Secure Radio Communications

when it comes to handheld radio communications there are a lot of things to consider radios propagation antennas all of this can get really complicated really quickly but one major concern that a lot of people have these days is privacy with government surveillance and big tech censorship increasing to staggering levels more and more average people are considering handheld radios as a viable means of communication for everything from emergencies to daily communication that is a bit more private than a smartphone so when it comes to specifically handheld radio communications we like to think of two main avenues of approach number one is what you communicate and two is who you communicate to there is a third factor who might be listening but we'll address this as we go along these factors will dictate how you choose to communicate to put this into a succinct statement really what we are trying to define is our intent which is to establish secure voice or text communications between small localized groups of trusted individuals without using pre-established infrastructure and to do this we are going to use this illustration to show the increasingly more effective ways that you can prevent people from hearing and understanding your communication as we go from the bottom of the pyramid to the top we get more complex and more difficult which in turn means that fewer and fewer people can intercept and understand your communications now granted no communication form is foolproof least of all radios so all we are trying to do is do our best to limit who can hear and understand our communications but before we get too far into this we have to touch on the legality of things i only mention this because the self-appointed internet division of the fcc will show up in the comments section to educate everyone using their vast knowledge of legal expertise anyone who spends even just five minutes around the ham radio community knows that it is unfortunately filled with a lot of people that are more concerned with memorizing the fcc's arbitrary confusing contradictory and nonsensical rules rather than helping people i'm cooperating i never met this man before i hate the constitution i hate free space i'll stitch i know things fair warning sir money has an additional 80 to your fine and for people like this my decorum my respect and my patience has run out it's not a tantrum and i'm not jealous i'm just fed up if you are one of the ham radio operators who does this at a time when we need to encourage people to help us develop and modernize this technology you are destroying your own hobby so chill out of course since there are most likely federal agencies surveilling this video we are obligated to say don't do anything illegal always obey the holy scripture from the fcc however it is up to you whether or not you want to follow the fcc's rules or not the only person that is responsible for your actions is you so today we are going to be talking a lot about this middle ground right here and as such we are not going to talk about the legality so much but rather focus on what is technologically possible rather than what is legally possible really the only significant reason for bringing this up in the first place is because laws do matter when it comes to what a company is willing to invest their time and effort to build if something is questionably legal or is not legal at all a company in the united states is not going to invest the time and energy to build such a technology out even if something is technologically possible the laws are going to hold a company back from doing what they want to do or what the customers want to do so today we're going to talk about the law as little as possible and only when it is really a barrier to you using or even owning a certain technology so let's dive right into this one of the major considerations for radio communications is what frequency you choose so first up is vhf and uhf these are the bands that are responsible for ensuring the overwhelming majority of all line-of-sight communications everything from your bowel fang to what we call bubble pack radios that you can pick up at really any store these days that's what these radios will use most of the time and this is because there are ways to use these radios without a license legally or quasi legally is using a baofeng on frs or gmrs frequencies illegal maybe maybe not depending on who you ask if you ask the hams everything's illegal but if you use a cheap baofeng on an frs frequency will anyone even the fcc or other hams even know about it ah the answer to that is no there's no way you can detect that but that's a different story with the next one hf radio hf radio is kind of out of place on this chart and honestly it requires its own video it doesn't deserve to be in this little pyramid here because it's genuinely a fascinating frequency range that offers a lot of very interesting capabilities but we haven't found any quasi-legal way to use hf radio without a license right to jail right away and since hf radio offers an extremely long range a lot of people can hear and triangulate you and since it's the staple of amateurs you will find it very hard to rely on hf radio as the bread and butter of your communications plan moving on up we come to a handful of very obscure bands this is something that you can research on your own a bit because each radio band has its ups and downs but you might find that a good way to increase your privacy is to operate on bands and frequencies that not many people use and one of the better bands for this is the 700 800 and 900 megahertz bands this is what many police and commercial radios use specifically because it's far away from the traditional vhf uhf bands granted these days these frequencies are becoming more popular among amateurs but for now it's still not that common in many areas simply because there aren't too many radios capable of transmitting and receiving in this frequency range and the ones that do are very expensive but up here at the top is