Emergency Plan B: “I’m thinking about pagers”
“That whole thing that happened in Lebanon with the pagers and walkie-talkies should be a wake-up call to our readership and listeners that we need a Plan B. Our grid could go down, and our systems could go down, which is why I’m thinking about pagers.”
I had not thought about pagers much (or at all) until the Hezbollah pagers blew up recently.
Those were special order pagers, which Hezbollah unknowingly bought from an Israeli front company which put explosives and malware on the pagers that were in the hands and pockets of 4000-5000 Hezbollah terrorists, allowing Israel to detonate them on command. I think I’ll skip those pagers.
But it got me thinking about Prepping, a repeat topic here. What role could pagers play in Plan B, when the cell networks and internet go down. If it were not for the explosives (!) Hezbollah seemed to deem pagers a good low-tech means of communicating.
Is it a viable alternative? Could I get pagers for each family member and communicate that way when things fall apart?
The internet didn’t give me any clear answers. A lot of the pager gear seems no longer available.
I discussed my new-found curiosity with pagers as part of the longer podcast, where I also discussed in more detail what went down in Lebanon.
I’d really appreciate reader input.
So, pagers do exist. I’ve never had one, although I think I want one now. I’m looking into it, and I may write a blog post about this, asking for reader suggestions.
I’m looking into what technology is out there for emergency purposes. Will pagers work when cell phones don’t? What alternatives are available?
What I’m gathering from about 15 minutes of Googling is that the old two-way pagers aren’t really a thing anymore, where you could essentially text with somebody, but that’s what I want. So, what I’d like to do is get each family member a pager. We live hundreds of miles apart, with some living nearby, and in an emergency, this might be viable. But of course, the pager service needs to be operational, so it’s not completely independent.
I am definitely looking into pagers and want to find out more about them. I’m unsure if a one-way pager would work. I’m uncertain about how that would function given what I want it to do.
Pagers are relatively simple technology. They don’t run over the Internet. They use wireless and FM broadcast technology, so it’s similar to radio technology. I think the biggest group that still uses them are doctors in hospitals.
Anyway, that whole thing that happened in Lebanon with the pagers and walkie-talkies should be a wake-up call to our readership and listeners that we need a Plan B. Our grid could go down, and our systems could go down, which is why I’m thinking about pagers.
However, we still need to rely on the pager company. As for satellite phones, the problem is they’re very expensive.
So, my parting shot is that we should not kid ourselves, we are at risk also.
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Comments
For people nearby, inexpensive walkie talkies work well. They are cheap, have multiple channels, and have decent range.
Pagers & Plan B? This wasn’t quite what I thought it’d be about! 😀
Hundreds of miles apart. Grid down. Tough one.
Try researching ham radio(s). If the grid is down, etc., and you have a generator or such, then ham radio might be the only thing that would work. Lots of things on the web about ham radio such as https://hamradioprep.com/ham-radio-range/
Also, check the prepper sites for communication when the grid is down. Lots of sites for that.
Ham radio is a thought, but just doesn’t work for many because….
* You need a license from the FCC. If you don’t have one and/or go beyond other legal requirements, they will find you and it won’t be good….
* Getting the license is tough for many, especially the very young and the older folks. You have to pass tests and know stuff.
* Some equipment is quite expensive.
* Often, larger antennas are required for certain frequencies. Also a pain point.
* there is more but….
CB radios are much less fuss. Range is limited, but the same for any other radio.
Tippecanoe, what do you have against Amateur/Ham Radio? As a licensed Amateur Radio Operator, my opinion is that your arguments fall flat.
–Getting a license is not all that difficult. The entry level (Technician) test information can be taught in a couple of days. The club I am a member of does it with a 16 hour course (Four 4 hour sessions). We are going to do a similar class for the General License that gives access to the High Frequency bands (think Shortwave between 1 MHz and 30 MHz). The club has a pool of Volunteer Examiners who give and grade the tests for the licenses. We have “old” people getting licensed all of the time and I have seen numerous instances of grade school aged children getting licensed. The big hold up time wise is the FCC.
