentioned) will destroy all forms of electronic equipment - that is not true and never has been.  Switching the definition to DE weapons doesn't help, because most of us will never be attacked with one.  Our infrastructure may be, and we may face the results of an attack on the infrastructure, but that is a completely different thing.  Doomsday Apocalypse scenarios are seldom helpful to good prep planning; they detract from a reasoned evaluation of the scenarios we are most likely to face.  This causes unnecessary diversion of resources and inhibits a methodical approach to preparing for hard times.  Experienced preppers know this, and plan accordingly, but people new to the subject may not.

All IMHO of course.  Stock up on all the carbide you want... it has lots of uses.  I have lots of stuff I will probably never use.  And now I have chores to do so I will check out of this thread

Wally
#60
Quote from: freax on February 26, 2015, 06:57:24 PM
It is a Directed Energy weapon and if I had to guess it would be more than likely used and copied by China for use against us.

Wow, freax, you must be a lot more important than I am if you are concerned about being the target of a DE attack.  I cannot even imagine your normal prepper being the target of a DE attack with weapons intended to take out aircraft carriers, control centers/systems and other high value targets.  Don't forget what the "D" in Directed Energy weapons stands for, and it is absolutely not the same thing as the more or less omni-directional HEMP from a high altitude nuke burst.  Even the animation you linked to showed the beam width as limited to specific targets.  Wall Street might have to worry, but my time is better spent worrying about other things.

Yes, I am aware of these types of weapons, but I don't think it is accurate to lump their risks in with garden variety HEMP when it comes to the civilian population who are not specifically targeted by a Well Funded Adversary.  IMHO preppers are not targets that someone would waste their advanced DE capabilities on.  Also, IMHO, advanced DE weapons are not something preppers should waste their limited resources defending against.  It's far better to prepare for things with much higher likelihood of occurrence - like maybe ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, illness, unemployment... you know, life in general.  All IMHO of course.

Wally