essentially summarizing the best parts of all of these tactics using frequencies that nobody uses or frequencies that are slightly out of band but are still within the transmitting capability of the radio you are using or transmitting really close to or even in between the offsets of something else to confuse people trying to direction find you or using wide non-standard offsets to confuse scanners or hams who are used to a 600 kilohertz offset we're using a radio with a very high selectivity meaning that you can squeeze in your transmission into places where normally you wouldn't find a transmission depending on what radios you have and what you are willing to do and what you're willing to spend your money on there are a lot of things that can be done to make your communications a bit more private just by choosing the right frequency next up is a much larger topic than we can talk about here but it is the eternal question of analog versus digital radio most people that try to get into radio by buying a couple of cheap valve fangs might not even know that digital radio exists again this is some more homework for you but the short version is that the overwhelming number of radios on the market most if not all baofengs all bubble pack radios and most radios that hams use are analog meaning that they transmit an analog signal digital radios which use a digital signal are less common but they are becoming more and more popular every day in fact their popularity has exploded in recent years because there's a lot of benefits to using them you can look into the differences and the pros and cons of each but here's what we think for a professional non-hobby use there are very few reasons to use analog radios anymore for one you cannot encrypt analog signals several companies have tried with things like voice inversion but there is nothing that can't easily be cracked in real time by someone who knows what they're doing and that's a deal breaker for many people so if you're trying to use encryption of any kind your only option is digital digital signals are also much more clear than analog and digital signals have a farther range than analog at the same power level and there are lots of different digital modes that you can choose from so you can take your pick this is just a handful of the sort of the most common ones the downsides of digital radio are really just three-fold one digital radios are more expensive and so that's really a barrier for a lot of people number two is that there is no quasi-legal way to use a digital radio without a license so there's really no way to get around that unless you don't care about that and finally which is really the biggest problem and one that we're currently working on right now is that digital radio modes like dmr which is the most common one are really really hard to build repeaters for with an analog radio you can literally buy two bow things and build a repeater in 10 minutes it's it's that easy so that's really one of the main reasons to keep analog radio around for professional uses sometimes because if you want to build a repeater on digital radio like dmr it is not easy to do most people in the ham radio world use hot spots instead of repeaters which is its own rabbit hole you can go down but the bottom line is that unless you've got significant technical skill to build one or have several thousands of dollars laying around to buy a commercial repeater using digital radios with repeaters is not really feasible at this time but that's changing in the next couple of years that will be an incorrect statement because right now a lot of people are working on figuring out how to more easily build digital radio repeaters and on to the topic that everyone has been waiting for encryption encryption is one of those touchy subjects among hams most will tell you that encryption is illegal and you go directly to jail do not pass go or collect your 200 for even thinking about using it no trial no nothing but that's not true you can legally use encryption on your radios in a few specific circumstances and situations but we can get into the dirty details of that later if anyone really cares the reason for bringing this up is to explain the very first level of encryption inherit heavy air quotes because it's not encryption at all and that is what we generally call privacy tones i only put this on here because i wanted to stress how you should not use these privacy tones also sometimes called ct css tones or pl tones are not private all they do is prevent you from hearing someone else on your frequency these do not stop anyone from hearing you they only stop you from hearing some random person that might also be on your frequency so they provide negative levels of privacy because someone is probably listening to you but you have no idea because you think you're safe so do not use these if you're concerned about privacy because i really don't know how companies have been able to get away with marketing privacy tones on their radios because it doesn't do that up next on the chart are digital modes which we've already talked about again digital systems by themselves are not encrypted but digital signals can only be heard by digital radios whereas analog signals can be heard by analog and digital radios usually so since encryption is such a touchy subject in the ham community a culture has emerged in which hams try to comply with the law but still make it harder to hear and digital radio is pretty good for this especially considering the popularity of the balfang radios love it or hate it balfang has sold millions of those radios globally so in almost every single area in the united states in every single town in this country there is going to be someone who can hear your uhf or vhf transmission but if you are using a digital radio even without encryption the number of people that can understand that transmission will be astronomically low the transmission if you try to listen to a digital transmission on an analog radio it just comes across as clicking and unintelligible you can't