–While some high performance equipment can be expensive, entry level equipment is affordable. VHF/UHF walkie-talkies can be purchased new for under $100. High Frequency radios can be found used for just a few hundred dollars. New ones cost just over $1000. People spend as much or more on cell phones.
–A 3.5-4 MHz vertical antenna can be put in an average backyard. A bigger antenna often provides better performance but is not necessary. I have known of people that used a long wire antenna placed around the eaves of their home for the bands between 1 and 30 MHz.
–CB radios are limited to 5 watts and 40 channels near 27 MHz. It is typically a fairly short range method of communication. I myself, being prepared for an emergency situation, have an AM CB radio because there will be some people that are not Amateur operators that I might need to communicate with. I can even use it to pass local message traffic received via Amateur Radio if the emergency requires it.
I second this. For the testing requirements, they give you all the questions and answers to study. If you have any reasonable memory skills, and learn a few concepts, you can pass the tech test easily, and the General with a little more work. There are lots of “ham test prep” sites on the web that will teach the concepts and drill you on the test questions.
Ham radio is the best solution, getting licensed is much easier now, no Morris code requirements. Though code will carry further than voice. Regional voice is usually by repeater, and when the repeater goes down, just like cell towers, range will be limited. For longer range a different radio is used, they are much more expensive and require either large beam or long wire antennas.
Yes. I’d just point out that the approved/legal entry-level, most common FM Ham frequencies of VHF (144.1 MHz- 148 MHz) and UHF (420 MHz – 450 MHz) are line-of-sight frequencies. (They escape Earth and continue into space.)
WRT the longer-range rigs, they utilize AM HF frequencies (there several bands, each with it’s own set of frequencies), you can communicate way beyond line-of-sight. The HF frequencies achieve this over-the-horizon capability by repeatedly bouncing their waves off the ionisphere back to earth and up again. The ARRL bands and a brief description of them are here: https://www.arrl.org/band-plan
Comms prepping. Too many variables. If our power grid goes down nothing works. If only the internet goes down will landline phones work? A hardened nationwide pager RF broadcasting system probably doesn’t even exist (compatibility).
If clear channel radio stations can broadcast (on a limited basis) then hand crank radioes with single side band capability are useful.
Someone will mention HAM transceivers, but that is far beyond pager talk.
Ham radio seems to be the #1 prepper answer to this.
Pagers are a non solution. There may have been a sweet spot between the last pager I had and the first (brick) cell phone I had, where fancier pagers actually delivered something like text messages… but all the pagers I had delivered nothing but phone numbers. The implicit message was “call me,” and you had to find a landline phone (or phone booth, whatever) to do it. I’m assuming places like Lebanon may still have a healthy landline phone exchange culture… but we don’t. It’s no solution for “when the government takes the grid down” because all the comm is still grid.
Before I retired, I erected a 200-household wireless ISP that networked three towns together. The government could crater our gateway to the Internet, but could do anything to affect the connectivity these three neighborhoods could have with one another. It would require creation of an internal server and some software infrastructure, but it could be done if anyone on the network felt the incentive to do it. It would be like a phone tree on steroids.
…but COULDN’T do anything to affect…
Ah, if only we had an ꓠꓳꓕꓕꓵꓭ ꓕꓲꓷꓱ.
CB’s will work locally. A decent antenna and a 100w amp will broadcast pretty dang far in the flatlands. That’s simplicity and affordability in one package.
10-4, Rubber Ducky!!
Seriously, I still have an old one, and I am glad I do. Guess I’ll reinstall it.
Yeah, CBs work locally, but forget the 100W amp; Feds get very fussy about that and WILL find you. Yes, they really can.
Maybe keep the high power amp in the closet until the SHTF. At that point the FCC goons will be nowhere to be found.
