Ham in a can / Ham radio

Michele

Michele

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Behind Enemy Lines in a State ruled by Tyranny
A metal ammo can will make an excellent, but not perfect, Faraday cage. Complete cost about $400-500
faraday cage.jpg


Ham components: shop around to find best price or sale
Internals.jpg
Antenna.jpg Antenna Radio.jpgRadio

License.jpg License about $35. Class and test one day very simple.

Total approx. cost for your ham =$400-500
ham GIF

We are not onea those crazy prep people but we do have some items just in case such as this radio, water, dehydrator, weapons/ammo, small stash of ready food, an alternative remote living location in the desert with water and live game; that's inhabitable for most humans. With the dehydrator can always make more chow as needed.
 
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If one were building this as a "doomsday" radio for SHTF, it is fair to assume it is legal to buy and operate in listen mode without a license or is possession of a transmitter w/o the license a no-no?
 
Oh it's a lot like a CB. I imagined it being more complex, with some big tower on my roof. I haven't really done much research yet. One guy had it on his computer screen. Much to learn.
 
brian said:
If one were building this as a "doomsday" radio for SHTF, it is fair to assume it is legal to buy and operate in listen mode without a license or is possession of a transmitter w/o the license a no-no?
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Anyone can listen, thereā€™s even some that donā€™t bother to get a license and use it.
 
There was a time you had to go to a Hamster store to get equipment and they'd certainly check if you had a license.
Now they sell it Amazon/Ebay. You can find lots of stuff on internet and with a mod kit get allll kinds of stuff. Id be careful of who tunes your stuff, if you're not inclined or equipped to do yourself. Lots of golden screwdrivers out there that just love letting the smoke out of stuff.

Bells CB and Electronics in Fort Lauderdale still has a site up. Carle is TOP of pile and fair with the cost. Former Navy Communications something???
Some of the pics of custom work was done by me šŸ˜ 25yrs ago lmao. Nothing gets yer ass tight like drilling a 1.5" hole in a Bentley or Lamborghini with under 1k miles on it.
Tell him BLUE says hey

 
This is one thing we are going to add to the jeep this year.
Thinking about getting a handheld too. GMRS mounted in the jeep and handheld for remote use.
 
Michele said:
A metal ammo can will make an excellent, but not perfect, Faraday cage. Complete cost about $400-500
View attachment 17921

Ham components: shop around to find best price or sale
View attachment 17922View attachment 17920 Antenna View attachment 17924Radio

View attachment 17923 License about $35. Class and test one day very simple.

Total approx. cost for your ham =$400-500
ham GIF

We are not onea those crazy prep people but we do have some items just in case such as this radio, water, dehydrator, weapons/ammo, small stash of ready food, an alternative remote living location in the desert with water and live game; that's inhabitable for most humans. With the dehydrator can always make more chow as needed.
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Actually, it doesn't even hurt or cost much. The Technician license, which allows VHF and UHF comms consists of 35 questions. To take the test is $15, the study guide, which should take no more than 10-20 hours of reading is $35, and an excellent handheld radio that covers those bands is the Radtel RT 490 that can be had with cables and earpiece from Amazon (or Temu, if you want to give up your identity to China, er, Giner, as the Mango Moron likes to say) for less than $80.

As a BTW, if you just listen, you don't need a license. If you want to assemble a good "Go-Kit", get a Nanuk plastic case (cheaper than Pelican by a lot), Bienno DC batteries and hookups from PowerWerx and you're good to go.

I'd also recommend a GMRS radio (like the Midland G1000, $80 for a pair). The GMRS license us obtained for $70 and is good for 10 years and does not require a test. Ham radio does not cover the GMRS bands.

ATT announced that they're getting out of the LandLine business and yesterday's fail of the ATT cell phone system showed what SHTF looks like. Oh, and I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat.

Har3ry, the 3 is silent

PS-while I was writing the above, an email came in from Chameleon Antenna (a good military supplier) selling Bienno DC batts for $99:

chameleonantenna.com

BLF-1212AS KIT (10 hours on HF SSB at 20% TX and 80% RX)

THIS PRODUCT IS IN LIMITED QUANTITY - SO WHEN YOU'LL RECEIVE THE EMAIL NOTIFICATION FROM OUR NEWSLETTER - ACT QUICKLY! The Bioenno Power Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) Battery Model BLF-1212AS is a state-of-the-art 12V 12Ah battery. Electrically identical to our popular BLF-1212A, this AS...
chameleonantenna.com chameleonantenna.com

FH(3)
 
Just remember that repeaters will be smoked if a EMP hits.
I imagine after a event the airways will be free of most of, if not all made man noise. Atmospheric conditions aside, we should be able to get very good distance even in the FM. 10/11 meter - CB and the like should be 50miles easy. Shortwave even more. But all very limited in the big scheme of things. Really need means to atleast listen to the 60/80 meter. Good radio, antenna tuner and a spool of wire you can be world wide in a hour.
We've made crude beams for tracking in a mobil. Talking chicken wire and clothes hangers. Made 1 from a stainless salad bowl once, that one even increased my phones bluetooth by 400%, with a dongle. My laptop with a old RCA satellite I got reliable connections 600yds while stationary and could locate/direction +1000yds.

Lots of really cool stuff can be done cheap if your willing and like to read.
 
