Prioritizing Radio

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so right now I'm in the process of getting together some questions for uh frequently asked questions question and answer ask anything whatever you want to call it uh with regards to radio so uh in in sort of soliciting this out there in the The Ether sphere uh on the internet uh I realized that there's one uh question that really I get kind of asked quite a lot uh people ask it in very indirect ways and I have to answer it a little bit separately from the dedicated question and answer video so hopefully these videos will come out right around the same time as one another uh so if you have not seen uh what the Q&A video is going to be I haven't recorded it yet I'm recording this one first uh just so everyone's aware uh because I think this is a very important question and the question that I get asked all of the time both directly and indirectly IR ly is how do I prioritize radio how do I decide how much money to budget for comms how much money should I spend on a radio how much time should I invest in this thing that we call radio right how much uh should I dedicate in terms of money time resources knowledge all that stuff into the field of communications how does radio fit into everything else that we have to prepare for right uh and I think this is a good question because we are pulled in many different directions aren't we uh we have all different kinds of communities all trying to to say that their uh their subject matter is the best or the most important or so on and so forth right you've got the medical community who says that you know prepping you know with medicine and preparing with medical supplies is the most important thing you've got the general pre to say Food Water Shelter that's the most important thing you've got of course the entire gun Community right um which despite I I appreciate the fact that some people are coming out and saying you know maybe the answer to our problems uh does not lie with uh Firearms exclusively right uh despite some people coming out and saying that there's just still kind of the this overwhelming tidal wave of information uh when it comes to guns and if you were to go by the internet uh and the internet's advice you would think that you know owning a firearm is you know the most important thing a human being can do and you know that's um not really the case in my opinion however when we come to radio we get the kind of same thing don't we we we go and we we kind of get the the idea from a lot of radio guys that hey comms radios are the most important thing and it's not true uh all of this is a balance so the question is how much of a balance like how much do we prioritize this what do we do when we're trying to factor in radio to some of the other Financial things that we're doing because as we all know radio stuff's not cheap uh so if we're trying to save and prepare and do the best that we can how does radio factor in and how do I decide that for myself as one might imagine you really do have to kind of figure this out yourself however I can help uh by providing my thoughts in terms of well I can't tell you what's most important for you you but I can tell you for me and for some of some of the others out there uh which situations might I want to increase the priority that I give to radio so really this is just an exercise and risk management is it not the risk management Matrix process I have a whole separate video on that if you want to go check that out it's not really assessing like Risk in terms of like a threat to you or anything but it's the same process like you know what's the severity of something that could go wrong and what's the likelihood of that happening um if something is very severely bad and uh if it were to happen that would be very very horrible and it's likely to happen well maybe I should prioritize preparing for that scenario over something else the same idea applies to radio even though we may not see it so but there are a few situations and circumstances that I would recommend placing a higher priority on Communications if you're in a a few um situations so the very first uh thing that I would encourage you to think about is your own personal situation mostly in terms of two things geography and who you want to talk to or who you can talk to so Geographic uh position is very important in radio because we are limited by physics we're limited by the radio waves themselves and if you have just as kind of introducing our our our two topics right to start with we are very much limited by physics so just uh for Simplicity sake let's consider two scenarios let's consider the person who is living in a very tight-knit Community they've got great neighbors they've got great family members either living with them or in the immediate area and that's their Communications situation they already have a good Community infrastructure okay so that's scenario one scenario two is someone who maybe lives in a studio apartment they're a student or they're finishing up a degree or something like that they're living and working by themselves maybe um and that's kind of uh their situation they don't have anyone in their close immediate environment they maybe have a roommate maybe have one or two co-workers that that maybe they could call upon uh for uh maybe a a a limited emergency but this you know maybe they don't have a super great number of people around them um that they might be interested in beefing up their Communications with so as you might imagine these two scenarios are going to be very important as we go through this so again geography right if you're in the scenario one and you're living very close to all the people you need to talk to well you're lucky uh because it's very it's going to be a lot easier and you're going to have a lot more options whereas if you're kind of a you know Lone Ranger out there by yourself or with a very small group of people who is interested in talking with people much further away but not so much close together well you're in a you're in a whole different boat entirely so geography the physical Terrain in which you're located matters a lot sort of linked to this are the people that you might