Don’t forget the 100w amp. It’s essential. We’re talking major emergency scenario, not mic checking your rig every day and night 24/7.
Easy to build with a pair of 6JE6 vacuum tubes. I am not sure about FETs since I have not messed with RF in a long time.
When land lines actually ran to each phone and the whole thing was powered from a huge battery, they were more reliable. A long time ago phone companies started switching to VOIP while charging high landline prices.
2 way hand held radios. Check out the Baofang radios at Amazon. $16.97 for a single low-end, programmable Baofang 5R. You can buy quite a bit of reduncy at that price. You can also replace the off-the-shelf antenna if you want.
Yaesu is a higher quality radio, but costs quite a bit more. Our old Yeasu’s are quite good.
IMO, it is best that a SHTF survival radio should not depend on wall chargers. A radio that accepts garden variety AA batteries, and a large supply of such batteries, is best.
Back in the day, the quality hand-held radios restricted the frequencies you could access to approved 2m (144.1 MHz – 148 mHz) and 70 cm (420.0-450.0 MHz).
The Baofangs lacked such restrictions, which SAR members liked since we could communicate with various gvt agencies on their frequencies (in our case, up around 150 – 155 MHz.), (Confession: some of us had our quality radios [Yaesu] altered to eliminate the built-in filters.)
Don’t know if those restrictions still hold, but the more frequencies your radio can access, the better. If TSHTF, nobody’s going to care about you violating
For all intents and purposes, 2m and 70 cm radios are restricted to line-of-sight, but they are easy to operate and you don’t have to learn a whole lot of details about how to tune an signal, as you would with an HF, bench radio.
Watch out for ICOM hadie talkies. Hezbollah had (long out of manufacture) IC-V82 handie talkies that had explosive failures! /s
(Actually, ICOM makes some real good radios)
“Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”
What about those solar generators. What will they actually run and for how long? And how long to re-charge?
Not much and not for long. They’re just batteries. I looked up a few and it looks like a 6 kWh battery pack costs about $4,000 (and that’s a pretty big one for the “portable” ones). But even that is only enough to run 200 watts for 30 hours. Just lighting, alone, takes over 100 watts (even with leds) for a few rooms.
You can get a Tesla style battery pack for the house. A decent one has a capacity of near 100 kWh, which is enough to run an active house for a few days (not including air conditioning).. I think they only cost around $15,000 or $20,000 but I don’t even know where I heard those figures. And then you still need all the electronics and the solar panels and such.
If you have the money it’s certainly worth having solar with battery capacity like that, just to let you be self-sufficient, generally, for electricity. It costs more but you are paying for the independence more than the electricity.
If society falls apart pagers won’t save you but guns might.
Yes, but you need enough comm to get your gun-owning neighbors to show up to help you outgun the tangoes. The Bundys didn’t send the (other) BLM goons back to DC because they asked nice
Weirdly, the answer to “How to communicate if the cell phone network goes down” may be “smart phones with peer-to-peer mesh networking apps.”
This assumes you have at least enough backup power to recharge your phone and/or run a mesh router. I’m hardly an expert, but I do know this technology exists.
There are also iPhone ham radio apps, another technology that will probably have some form of survival after a grid collapse.
I don’t think you can assume pagers will work when cell phone towers don’t. I think you’d need to research just how redundant your pager carrier network is, and then you still may not know…
The lesson a lot of conservative media learned is, no matter how attractive the cost savings, never depend on (politically) unreliable transport services to get your message out.
Nothing illustrates this more completely than the Parler story. One of the earliest attempts to create a “free speech” (i.e., conservative-friendly) social media alternative to Twitter and Facebook, they got body-slammed almost immediately after their debut by Amazon Web Services shutting down the Parler service’s cloud data farm, cutting them off from their own data. Parler went into emergency mode trying to find a “non-woke” hosting site big enough to serve their traffic. When they finally did and got their service working again, Apple and Google hammered them almost simultaneously, purging their app from their app stores. It went on like this through a chain of “enemy action.” The service went dark to their subscribers two or three times, for extended periods, and finally went bankrupt. But in doing so, they did others a service in identifying “reliable” unwoke service providers for their spiritual successors to use.