hear anything you can hear sound but you can't actually hear people talking right and speaking of doing things to reduce the number of people that can hear you but still remain legal by not using encryption look no further than your local police department public service entities but particularly law enforcement agencies have over the years been going to what are called trunked radio systems now we can get into the weeds for this later we've already talked about this a bit but the short and simple version is that most trunked radio systems use complex digital modes which make it very difficult for someone to hear even if they are listening out for it on a digital radio most of these systems are not encrypted so that they remain within the laws that are meant to ensure transparency between police and taxpayers a lot of states and cities and local areas have restrictions on local law enforcement using encryption in their radios like they they'll say like a city council will say hey look you can't use encryption on your standard dispatch radios but you can use encryption on your like your swat team radios and stuff like that but the complexity of these systems means that you often need to buy a specific police scanner that is capable of decoding or demodulating the police communications in your local area now granted many police departments around the country are just skipping right passes and going to fully encrypted radios regardless of whatever transparency laws exist but moving on up within the han radio or commercial business communities we have what we can genuinely call true encryption many commercial chinese radios quietly offer this for their radios again since encryption is not encouraged at all within the ham radio community if you were to look up a review for a radio on youtube or something most hams won't even mention the encryption feature but in many cases you will see like a basic or enhanced encryption in the programming software for a particular radio that has it and there's a little bit of a problem with this for one almost all of these encryption methods are proprietary and closed source so even if you do find a radio that advertises encryption unless you are highly technically skilled there's no way for you to verify that the message is actually encrypted to the level that the company claims for instance a lot of companies will advertise that their quote enhanced encryption is 128 bit which isn't great but it's better than nothing i guess but when people on the internet do their thing and investigate we find that due to the math and some other weird stuff that's complex to understand it's really just 40-bit encryption which is really easily crackable in real time by anyone who knows what they're doing these weird proprietary encryption methods might work for you something like this will prevent the kid down the block with a walkie-talkie from understanding you but the closed-source nature of a lot of this stuff is really hard to find seriously we have scraped the absolute bottom of the internet to find random forum posts from 10 years ago or a comment on a blog or a news article from five years ago about a specific radio's encryption capabilities it's just not easy to find any information on this stuff so really the final option is what most people will end up with by far the only encryption that we think is worth using for any serious use is aes 256. 256-bit encryption is the gold standard for all encryption at this current time this is simply the best you can do aes 256 is open source and it's the only encryption standard approved by the nsa to handle top secret information right now the undisputed leader of radio encryption is motorola for those of you who have been following us for a while you know our strong feelings about motorola as a company around here motorola and the atf compete for our attention for what we think is the most totalitarian entity in the united states but motorola created the aes 256 standard for how it applies to radios and as such they are the top dog when it comes to radio encryption because many companies use motorola's standard for their own radios so if you're trying to go for encryption aes 256 is the best you're going to get although be prepared to pay for it but there is something else to think about we dedicate a lot of time and effort to trying to hide our radio transmissions so much so that we forget to ask ourselves this question is it even worth hiding what you say if your transmission can be geo-located now we have talked about this in greater detail in a previous video so if you're interested in learning more please check out our video on radio direction finding we're literally showing you how people or agencies can hunt you down via the transmissions you emit on a daily basis but for those who just want the short version here's a quick rundown of what we're trying to explain imagine that you are running a surveillance operation and you're trying to find out where a certain person is transmitting from well if you intercept transmissions from these areas marked by the red dots on the screen this doesn't really tell you much the person transmitting can be over here on the left they can be down the road on the right they can be in this little green area down to the south you can't really tell where they're located but if we wait a little while and we pick up more transmissions the picture becomes even more clear and we can narrow this down to a specific house this is what happens in modern warfare those transmissions can have the most secure uncrackable encryption ever but if the transmission alone is in the same area every time an adversary does not need to understand what's being said to target that site so never forget that you can spend thousands of dollars on a radio and encrypt it with the highest levels of encryption but if you are constantly transmitting from the place that you sleep at night that's probably not a good idea so for us in our specific situation and for the things that we need radios for radio direction finding or rdf