want to talk to so again this is this is very closely related to geography but not quite this is there's a more of a social component to this which is okay if you've got a lot of people in your very close tight-nit Community around you uh you're going to have a little bit of an easier time trying to find Technology Solutions that work for that because the kinds of communications you're going to need are probably going to be like small unit stuff right you're going to you're going to get into that tacticool stuff with radio right where you you know you plug in your five or $600 headsets on your helmet into a radio and you you get to go with that kind of stuff right because you have that small unit that that that Community mentality well the other scenario is quite different isn't it the the the lone person or person with a very small group that doesn't that does it's not really like a small unit right maybe one person and and a couple of other family members they're not going to be plugging a $600 headset into something to go kick IND doors right their whole situation their whole Communications like needs are different so you might find that the for the person in the tight-knit community that's Geographic rically close together they have one kind of pathway or they have you they have many Pathways but one major pathway where as the person who has well maybe not so many people around them physically but they've got people dotted throughout the country or uh they're interested in you know meeting more people through radio I suppose um but they're they're really uh struggling on the community part well those people will have a whole other Road entirely so geography in terms of physical terrain and in terms of human terrain is very very important to consider right up front with how high you place Communications in your priority for the person who is in the tight-knit community well you know comms are are are going to be important for sure but you know investing in A1 thousand radio might not be necessary you might could go with some of the cheaper options whereas the Lan Ranger over there and the apartment by themselves they may have to Shell out quite a bit of money to talk to people uh in a different sort of mode entirely so we're thinking strategic versus tactical right we think about the three levels of Warfare at the top we've got strategic we have operational and we have tactical that's not just something that we you know came up with there's there's there's reasons for this and we have to realize that if you have uh a lot of distance between people and you have very little people involved in between uh you're going to be more at the Strategic level whereas if you're going to if you're going to find yourself talking into a handheld radio a lot of the time uh you know just using your voice to talk to your team well you're obviously going to be in more of a a tactical level environment right so those are two things to consider right up front is your physical terrain and your human terrain what is your environment look like how close are you to other people and what is the nature of the communications between you uh between uh your your group and your people because this is going to limit the the technology that you go with this is why uh it really matters on your personality and what you're trying to do in life uh you know as for me I guess it's somewhat willingly somewhat unwillingly it's just kind of how things have worked out it's not really good or bad but let me just explain you know I have found myself um not not really having a a good wholesome fantastic community in the real world right so when I take the mask off and I go back to my normal day-to-day life you know I don't have good neighbors I don't have a good Community my my the the closest town has got less than a thousand people in it but you would think that it's San Francisco by the policies they put out and all of this changed within the past year you know so um there's really not a whole lot of good options for me out there so you you see kind of my perspective and I can talk about this at greater length I'm trying to keep things short today but um for those of you who find yourselves kind of hunkering down into kind of like a Hermit status a little bit um you know you may not be totally alone um but you find yourself going to work dayto day you know interacting with people but you're never really connecting with people you know um you've got maybe a lot of people in your life but none of those people who you uh interact with you feel like you can be totally honest with or uh you don't feel like they can be uh totally trustworthy you may trust them here and there um you know but they don't they don't get to uh to understand your true feelings on things a lot of time you know uh some of you out there may have uh one or two family members but you you might not have you know any extended family you might not have uh any super great neighbors or you may be in a transient status where you're kind of like you know a student living in an apartment or you're you're kind of moving around for work a lot and there's many many reasons as to why someone you know in this country may end up feeling like they are sort of Alone um and you know no one is truly ever Alone um to be honest but a lot of people certainly feel that way and when it comes to you know the people on the Earth here you know this magic Rock going around the Sun uh a lot of people end up trying to engage in systems and trying to engage in a world where they they feel like their efforts are solitary that's okay um well it's not okay it's it's sad and it's unfortunate that our kind of world has gone that way but this is why I think radio has become such a big thing for a lot of people it's not just resiliency it's not just emergency prepping it's people trying to engage in in in network and systems and things like that uh that don't have anyone else to to kind of bounce ideas off you know they're trying to to Network and and and grow and things like that and they just don't get that from either social media or you know in the real world so radio is a good way to take out a branch that across and I say all of this because I get these