Thanks to Parler, I knew enough to jump to the Epik registrar when GoDaddy spoke out in favor of SOPA and then started unilaterally cancelling conservative hosted domains like Texas Right To Life.
The Professor learned this lesson when his hosting provider deplatformed him unceremoniously sometime in 2021(?) I remember this happening, but haven’t been able to tickle Google into citing it.
Mesh is hard to scale to a whole community and there is the issue of power.
I don’t think you should think of this as a one-size-fits-all situation. Imagine the grid goes down. Now someone needs to venture out somewhere for a short period of time—maybe to help a neighbor, maybe to grab a last quart of milk, etc. Or maybe you go out together and become separated. In those situations, a walkie-talkie or possibly a small, low-powered Ham radio might be good. A pager wouldn’t be of much help. I considered the thought of being separated from my family by just a mile or two in a disaster event and bought walkie talkies. (Of course, these are also helpful when my son and I go skiing.)
Professor Jacobson: Imho, nothing to worry about. Doubt you have any need to prep for anything. As long as you will accept the sharrya, neither you nor your family nor anyone associated with L.I. need be concerned about losing electricity nor anything else.
Pagers aren’t pager to pager – they go through a tower which is going to be down along with everything else.
My 15w ham radio runs off 12v and has reached Favorite Island (W Australia) which google tells me is the most distant land on earth from me. Distance and time of day dictate what frequency band is most likely to work, once it’s over-the-horizon. A better option is find a ham and have him send a message to a ham near your recipient and hope for the best – it’s an old and mostly obsolete tradition now but would still work. Hams are always looking for something meaningful to do with their radios.
“Pagers aren’t pager to pager – they go through a tower which is going to be down along with everything else.”
and not only that, but you need to use the phone to dial the recipient pager number and enter your short message. Do you have a wired phone ? and will the wired phone system even be working?
Ham radio
I wonder what Israel’s message was?
Your package removed
No virgins for you.
Limping for life
No one cares
No longer a man
Suggestions please
My guess is: L’Chaim
https://www.masaisrael.org/lchaim/#:~:text=A%20Toast%20to%20Life%20%E2%80%9CL,the%20joy%20of%20shared%20moments.
“My 15w ham radio runs off 12v and has reached Favorite Island (W Australia) which google tells me is the most distant land on earth from me.”
Your 15w ham radio may still need to go through repeaters, which will be powered by utility electric, which may go down. And even IF there was a backup, those do not last forever and could also go down.
And Ham radio requires a license, which involves testing for which you must pass.
It just isn’t for everyone. There is no sure thing, no silver bullet here. When the SHTF it will not be like before.
rhhardin is referring to a High Frequency radio. Repeaters are just an adjunct for extended range at VHF and UHF.
Ham frequencies below about 30MHz can be reflected by the ionosphere and go all the way around the earth, the lower the frequency the more the reflection. Trading off against that, the lower the frequency the more absorption when the lower atmosphere is ionized by the sun. At any time of day there’s usually a frequency that isn’t absorbed and gets reflected.
A slight geometric advantage that nobody ever thinks of is that once the wave gets a quarter way around the earth, it starts converging instead of diverging, which raises its strength over what it otherwise would have been.
Many very good posts above. All viable under certain circumstances. That’s the rub. The real question isn’t ‘what to do when/if the grid goes down’. The better question is ‘under what circumstances’. If a meteor strike creates a tsunami submerging the east coast under 25 feet of water to the Appalachian Mountains, the grid is gonna go down but a pager/cell/Ham won’t really help much for that scenario
Focus instead on what you are trying to accomplish with the back up comms. Just get an I’m ok here, are you ok there message sent/received? What is the distance? Trying to establish a semi permanent comes system or just short term? Are you sending them a ‘come home or to the rally point’ message? Go through some ‘why is grid down’ scenarios and you will see many of them don’t lend themselves to travel over long distance. Meteor, EMP, Authoritarian gov’t, attack on grid infrastructure. Lots of.other causes but 3/4 of these and travel is iffy. Don’t forget Humans are the apex predators and in densely populated areas like the North East US there’s A bunch of them and many of them will be looking out for #1 and will happily off you to ensure their kid eats that night.
