EDC compass

[Pete Grey]

A good quality road map is always useful in a vehicle, but large scale maps of the local area can be marked with points of interest, pharmacies, garages, hardware shops for tools and gas, obviously food shops, even allotments. I often go into new shops and see if they have anything worth noting, sometimes it can be surprising what you can find when you don’t expect to. After 40 years of hill walking I always have a compass close at hand, if you can find north you will never be lost.

[Thoughtful]

My wife calls my car compass the "Right way up meter".
Maps never mark the important things in life for me either.
Doctor, dentist, vet, phone boxes, ambulance and fire houses.
Plus anywhere that is open 24/7.

I can never work out map scale anyway so when walking I count paces.
All places I'm interested in are marked with that not distance.
So many paces to the roundabout, from there so many paces to the phone box.

[Mortblanc]

Not sure if I have offered this story before, but back i the 1990s my Dad was suffering from a series of incidents where he was disoriented and had to ask directions to get home inside the small town where he had resided for 30 years. He was one of those people that navigate by landmark and the town was going through sudden and massive growth and rebuilding with even large strip malls disappearing seemingly over night.

He was not suffering dementia, simply confused due to the changes in his world that he could not keep up with. He had never been real good at navigating about anyway and would get frustrated over being turned around when he was 30! At 70 it was even worse.

We debated taking the car keys as a family, but realized that was not the answer. He was still sane and alert, he just got lost between Walmart and home. After all, he had experienced four changes in the Walmart location in that town since he had moved there.

My youngest brother went to his vehicle and unplugged the portable GPS unit and placed it in the dash of my Father's car. All he had to do was push the button labeled HOME and the lady in the GPS box would give him directions to get back home.

He was never afraid of technology and took to the new system with ease. He was able to get around on his own until he passed at age 80.

Another +1 for the modern GPS system!

Stores, theaters, shopping malls, mechanics, I have all that type information plugged into my smart phone GPS and the vehicle GPS has record of every important destination I have traveled in the past 5 years.

No I do not care if the government seizes it and has record that I went to the movies on 4, June, 2015, kr that I was camping in the national forest last summer. Neither am I worried that EMP will shut the system down.

Fact is that if we were to suffer an EMP attack the compass needles would be demagnetized by the event and as useless as a GPS! That is a factor no one ever mentions when doing the compass vs. GPS thing.

[Pete Grey]

There is always a place for GPS as well as maps and compass, you fathers story illustrates this, I do not have a GPS device ( I used one extensively when I worked ) but I do not need one now. I know my local area well and if I making a longer journey I usually get directions from the internet then I check my maps. We are all different and so are our needs.

[Lightspeed]

MB I've not seen any reliable evidence that EMP would demagnetise a magnetic compass. and come to think of it, if you were close enough to an EMP source to do so, I think you'd have no use for a compass anymore! :-)

[Mortblanc]

If the emp source were a thermonuclear device and you were under ground zero you would have few continued worries.

Back in the olden days, when "prepping" was newly born, EMP held a different worry for the individual. We had no miniaturized electronic devices, no PC on the desk, no laptop in the briefcase, no smart phone in the pocket. Nor did we have electronics in our vehicles.

EMP was directly of interest to us as an electromagnetic spectrum product with more effect radius than the radiation of the blast. One could be safe from the alpha, beta and gamma rays and the EMP would still make it far past the radiation zone and damage equipment, not through surge melting circuits, but due to sudden magnetization shifts rendering batteries and magnets nonfunctional and the change in magnetization of small parts.

The worry about EMP back in the 1960s and 1970s was the effect it had on batteries, magnets in alternators, and small mechanical gear like chronometers and watches.

EMP being the rapid reversal and alternation of electrical currents at the nanosecond level, an affect on any small moving instrument would be noticeable. Many small parts would be magnetized and others would reverse polarity.

Back in those days there were no digital watches, and may people could not wear a wrist watch due to the electrical fields inside their bodies. Just the small imperceptible magnetic fields generated by the functioning of the nervous system would impart a magnetic field that would slow and eventually stop a wind up wrist watch within a few hours. Imagine what an emp blast shifting polarity every nanosecond would have done?

We were not so much concerned with a "surge" that would mess up our electronics. That did not occur until miniature electronics became a part of everyday life.

I am not a big proponent of the ability of man made emp to stop the world, but close to the blast area, and outside the thermo/radiation zone, there would be a dramatic effect on lots of things people have not even considered, and less than we expected on many others.

And yes, even today I do keep a wind up pocket watch and a couple of wind up wrist watches available in the little metal jewelry box for special occasions.

[Straight Shooter]

And yes, even today I do keep a wind up pocket watch and a couple of wind up wrist watches available in the little metal jewelry box for special occasions
.................................................................................................................................
And so do i MB and i suspect many other old farts like us.....i love my pocket watch the most though.

[Lightspeed]

Yep, wind up watches still kept here too. Only last week I checked functionality of the simple Timex that was given to me as my first watch, as a boy. It still works just fine losing just 1 min per day.