messages so uh I get a lot a lot of emails from people saying hey you know thank you for doing this because I am really kind of by myself here and uh I feel like everything you know is is built around the community and society and uh I'm just not able to do that right now at this point in my life now hopefully all of us will get there to where that wholesome Community can come together with a common goal of you know decency and and with the idea of building a good Society right we can talk about all this later right today we're talking about radios and when it comes to radios if you are one of those people who finds yourself kind of feeling like you don't really have a good local community well you can hop on HF radio and maybe try to figure out um some methods of exchanging information with people that're in the real world but we're we're brought together using the internet as a tool to get off of the internet if you know what I mean you know um social media I think you know I don't think it was developed for this in mind but it would have been great would it not have been great if Facebook actually was developed to help people grow and come together um instead of just being basically a spy platform um well you know radio can still kind of fill that Gap so if you're one of those people who who kind of by yourself you don't really seem to you know um have any options for growing your community in your local area fear not things will not always be this way uh and radio may be one of those Investments that you uh lean on a little bit more again for those people who find themselves in the exact opposite who were these words I'm speaking are just foreign to you you know if you've again if you've got a large happy family if you've got good Community you've got great neighbors maybe not outstanding neighbors but you've got people you know who live next to you that you know don't want to kill you kind of thing um this this may seem to be a little bit you know overboard um but you know I don't think it is I think a lot of people are out there feeling the same things and um it again it will not always be this way uh but I think that radio might be a great tool now I will caveat that by saying look you know if you think that you know you're alone in the world and you don't have anybody to talk to and you don't have anyone who shares the similar interest to you and you're interested in growing a community that you know maybe is not geographically uh near but you want to maintain some friends over a distance uh radio is not going to magically make that happen you know I could sit here and haw the ghost net all day long um but you it's not going to you know it's a tool it's not a living thing right you can't go to it and ask please you know give me a nice Squad sized element of friends so I can call on in an emergency that's not going to happen right um but the possibility for this in the future might be good if nothing else it's worth a try right so as you can probably imagine a lot of my development and my thought process behind the ghostnet kind of stuff is really for these people because I've been there you know and you know I'm still kind of there uh thankfully I have my family to kind of you know help me with a lot of things but you know a lot of times it's uh it's it's you know we're fairly well isolated uh sometimes uh and especially if it's not organic especially if you know we have a forced isolation kind of scenario like we're familiar with from a couple of years ago that may be a very good reason to hop on our radio or start prioritizing it a little bit more but again it's not going to be for everyone another thing uh that I would uh say bumps that priority level up in terms of radios is the nature of your work okay and your role in your community if you're like me and your role is in the information space and teaching and communicating and providing news and you you you're not holding a rifle for a living right you're doing stuff kind of like what I do Well Radio is going to be up there in terms of importance I've said it before and I'll say it again if your job is to provide information you need to be able to do that in different situations because if you have information but you cannot send it to the people that need it in a timely manner when they need it you are useless right and radio is one of the only Technologies we have that there is a great force multiplier in that regard so if my job if my task if my position uh was more along the lines of information things like that uh I would definitely invest more in radio so many people forget this and they they maybe know it like instinctively but they don't ever say it out loud and they certainly don't think about it in any depth but there's a lot of us out there whose whose jobs professions tasks roles whatever is not going to be the cool guy stuff on YouTube okay it's going to be the boring stuff it's going to be things like Logistics um you know medical stuff news information e you know even the worst uh kinds of you know uh boring jobs paper pushers kind of stuff right well some of us that's that's what we do right so for those people it might be a little bit higher priority uh for for investing in radio stuff um or investing the time the mentality the budget into figuring out comes a little bit more and before we get into the more technical side of things and I just start talking about some of the more technical side of radio there's one more consideration and this gets left out entirely because well it's it's not something the radio world is very well versed in certainly not something I am versed in at all by any means whatsoever but it is something that is very very very important and that is the concept of leadership if you are a leader in your community if you are the one that people come to for advice for help when their life is is falling apart or there is some other disaster or something like that you might want to invest a little bit more in Communications than your average Bearer because you cannot lead people that you cannot speak to or communicate with you see the problem I've said it before if you have information but you cannot give it to anyone you are useless that's me speaking