is by far the biggest concern so how do we address that well the first way is by using a low power level the general rule of thumb in the radio community is to only use enough power to complete the communication this is something that is often forgotten by most people that have radios so what does this look like in practice jumping back to our map here let's say that we are located in this house right here at the upper left and we need to communicate with a person or a team that is operating down somewhere in this little red blob but we also have an adversary within the battle space located up here to the top right a radio listening post which is trying to intercept our communications do we now see why the topics we've covered before are useful all of this comes together in situations like this but anyway let's say that we need to communicate with these dudes over here without the guys in the listening post hearing us well in this specific situation if we blast out our radio at maximum power everyone's going to hear us which is not only good for counter surveillance but it also allows us to be jammed very easily which is not good but if we dial the power down we might have a chance at being heard by our guys but not the adversarial force granted this is impossible to know radio wave propagation is some weird stuff and strange things happen all the time plus you are never really going to know where a surveillance site is located but ideally you would be able to use just barely enough power to get the job done without any interruptions of course it can be a bit nerve-wracking to be constantly on the edge of not having comms but it's all a balance a nice safety barrier is good to have in case things change or the ao shifts or whatever but the overall point is that using only the power that you need is crucial and always a good thing to do but there is something else that we can do and this is where things get even more complicated we can use terrain masking and directional antennas to make sure that the signal we're transmitting only goes where we want it to right down here at the bottom are what we call omnidirectional antennas these antennas are what most people think of when they get into radios and these are the kinds of antennas that will come with your radio when you buy it these antennas emit a signal in every direction equally but what if you were to use an antenna that points the signal in only one direction so if we jump back to our map here we can see that this signal right here that our previous signal with our omnidirectional antenna is a circular shape now this is slightly inaccurate because of many factors many people think of radio signals like a circle or a bubble but that's not quite right especially in urban environments but just for this example a circular transmission area is good enough to illustrate what using an omnidirectional antenna would do this is what it would look like but let's say that the listening post your adversary that is trying to intercept you is closer than the people you're trying to talk to well that's a problem because you can't reduce your power enough to really matter because then only the people that are in the listening post can hear you so for this we can use what's called a directional antenna this will beam your transmission along a certain path rather than every direction so by using a directional antenna you can easily reduce the number of people that can intercept your transmission really the only way to intercept this kind of transmission is to be located between each person transmitting this would also mean that directional signals are very hard to jam because the jammer would need to be using an insane amount of power or be located along the transmitting axis you can also do this with terrain transmitting down a valley using the mountains on either side of the valley to bounce the signal down like a bowling ball down a lane with the gutters up but this obviously relies on the terrain cooperating and since most people live in cities which are notorious for creating radio problems of their own directional antennas are usually a better bet and coming back to our chart here just like everything else we've talked about we can layer this one with other tactics we can use a directional antenna in conjunction with cooperating terrain we can also add in repeaters which mask the true transmission site so that if someone far away hears you and tries to direction find the transmission site chances are they're going to find the repeater instead of you using a directional antenna to hit a repeater that is off-site a repeater which itself is connected to a directional antenna to transmit to a final site man that would be pretty effective at confusing anyone who's trying to figure out what's going on much less anyone is trying to triangulate you of course directional antennas have disadvantages too directional antennas are not super great for mobile applications and you have to know where the other guy is in order to point the antenna in their direction but if you have pre-established communications windows and procedures directional antennas are really hard to beat for just being a bit more secure in your communications but remember when it comes to sending information via the radio waves we don't even necessarily need to use our voice to send that information a lot of times and generally speaking just like how power level affects the number of people that can hear us if someone is trying to scan for a frequency or scan for a transmission the length of time of your transmission also matters very significantly generally speaking the longer you hit that push-to-talk button the longer you're transmitting the longer that you spend talking on the radio the easier it is for people to find out where you are so right down here at the bottom is what we call rag chewing now this is just ham radio slang for hopping on the radio you know for hobby uses just to have a good time and talk with your friends on the radio not worrying at all about who's listening to you or and