[Pete Grey]

With recent comments about GPS devices and EMP what would you put in your faraday cage, My thoughts are a radio, small solar panel, rechargeable batteries, a pair of walkie talkies, tablet with survival information, a couple of led torches (one with batteries ready for instant use), a blood pressure monitor, a battery charger in case power was resumed, then I would drop in some cable, clips, fuses, any adapters I think I might need, it’s better to have them and not want them than want them and not have them.
Can any one out there think of over things to add ?.

[Mortblanc]

Depends on your perception of what EMP can do, how devices react to it, and what a Faraday cage actually is???

Lots of ideas and arguments one way and the other on those subjects. The arguments are long and confusing and when I read them and an old R&R song cones to mind, "Why do you say you will when you won't, say you do Baby then you don't"

One of the real problems is the hype on You-tube and on the internet about EMP. It is one of the best examples of the old saying, "If you can not dazzle them with brilliance then baffle them with bu!! sh!&!".

Most of those people doing the tests on you-tube are short circuiting devises with direct voltage surges and not EMP. There is a difference between a voltage spike that can jump a closely positioned open circuit and an EMP pulse.

I think I have spoken before that I have a BIL that works as a programmer for NASA. He was on the lead staff that put the Space Station into orbit and keeps it there. He programmed the controls for the Hubble and Galileo telescopes and has done God knows what for other agencies NSA contracts for and he can not even mention.

I once asked him what NASA did when a CME (natural EMP) passed the orbit of all the satellites we depend on daily for comms and weather, as well as spy duties.

His answer was simple, "We turn them off, wait for the event to pass, and turn them back on."

If one is subjected to an EMP pulse they turn them off and turn them back on, just like resetting a computer.

It seems that in spite of all the hype, a closed circuit is needed for EMP to do its dirty work and if the item is not in use or turned on it is safe. That was an expensive lesson they learned from the Starfish event back in 1962. There was no shielding on satellites, and no provision on satellites to turn them off and back on in the early days and they lost most of them within a few months after that event.

Your car sitting parked at the curb is probably OK. If it is running it will probably stall due to EMP pulse if that pules is strong. If it stalls turn it off and wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on. If that will not work then disconnect the battery at the terminals for 10 minutes and reset the computer. When the agencies report that vehicles would not restart after EMP pulse without mechanical assistance that is what they are speaking about, resetting the computer.

If you were so close to the EMP point of origin that neither of those things works and your gear is really fried you are probably dead or will be soon anyway, go back inside and wait for your hair to start falling out.

I live 30 miles from a major U.S. city that is well known abroad, but lost its real importance soon after WW2, and 70 miles from Wright Patterson Air Force Base. I am in a target area to say the least, but not directly in the thermo-nuclear danger zone. I am in what would be the EMP danger zone due to nuclear blast. My major surrender to the EMP fear is that I have a metal storage shed with a metal floor. It was already here when I bought the place. I keep all my lawn and garden power equipment in there. The little tractor, the rotovator, chain saws, one of the gen-sets .... I figure that if the EMP thing is real, and all my ambivalence is misguided, I will still be in good shape for the garden the first year of the new dark ages.

I also live in a "metal box" covered with aluminum siding, a tin roof and a heating grid under the floor. I have to have an outside antenna to get TV or radio signal inside the box. My cell phone will not work inside the box. That is the same protection that a Faraday cage would provide and the main provision I have for any such disaster. That and the little tin mob with the pocket watch and Grandad's pen knife.

I have always wondered why people wanted to protect their comms if the guy on the other end did not protect his? You would be like that jerk at the supermarket walking around with the blue tooth in his ear pretending to talk to some imaginary person on the other end. (One survey I read stated that 1/3 of the calls on these headphone set deals had no one on the other end.)

Tablets, pads, phones with all your information??? That is only prepping for disaster. The dark ages existed because there was no paper to write things down. It was all in a "memory bank" and when that source died of disease or old age the knowledge died with it and we forgot how to make concrete for 2000 years! Make a hard copy. I can not imagine the experience of having all your life work on the thumb drive and not being able to retrieve it. (Come to think of it I do know that feeling, I have a masters degree thesis on floppy disk and no terminal within 100 miles that will read them!)

Most of the information I really need is on the bookshelf, not in a hard drive. That is one advantage to being a long term "prepper". For my first 40 years of this endeavor I did not even own a computer. There are more than 400 volumes of "prepper" related material in my shelves.

Hopefully your solar charger would provide power for the laptop and pad, if they were intact. Hopefully you can still pull up the information you need to build a good privy and hope the source you have on preserving meat really knew what they were talking about. That is especially the case for all those that feel having the information is as good as having the experience. Just wait until you cut into that first shoulder of bacon and realize the book was wrong, you did not use enough salt and the salt you did use, and the whole hog, are wasted!

I did not worry about EMP for the better part of 30 years, after the fall of the old Soviet Union. Now we have the Korean thing going on and it is a concern again. Not a real worry, just a concern, since I can do nothing about its occurrence anyway.

This time around I am not 13 years old with my whole life ahead of me and worrying about the Russians in Cuba. I am nearly 70, have lived an interesting life and if I die in the next 5 minutes I have cheated death out of 25 years once already. I can easily live without computer, walkie-talkies, cell phones or internet until the meds run out and I lay down and breathe my last.