Shortwave radio, and it's future

Shortwave radio, once the cutting edge of information dissemination, declined with the installation of the present canopy of communications satellites, and the simple fact of the lowering of the cost of telephony.

I remember single phone calls costing more than my monthly bill for unlimited national and limited international free calling costs me today. Shortwave was king then, because one could get news and information directly, ahead of the media systems which MIGHT have passed it down to you, or might not have.

Then, along came the Internet, and everything changed. The Internet, of course, is everyone's preferred medium of exchanging EVERYTHING. Dependence on the Internet is EXACTLY why one needs a shortwave receiver, and hopefully, why those with shortwave ("ham") transmitters will keep up THEIR equipment. The Internet is HIGHLY vulnerable to disruption (military nets a little less so), and any major attack on the USA will either start with Internet disruption, or end with it. As society now stands, loss of the Internet for more than a day or two would irreparably cripple our business and communication industries, to name just two.

Shortwave radio would be a good point to fall back to if the Internet gets damaged, or maybe even shut off by a hostile Government. Today's shortwave radio operators have transmitters which fit into small spaces, and can be transported easily. The biggest component is the antenna, and it is vital for proper transmission, but decent antennae can be made of mostly wire (not pipe), properly insulated, and put up on 6-foot poles in a particular pattern and length to aim the outgoing signal.

An important improvement to radio has been digitization. There are now inexpensive versions of what used to be known at RTTY, or automatic radio telephony/teletype. In my early radio days, RTTY equipment used to fill a room, but most deep-sea sailors now have a book-size modem for their Single Side Band receiver/transmitters which allows them to get a digital stream good enough to give them weather charts and allow them to print out vital transmissions.

All this brings me back to the receiver. You must have a good receiver, and more importantly, you MUST have a list of frequencies to tune it to. A good receiver will give you too many choices to just scan the dial for, you have to know where to go.

Use Google, or your favorite Internet search engine, by entering just "shortwave radio" and pick out the groups who review and rate receivers, not sales outfits like Amazon. Using such a group's recommendation, pick out a receiver that you can afford and THEN use a shopping-bot to buy it.

Use these rough specifications: It MUST have the capability to accept an external DC power source. Your receiver must be able to tune ALL shortwave bands, generally from 1.7 mhz to 32 mhz, it must have switchable (or tunable) Single Side Band, and a Beat Frequency Oscillator to allow you to tune code-tones correctly (and/or tune the Single Side Band with). Today's standard is digital tuning, and if you get a choice of keying in a frequency or turning a dial to it, that's even better. Some radios with vernier (dial/knob) tuning drop out the audio as you are turning the knob. You don't want that, you want to be able to hear everything the radio tunes, all the time.

Next, using that same search engine, enter "shortwave radio listening" and find, again, groups devoted to that practice. You are looking for lists of frequencies, schedules of broadcasting, etc. The Internet makes this easy, use it while we still have it. Print all this material out for your SHTF library, of course.

When the Internet's gone, the smartest and quickest of us will have shortwave radio to fall back on, with little interruption in our vital information flow, and those who don't are just sheep.

Most of us have all the guns we need by now, and that makes us strong in our defense capability. Add in communication and information stream via shortwave radio, and we are the next leaders of this society.

Comments

[Rivrdog]

Working on it Jason, and when I get the info, I'll put up a new post with it.

Kurt P, up to just recently, I'd have said yes, and some of my SHTF-prep posts have dealt with that issue. Now, I'm not so sure. First of all, probably only Russia could pull off the technical aspects of a simultaneous nuke-strike in the upper atmosphere with 3 to five warheads. The ChiComs might be able to in a few more years. The rogue states, even giving them very optimistic progress reports on their rocketry, probably can't now, and will likely be unable to for a long while.

The strike has to go off 50 miles or so up above ground, and the detonations have to be timed to within a few milliseconds of each other to give the desire roll-up effect to kill the power grid, which is the biggie in that type of targeting. As a bonus, you also get some other stuff, and might roll up the Internet, or you might not, depending on the existing ability to switch transmission modes. Individual pieces of solid-state equipment might or might not be at risk, depending on the angle of incidence of the radiation from the bursts. In any case, a simple "copper cage" can mitigate all but the most direct rays (dead-overhead burst). It's a myth that all vacuum-tube stuff survives anyway. EMP damage is all about induced currents in circuits, and vacuum-tube circuitry is also vulnerable. In reality, after such an attack, some identical things, like cars, in an area might be killed, and some survive. The EMP tests out in the Mohave showed that, even in the limited area that the test array could severely saturate, that damage could be expected to be uneven and unpredictable. Additionally, some solid-state circuits tested show immediate incapacitation, but somehow returned to normal function after a while.

I think the precaution of building a shielded box in which to store solid-state things for SHTF is a normal precaution, and duplication where feasible is another, but I'm not sure I would go beyond that.

The Internet is currently more vulnerable to damage from hackers overloading it than it is from a nuke strike.

[Justthisguy]

Maybe it's time to start up Fidonet again.

[Jason van Mourik]

Im a bit of a nicompoop when it comes to reading things in forums and such for tech info. do you know any good local places that have a good selection and smart people there that i could learn a thing or two from?

[Kurt P]

Those notebook sized transievers are ...miniture vacume tec...right?
Because the most likely ---clypse will probably involve some kind of EMP.