not worrying about direction finding at all that's okay for a hobby use but in a tactical scenario you don't want to do this this is not good you don't want to just spend your entire day on the radio transmitting with really long transmissions of like sometimes a minute or two minutes or more that's that's not something that's good when you're trying to limit the number of people that can hear you so really the best thing the the best practice for voice communications is to keep your voice communications as short as you possibly can but sometimes even a voice message is too long how long does it take for you to read a sentence out loud it takes you several seconds but what if you could type out your message and send it in less than less than half a second a lot of dmr radios nowadays a lot of digital radios come with a texting feature that allow you to send a text message uh to another radio or a radio that's you know part of your group uh and that message is going to take just fractions of a second to send because it's sending it's compressing all of those characters down to a very small size so you really you're only exposing yourself for a very short period of time now something to keep in mind as i have indicated here on the screen is that many dmr text messaging features on most digital radios are not encrypted so you're sending this message in the clear over the airwaves so anyone can read it that's something to keep in mind another more well-known method of sending data over the airwaves is what's called aprs or automated packet reporting system or automated position reporting system depending on who you ask most people just call it packet radio and this is its own rabbit hole again some more homework for you to look into but this is really fascinating you can use aprs to do things like send emails and send text messages and weather reports and automatically report your position without using some kind of cellular service it's very interesting and there's a lot of different ways you can use aprs and it's a little bit more well known than a lot of these proprietary texting services that are on dmr radios they're usually proprietary whereas aprs is really more of a standard and then finally just like a few of our other categories we can layer all of this stuff together we can use encrypted text-based communication and voice communication only when it's absolutely needed and even then short transmissions from multiple locations if you do this you're limiting the amount of time that you're spending transmitting your location out in the form of your your radio signal getting out there so remember the shorter you can keep your communications the better and a good way to do that is by sending data instead of voice and finally we come to one of the more contentious subjects that not a lot of people talk about but it's definitely a factor and that is what we're calling the family factor or the convenience factor in other words how easy is your setup to use with your family who might not care about radios this is something that a lot of people deal with it's just everybody knows you know hey when you know the radio guy in the family is bringing the radios out and nobody really pays attention it's something that's really hard for people to understand and depending on the complexity of your system you're gonna you might have to choose a less ideal situation a less ideal setup just because a a setup that you use that's less ideal is better than the best system that you don't use so right down here at the bottom you might have you know small kids who you're trying to get into to radio and all they can handle is a small cheap battle thing or that's all you want to invest in them because you know there'd be young kids or something like that hey there you go that could be a great option if you've got some older folks around who might understand digital radios or they might be able to to handle the responsibility of a you know 100 plus digital radio then you can go with digital and with digital radios it was analog ones too you can program the front front face so that really the only thing they can do is push the push to talk button and change the volume so if you're worried about people kind of messing around with systems and and your settings uh you can do that very easily and then moving on up we can move into encryption now uh depending on your level of expertise and how people understand how keys work and things like that you might have to choose a less ideal encryption method that's a little bit simpler to understand or you might be the tip of the spear and you might be running a a small local group of you know uh people who are in your trusty group and they understand the the impact of radios and they're they're responsible enough and they're willing to spend the money on a five thousand dollar radio uh to run some aes 256-bit encrypted you know radio on really strange frequencies and and take that responsibility to the next level so you always have to consider convenience or your your family in your decision-making process because chances are if you've made it this far into the video you're going to be interested in providing a set of radios you might have a family you're trying to buy radios for to make sure that your family unit is good to go you might have some friends and neighbors who you might want to purchase radios for or you might have a group of buddies who are trying to get together and buy radios as like a group so that you all are on the same page with things and the convenience factor is something you have to consider if you get a really expensive radio that nobody wants to use because it's inconvenient or they don't know how to use it well you know that's probably a little bit of a waste whereas you could go with a slightly less ideal radio setup but it's a lot more convenient for people to use or more durable or something like that so this is something to consider when you're trying to pick out what kind of radios to use so when we add all of this stuff together really our goal is to