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Sadly, I've yet to need to open my wallet.

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A wise old Squid corpsman once told me regarding people:  "Keep your expectations low enough, and you'll seldom be disappointed."  True dat.

I second the choice of Shelby Foote's three-volume set as recommended just above by raybiker73.  Foote has been maybe the best writer to chronicle the whole conflict.  His writing flows as prose.  Some years back during a TV series on that war, there was numerous interviews with Foote.  They were a joy to watch, a gentleman talking about what he knew better than most anyone.
 
Foote's trilogy took some years to write; copywright dates are from 1958 for the first volume, to 1974 for the third.  I think he may have been a company-grade redleg officer during WW2. 
 
Gil, if you are looking for something from the southern perspective:  read Shrouds of Glory by Winston Groom (Forrest Gump author).  The book is about a lesser-known campaign waged by the south after Atlanta had been lost.  Intent was to do a left hook out of lost Atlanta and capture Nashville, while cutting off Sherman's sources of supply.  The campaign didn't go real well.  Hood's army got to the outskirts of Nashville during Dec 1864 just about as Sherman's was reaching the Georgia coast at Savannah,sans supplies since Sherman provided/looted as he went.  Oops.  And then Hood's army got driven off from Nashville's outskirts, badly.  It had gone up to Nashville just as badly.  The attack into Franklin TN which lost twelve generals for the confederacy, may have been a punishing action for his army on the part of Hood, and he was using some decent drugs due to wound and amputation status at the time.
 
Trace Adkins' song that plays in commercials asking for money for current wounded vets, begins with the singer saying that he was at Nashville.  He got pounded there by Hood.  In that book, there is a quote from a contemporary about how Hood wanted to forge an axe of the Army of Tennessee.  He got blunted, so the forging got to be a froe.  In the end, it was a wedge.
 
Anyway, good book, I've given it off but intend to go to the library and read it again.  Gil, it will fulfill your wish for the tactical side of a narrative.  Small campaign, big book.  And it will bring in the human side of failed leadership:  one army passing another fifty yards away in the night, while leadership was having a soiree with the locals.  Punishment soon after at Franklin.  And all within the shadow of leadership coming from primitive painkillers.
 
ETA while starting to post:  Well eff me.  Maybe there should be a suggested reading list here where people can put out what they think a RadioPrepper sort of a person ought to get his mind around.  There's a person on the training side of life's equation, who says that ham radio operators will be among the first to rat you out to the proper authorities (that would, of course, be right behind your family and close neighbors.)  I like the concept.  What do people here recommend for a reading list?  I vote for books seconded by people who know American history.

Not to mention that the radio can be programmed with FRS, GMRS and MURS frequencies, though transmitting would be illegal on these bands.





Gil.

 

 
Was wondering why you would be concerned about such a thing, that radio's transmit power being too strong for some bands.
 
I would think of transmitting on those bands, with that power, as an easy no-brainer effort to harden the mind for bad times.  Part of the hardening, is to willfully commit a misdemeanor per day, and a felony per week.
 
 That concept was put out several years ago on a more political site, Western Rifle Shooter's Association.  I do think that deliberate lawbreaking is a fine thing, if kept  somewhat in check to protect a person's ability to continue to run free and keep breaking laws.
 
For sure, any crimes committed during that heart-hardened way of life, must be directed at authority, not at people.  A couple of watts extra on transmit running a Chicom handheld radio,  is a harm to no one, and  running it on those prohibited bands helps you to be an outlaw in one of the smaller parts of life.  That's a very small start to outlaw status.  But as the wise man said, if you are not on some government watch list by this time in your life, you should be embarrased.

For my purposes, it would be 80m.  Same NVIS arguments as above in favor of 40m.  But in my AO, 80m is where potential friends are on the nigthly check-ins on the Wyoming Cowboy net.  The house dipole cut for @3.800 works well.
 
For this board, being able to put up a 16-20' mast on short notice for the consenus 40m is a good thing.  What do you stabilize that 40m dipole wire with?  Maybe with an 80m wire.  Or, you can set up that short mast and put 80m and 40m wires in the same axis, one being beneath the other.  Then use a 60m cross-wire to stabilize the both., and you know that there's much privacy on the few alloted 60m band freqs.  That works fine. 
 
Simplicity rules, though.  Put up the 80m wire and stabilize it with a 40m wire on a short mast.  You will get the close concept, and maybe some distance, depending on end height of wires. 

I've packed a "Sweetwater Guardian" filter and spare cartridge for about ten years.  MSR has apparently bought out Sweetwater, now it's called the MSR  Guardian.  Haven't needed to use it much.  I pack a couple of paper coffee filters and bread ties to secure a cut-down coffee filter to the intake head.  This, in order to help cut the need for filter replacement.
 
When the current easy times of internet ordering of such things comes to an end, it will be a good thing to be able to construct a larger water filter for personal and household use.  I imagine that plans for this are all around the internet.  I got mine in print prior to that from one of the paperback books that a guy named Don Paul wrote and published via primitive computer printing some time back.   (OMG, that's so '90s!)
 
His advice was for use with 55-gal drums, but the filter can be downsized considerably.  Five gallon buckets would work real fine.  Now, might be a handy time to plumb in a bucket lid for hose intake, and the bottom of the bucket for hose outlet.  Inside the bucket, is a multi-layered mix of coarse rock, smaller rock, gravel, and sand.  I'd be wanting to make the lowest layer out of smashed up charcoal briquettes, a bag of them would probably last the lifetime of the filter maker.  (As to that "lifetime" prediction, I think that other events other than water purification may intrude.)

There is some forum whose name I can't recall, where some people are told that "your rucksack is in the hall."

Shutting down cell phone service in a hurry is just not possible.  That action requires jumping through some significant legal hoops, otherwise (no matter who does it) it is known popularly as "interfering with communications" under federal law and is illegal, absent some significant prior judicial permission.  It's just against the law.
 
About a year and a half ago, when the arnichists were doing their thing out in Oakland during the Occupy Wall Street times, word on the street was that people knew the coppers were coming when their cell phones no longer worked.  That was one of those "interfering with communications" events.  Those OWS protests did not rise to a Martin Niemoller  moment for most.  I doubt that a quick tuck 'n trim on cell service anywhere here will raise many eyebrows, as long as it's done for a good cause.
 
America will get used to and may embrace, many more breaches of law as convenience dictates for the law enforcers.