Lots of variables in setting up/maintaining working comms. Your stuff must work, you have to know how to use it, get it power, maintain it, use correct antenna for the job. Likewise everyone on the distant end must do so. If not it won’t work no matter the choice. If you have widely dispersed family then establishing and maintaining a viable back up semi permanent means of communication is gonna be tough. Finding local Ham nerds is a good method. Buying decent short range hand helds another. Can pair this with a good antenna set up pre grid down at wherever your ‘home’ to ride it out is located along with a relatively inexpensive ham set up. Consider a good shortwave receiver to get news/info broadcasts.
Wikipedia has a summary of pager technology. As pointed out by other commenters here, Pagers are not what you want. You want something like Citizen’s Band (CB) radio. Beware CB radio uses a wavelength of about 11 meters. Various effects limit the range to a few miles. About 20 maxiumum. FCC rules limit the power to 4 watts. That’s not much. You can increase the range with a better antenna. That’s a whole subject in itself. If you do go CB get one that operates using single sideband (SSB). CB radio is like the old party line telephone system. You have to compete with others, and that could easily render it unusable in an emergency. A digression on SSB.
SSB is an alternative to Amplitude Modulation (AM) as you find on the AM bands. AM was designed to create a system of expensive transmitters and cheap simple receivers. That made sense with the radio technology 100 years ago. Modern electronics has reduced the cost of the receiver. With AM radio you have three components. The Carrier (always on) and two sidebands. One sideband has the same information as the other. So most of your power is wasted broadcasting the Carrier which has no information and a redundant sideband. A no brainer, go SSB for your application.
Communication is a war between signal and noise. Noise comes in many forms. Thermal noise in the electronics, lightening strikes and urban radio noise. I have worked in the latter. AM is the worst. FM is far more noise resistant. The FCC has recently approved FM for CB radio. FM is preferable over SSB for many applications.
So if you really want the best Plan B for communication go for an amateur radio license. You no longer have to pass a Morse Code Test. The best license is the Amateur Extra but you will be tested on theory and regulations. Not hard for a EE, but the general public might have trouble. With amateur radio you have a choice of many bands and high power providing much much better range. Get the ARRL Handbook and read up if you are interested.
In a crisis the power will go out. What then? While I get water from a nearby city, and regular electrical service, I’m on my own for gas and sewer. So I have a septic tank and a 500 gallon propane tank (which is only filled to 80% max). In an emergency I can run an electrical generator off propane. You can also run them off gasoline. Your Plan B needs to consider power.
Now in the event of an EMP attack, we are absolutely screwed. Our government has been remiss in not hardening the power grid and other important infrastructure to an EMP attack. An EMP attack need not come from a missile. It could get delivered by balloon. I calculated the payload for the Chinese balloon and it’s significant. In the multi kilograms. The ballon is made of mylar and has almost no radar cross-section. Use stealth technology, for the payload package, and color the mylar to make visual tracking difficult and you get a cheap delivery system will ultimately kill 90% of the US population.
Finally read “One Second After” by William R. Forstchen for a fictional but realistic account of what will happen after a EMP attack.
The best Plan B is leaving the US. Especially for Jews.
In a collapse situation noise will plummet. If you are communicating with a private group, use spread spectrum, open communications are likely to draw predators.
Most consumer
Most consumer generators will not last long. One problem with them is that they run at 3600 RPM. year is stabilized gas has a short shelf life, about a year.
Old Owen RV generators run at 1800 RPM and are built for continuous duty. ones with mechanical governors are best. They come mostly in 4 and 6 KW,
Diesel generators are better but much more expensive.. They run at 1200,, 1800 and 3600 RPM. Lower RPM = longer life. Diesel fuel has a shelf life of at least 10 years.
Generators should be fully loaded, with extra power going to battery storage.
My understanding is an EMP attack requires a nuke exploded above the atmosphere to hit a large area. Small, non-nuclear EMP weapons exist, but their effects are local. If Iran wants to disrupt the election to ensure a Dem victory, they could fire a rocket from a ship in the Atlantic Ocean into space, and explode a multimegaton nuke about 300 miles up at midnight on Nov 4. That would hit the whole east seaboard with EMP, and at the very least make the power go out. Most battleground states would be within range, and your polling place probably would not open, since without power and internet they can’t check voters in unless they have pre-printed poll books. How long the power stays out is hard to say, since the enemy will not have had the ability to practice the attack. It will be a one-off, and may not be fully effective.
I am thinking about voting early this year, which I normally don’t do, since I have a 5 min walk to my polling place, and it usually in and out – no lines. This year, I expect Iran or someone else to disrupt election day voting in some way, since it is well known that most Dem voters mail it in, and most GOP voters vote on Election Day. So, I will have to see how long the lines are when satellite early voting locations open up in mid-October..
I’d expect dems before Iran or China to pull some crap. Which is why I, too, am voting early in person this time around.
its been proven time and again that unless there are enough patriots in the military …society is doomed
thats why the fjb goon squad used the DemVid 19 as the excuse to fire patriots who didnt want to shoot up into their veins
the left nowwww claims that seattle etc didnt really defund the police
but yet those cities have not even near the same number of police officers
YEAHHHH for the same reason as the miitary
they let the patriots go via demands like
no chasing suspects
no grabbing a suspects head
no defending yourself
no defending the ublic
and on and on it CONTINUES to go
there is no cessation in the DEI Affrim Action Hate Crime debacle that has SANCTIONED TRIBALISM
pretend all you want otherwise
so grab your ham radios and walkie talkies etc
nothing else matters but what the local police//usa military does
NOTHING!!!
I’ve been a Ham operator for about 15 years. The entry level license is Technician class. Easy to study for and it gets you on the air.
GMRS/FRS is another good option. No test required.
CB is still a thing, but you have to contend with low power and on-the-air idiocy.
I remember when some CBers were putting 100 and in at least one case a 1KW amplifiers on their CBs. The 1KW one was a few blocks from me, trashing TV for a big area. I used plyers to push a small brad nail through the center of the coax cable feeding his antenna. Being a CBer, he wasn’t smart enough to fix it.
In a few months, these men will be part of the next wave of refugees that will flood into Europe and the United States (but not Saudi Arabia). They will have injuries that mark them as terrorists. So what happens?
I’m betting (not confirmed) there was a radioactive marker in those blasts that will stay on them for months or years. The IDF and their Mossad crabs will pick them off 1 by 1.
Why kill them point blank when you can watch and mine intel?
Wouldn’t it have been easier to place a camera at each hospital and catch the terrorists on video as they were brought in? Although, if I were planning such an attack, I’d go for as much intel as I could, and would probably do both.
Yes. ^^^This.
The overall strategy is to infiltrate all Western societies, and take control of Western societies from the inside.
There’s no need and no desire for EMP attacks or any other such drama
According to Konstantin Kisin , the UK has taken in more “immigrants” during the past 25 years than it had taken in during the previous 600 years. Today, it’s a crime to notice rape gangs etc in UK. So, the folks in charge are either bought off, or they’re threatened. Or both.
Easy peasy
We see it’s happening in the US.
And who is forced to pay for it all?
They are telling you that their intent is to increase taxes and increase enforcement after kamala is installed..
That’s the threat. Pagers and Plan B ?…… ha! you’ll be lucky if they permit you to keep enough money to feed your self and some members of your family.
Think I’m exaggerating? The dems just voted to keep noncitizen convicted sex criminals in the US.
Think of how sick that is.
Look what they did to your 401k in the past 3-1/2 years
And the federal debt
Honestly, a massive power outage might actually be the least of our worries : (
They will want to be on American welfare while plotting to destroy all of us.
There is a huge job ahead, cleaning illegals out and mots all of the people Dems have schemed to foist on us. Purging non productive people, not handy capped, from all aspects of our society., and bringing criminals hiding among us to justice. This will be a huge challenge.
Afraid you are going to have to take the leap for HAM. I’ve wanted to take that leap for a long time, but its a time and equipment sink.
Before I moved, I was pretty tight with a lot of guys with “skills.” They really didn’t seem to sweat the comms side of prepping or having their family able to communicate. I think they were pretty content with just having a plan of action.
Survival blog is a good resource for sane and sensible survival information written by sane and sensible people. Guest bloggers are encouraged.
This article is about short and long range communications for WSHTF (when sh!t hits the fan).
https://survivalblog.com/2015/03/07/emp-hardened-ham-radio-communications-by-prepperdoc/
https://midlandusa.com/blogs/blog/why-do-i-need-a-gmrs-license-how-do-i-get-it?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADAFdQgNN4jHlxJ230lDvN4cPJcNk&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkMObtInXiAMV3c7CBB2MeA2OEAAYASAAEgJ2RvD_BwE
$35 for 10 years, family included.
For a real SHTF situation, here’s an interesting account from a Bosnia survivor – One Year In Hell
Of course, with the treaonous dems’ orchestrated invasion of America and planned distribution of third-worlders throughout small town and rural America, life is going to get much saltier no matter what. For people who never visited the ultimate sh*thole of Haiti (the place is completely disgusting, even though it could easily be a paradise) or other third-world hellholes, don’t worry, Haiti and the third world has been brought to you.
So many complaints that “there is no Edit button”. Click Preview button, then edit your post (if necessary) and click Preview again. Repeat as needed. Click Submit when you are happy with your post.
Don’t make errors, and you’ll all be fine.
Do better — be perfect.
This message brought to you by Dianetics™.
1) Crosswords are properly done in ink.
2) Preview buttons are for amateurs.
🙂
A possible solution for emergency communications would be the 915 MHz mesh networking radios being sold. They can run off of a small solar panel/battery combination. They do require a computer or cell phone to send messages; those can be powered/charged from a solar panel power system.
I live near San Antonio, Texas, where a group of Amateur Radio Operators and Non-Amateur Radio Operators have set up systems that provide communication from San Antonio out into adjacent counties. It can even be used in a mobile system.
Since I don’t experiment with it my knowledge is limited.
Consider Garmin InReach Satellite communicators. Lowest plans are $13/mo each and although they don’t guarantee redundancy when using Inreach to Inreach communication (they have email and phone gateways that will all not work in a situation like this but that isn’t important as the Inreach to Inreach direct is what you want), my research shows they have 4 redundant data centers located on different continents and if one of them is still communicating with the a satellite mesh (and a lot of the satellites were not taken out by space warfare) then the communicators should still work. You can basically text device to device anywhere in the world.
As a follow up Garmin just came out with updated pricing today and they have a new “Enabled” plan which costs $7.99/mo and has the unlimited SOS feature (probably most important feature when not SHTF) and all the rest of communication is pay as you go but “enabled” by default. Basically a legitimate satellite communicator with redundancy for less than $100 per person per year.
One of the things we need to really be concerned about are the phones and other comms equipment we are using that is made in China. If Israel planted explosives in pagers, what can the Chinese do with I-Phones, Motorola phones and other cell phone related equipment made in their country as well as telecom parts made there. We are vulnerable. Terribly vulnerable as long as we have so many products made by what is essentially a country that has vowed to overtake us and eventually rule us. We need to fix our manufacturing issues soon. Period. Who will want to take their medications made in China if the balloon goes up?