pick the best practices from all of the stuff we've talked about and implement it as best you can but let me tell you something the coolest dudes on the internet still haven't figured this out the super secret tier 1 ranger sniper delta seals still do not have ways of meeting all of these criteria at the same time but on the civilian side of things when it comes to ensuring the survivability and the utility of your communications networks and implementing this into your daily life not just on the weekends when you go to the range this is going to give you capabilities when others even the us government does not have those capabilities i know we dedicate a lot of time to talking capabilities and i guess we can only beat this into people's heads so much but i'm asking you please please please at least try to figure out this kind of stuff for yourself i'm pleading with you to pay attention to the boring stuff such as communications because communications is a great equalizer just like weather communications has historically been the reason for both resounding success and the abysmal failure of military operations around the world i know this stuff is boring and sometimes hard to understand i get it i really do my own brain is not wired to understand most of the stuff either and we here can try to help with the complex nature of this stuff by helping make things a little easier to understand but these days we are facing diminishing returns when it comes to trying to convince people to pay attention to the stuff that isn't entertaining if it isn't a video about a rifle or play carrier people just turn it off if it isn't entertaining people don't want to watch it this mentality has got to stop we are not going to make it out of these tough times unless we start reading books and learning skills that aren't just confined to the cool stuff in the tactical arena so let's do that if our youtube analytics are any indicator if you made it this far into the video on this topic you are already ahead of the curve if you're listening to this you are the resistance the people who need to watch this video in its entirety the people that we are pleading with to start learning skills are the people who clicked out of this video right at the beginning when they realized it wasn't going to be entertaining so congratulations you were already on your way to figuring out which path you need to take when it comes to your own communications for us this is not a game this is not a hobby this is an attempt to use one of the only existing technologies that humanity has in order to ensure that we have basic capabilities when powerful companies and or nation states decide they don't want us to communicate the past two years have strongly indicated that internet and cellular communications are not reliable cellular communications are not reliable due to everything from censorship to mass surveillance and internet-based communications well not only is that more vulnerable than we think from everything from recreational vehicle owners to russian submarines but the entire concept of the internet the very core and basic levels of how packets of data are sent and received has in our opinion been corrupted to the point that investing time and effort into new internet-based communications is not exactly a feasible enterprise we have gotten a taste of this in recent years it doesn't matter how secure your communications method is it doesn't matter how great your new social media app is if your entire domain can be delisted by the one or two companies that own the majority of internet traffic investing time to research and develop out our own independent communications networks from the ground up is in our opinion a much more worthwhile venture at this stage and the field of radio is really one of the only options that exists we believe that we as a people can do this but the biggest barrier like everything else in life is ourselves we have got to force ourselves to choke down this information and understand it ever wonder how social media companies now control the majority of communication and information in the world ever wonder how they did that because they had the technical knowledge and we did not so let's change that let's become experts on this stuff and build our own communications networks sure spending 19 hours on youtube watching videos about guns you don't even own is perfectly fine if that's what you want to do but you know what else is cool being strategically and tactically superior in the fields that are boring if even the highest tiers of special operators can't even fill their own radio and just get their echo to do it but you as a private citizen can set up your own extensive covert networks and bounce radio signals around like its child's play you will run circles around any adversary you might face so if you can do all of this and still say what you want to say and say it to only the people who you want to hear it well then you're going to be a very very capable force and finally when it comes to the eternal question that will surely be asked what radio do i need to buy that will enable me to meet all of these criteria the answer that i'm sure everyone is tired of hearing is it depends there is no one radio that can fulfill all of these criteria but you can get really close so this is going to require its own video on the topic right now there aren't too many options out there for people who want to use radios like we do so we can cover this in a separate video because it can get really confusing and technical really quickly so stay tuned for that but in the meantime if you do not have a radio just yet you can learn the internet with all of its faults is still a great place for learning new skills and recently there has been a lot of content within the field of ham radio that you can use to help understand basic principles and try to figure out what you will need to meet the criteria that matters to you so stay tuned for more on this infinitely large topic and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade