Govt daft idea of the day (turning off FM radio)

[River Song]

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re Post SHTF Comms

Quite right – I was involved in experiments here.

Lets recapitulate.

Firstly legalities – Totally illegal except if you have a HAM Licence on certain wavenlengths. (Bands). In a post SHTF situation, I personally wouldn’t give a monkeys and if you are doing it on behalf of the community then you are providing a measure of resilience (a good thing). I think tptb will have far more important things to do that chase radio pirates. (Unless we have a Marxist takeover in which case there are other considerations).

Morse Code (CW) – there was a thread recently originally started by NR and highjacked by LS and myself ☺ regarding low power transmitters. As and when I receive mine we’ll see how they work. As far as my very limited knowledge goes, CW works on lower power and greater distances than Voice.

Voice (FM) about a year ago methinks I invested £48,76 in this little 5w-7w FM Transmitter.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CZE-1W-7W-FM-S...XQlgtS-T0u

Distance covered with a decent aerial highup would be around 5 miles or so.

A cheaper alternative with slightly lower power would be for £28.67 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5-W-Digital-PL...XQuTNTO3te

Having said that I would be happy to have anyones views on which 20W transmitter would be useful. The ones on the bay range from a few hundred quid to a few tens.

Data (Server). I was far more interested in getting a community server up and running containing a preppers library and elemental message switch. I got the server up and running on a small 5v battery using Wifi to which you could connect with your smartphone or pad. Sadly even with a decent aerial I couldn’t get any useful distance out of it. I did consider (theoretically) networking a couple of servers over a few miles and connecting them using some form of protocol (AX.25??) over a pair of UC5R’s – maybe even a repeater with cascading data but things got in the way (or in the words of the late Harold Macmillan (“Events dear boy – events).

All this seems dreadfully technical but being able to have some kind of broadcast comms that is independent from “The man” would IMHO be useful in a post STF Situation.

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