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Bobster said:
So which character are you going to be? :D
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The one who isnā€™t dead. I'm always the protagonist in my life stories.

The wannabe bounty hunter ... when he says, "I aint yer Paw" it cracks me up every time. I still say that to my son as a joke all the time. We must have watched that movie together a 100 times.

Clint Eastwood is the definitive anti-hero in modern film. I met him in person twice. Total happenstance. Once in Monterey CA and once in Atlanta GA.
 
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I remember watching the show Last man on Earth, wondering "Why are there soooo many people". I mean, if there were me?? My yard line would be the state line.
 
As the one dinosaur said to the other, "I don't worry about a cataclysmic meteor strike. I'm a prepper. Why, just last week I wrote a feature article for Prepper Dinosaur Magazine. I think of myself as a scientist."

Screenshot 2024-02-27 at 3.55.14ā€ÆAM.png
 
Miltonboro said:
Oh it's a lot like a CB. I imagined it being more complex, with some big tower on my roof. I haven't really done much research yet. One guy had it on his computer screen. Much to learn.
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Yeah, it is a bit of a deep topic. Last year I delved into software based radio (using a cheap RTL-SDR Nano 3 and Gqrx in Linux.) Aside from the twenty bucks on the USB stick and a few bucks on cables to connect to various antennas, it is cheap. Worst part is that the whole hobby is acronym-happy space that is hard pick a thread out of and be able to follow it.
 
Anybody notice that the Josie Wales bounty hunter is a younger Uncle Leo from Seinfeld? The New England accent was a nice touch.

When he tells Josie to drop the gun belt, it doesnā€™t occur to him that a pistol fighter will always have a second gun. A cinematic example that falls under the broad subject of situational awareness.

A fatal oversight.
 
Michele said:
Anyone can listen, thereā€™s even some that donā€™t bother to get a license and use it.
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And, yeah, I fall into that category. I really don't have the desire to yak for hours at time like all of the ham radio enthusiasts I've met. So, took the novice classes at the local ARRL group, but never bothered with the test. The only FCC license I have is long obsolete and it was just for operating aircraft radios.

It is handy to listen in to broadcasts locally as well as in the traditional short-wave band to foreign broadcasters. But, since I don't have anyone I know well enough to reach out and talk to, no point in transmitting at all.
 
clm2112 said:
And, yeah, I fall into that category. I really don't have the desire to yak for hours at time like all of the ham radio enthusiasts I've met. So, took the novice classes at the local ARRL group, but never bothered with the test. The only FCC license I have is long obsolete and it was just for operating aircraft radios.

It is handy to listen in to broadcasts locally as well as in the traditional short-wave band to foreign broadcasters. But, since I don't have anyone I know well enough to reach out and talk to, no point in transmitting at all.
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My father had an old friend who was a ham radio operator. I believe he was a radioman in WWII or Korea. He was really into it. Made a lot of his own equipment from surplus military gear or breadboarded things himself. Old school vacuum tube stuff. He got me started on learning Morse code and gave me a practice pad with a homemade tone generator so could hear it. I was maybe 10 at the time. Self-taught, very smart guy who would have been a top notch electrical engineer if he had the opportunity and motivation to get the degree.

I thought it was really cool that he would talk to people all over the world any time he wanted from his basement shop which was jammed full of equipment. I had to ask permission to use the telephone at home.

As an engineering student, I had a passing interest in packet radio just before the dawn of the consumer internet. I was more intrigued by sending data wirelessly than voice communications. HAMs were leading that charge and it made me somewhat regret that I never got the license. I was so busy making sure my GPA wasn't in the shitter that I never took that on.
 
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Bongo Lewi said:
My father had an old friend who was a ham radio operator. I believe he was a radioman in WWII or Korea. He was really into it. Made a lot of his own equipment from surplus military gear or breadboarded things himself. Old school vacuum tube stuff. He got me started on learning Morse code and gave me a practice pad with a homemade tone generator so could hear it. I was maybe 10 at the time. Self-taught, very smart guy who would have been a top notch electrical engineer if he had the opportunity and motivation to get the degree.

I thought it was really cool that he would talk to people all over the world any time he wanted from his basement shop which was jammed full of equipment. I had to ask permission to use the telephone at home.

As an engineering student, I had a passing interest in packet radio just before the dawn of the consumer internet. I was more intrigued by sending data wirelessly than voice communications. HAMs were leading that charge and it made me somewhat regret that I never got the license. I was so busy making sure my GPA wasn't in the shitter that I never took that on.
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I went pretty much on the same track.... Dad was an Airforce aircraft tweeker/missile mechanic turned mainframe computer technician. Lotta of home-brew electronic gizmos littering the basement, including home-made radios. I ended up more of a propeller head aero-engineer who found the software business paid a lot better.

Nowdays, it is much easier (and cheaper) to get into the listening side thanks to software defined radios. While I like Michelle's commercial i-comm transceiver in a can, you can go pretty far with a obsolete Android phone/junk laptop and a USB dongle for a fraction of the cost.

Regardless of what you end up using for the radio, the important bit is the antenna and understanding why various designs work for the style of signals you want to receive (and, ahem, possibly transmit ;) ). The stuff that isn't in the can is what is going to make the rig work well.
 

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