as like an analyst from a more analytical style of job but the same thing applies if you're in a leadership position if you're a general on the battlefield but you cannot issue orders you're useless and unlike in military service if you're a company Commander if you're a battalion Commander division Commander so on and so forth right you've got a little RTO following your around some private or some specialist with a nice big heavy radio on their back they can hand a handset to you and they can be your means of communicating with your troops on the battlefield well in the civilian world that doesn't happen guess what I am my own RTO almost all of the time so this is something to consider and something that I certainly certainly wish that those who are in positions in the prepared Citizen Space or just in normal civilian life if you are trying to make a difference in the world using your military leadership skills or your other you know business leadership any kind of leadership skills you have developed but you're not investing in getting that information and getting that leadership out during a disaster guess what you're going to have to fall back on people like me who have got feet in both world and are good at neither right so your average garbage radio operator who's got some slipshod weeken Drill level leadership skills like me is going to be the one who's going to be doing stuff rather than the general or the colonel or the Fortune 500 Business CEO that should be leading this you're going to be stuck with somebody like me and you don't want that trust me so you don't want your ham radio guys to be your analysts you don't want your ham radio guys to be your your recon team your scouts out guys right would you really want to I mean you know no disrespect at all to the ham radio Community but I can tell you that I would not want the vast majority of amateur radio operators serving as a Recon team now it's easier to train somebody to do that than it is to train a a Recon guy to be a radio guy but you know at the risk of digressing even further than I already have you really need to start stacking your deck to help yourself out later and I see so many people so many people that have got that that sparkk of being able to to lead people into battle if necessary right hopefully hopefully it shall not come to that but people who are able to get people through a tough time even if it's nothing more than just being a mentor that's being a leader isn't it mentoring someone so those people who have those skills who have the ability to do it or if they don't have the skills and they don't have the ability but they're in the position anyway and they have to do it and they Mentor someone because they have to those people had better be able to do so in a contingent situation and I can think of no better way to do that than via radio at least when it comes to ensuring the resiliency of it radio is not the easiest thing to learn I'm not going to say we should move all of our coms to radio I would not want to do that uh I don't think you could but we always have to have that ability to be there and before I move on just just to kind of wrap things up with one thought if you have someone even just one person in your life who counts on you or will count on you or has counted on you when the chips are down and things are going sideways and it seems like there is no way out of the situation and they call on you are you going to be able to answer the call are you going to be able to have the technical ability to speak to that person or communicate with them in some way because I can tell you just through my own very very limited brief experience the ability to answer a phone call or answer a text message at 3 in the morning when someone is having a really bad time uh that's very very powerful uh very very powerful ability to have not just in terms of disasters because we get those phone calls all the time right you know hey can you come help me there's a tree down across my driveway and I can't I can't get up there to cut it down or you know hey I just got into an accident can you come pick me up or something like that the everyday emergencies are a great reason for radio but the more abstract emergencies are equally if not more so important and I can tell you that the very few people I know would be very very comforted and I would be comforted myself if I could when there's a cell phone outage or the internet's out things are going crazy social media is on fire the world seems like it's ending if I can fire up a radio and send a hey are you okay message to somebody I would feel better I'm sure they'd feel better and I would feel a lot better if someone did the same for me too so this is bigger than just saying hey tell me what radio to buy isn't it because you have to decide how much does that matter to you how much does the ability to exchange information with another human being how much does that matter to you to me it matters an awful lot that's why I invest a lot in radio because I want to be able to be reachable to be contactable to be effective to exchange information no matter what we can't always have that guarantee you know radios are fallible right they're not perfect there's no perfect radio as a matter of fact in the civilian space we're dealing with compromise on pretty much every level you know every radio in the civilian space is is compromised compared to what we know as technologically possible so this is something to consider is you know you're dealing with compromise how much do you value the exchange of information how much of a leadership role you're in and how much do you need to talk to someone else and if you're not in a leadership role if you're you know by yourself how by yourself are you right are you super by yourself you know and you might want to start investing in HF you know high frequency radio so you can talk to at least one other person around the planet or do you have other people you know near you that maybe you could go with a cheaper and easier option so these are some of the things you need to think about when it comes to the more high level thinking when it comes to radio right it's not just about here's the best radio this is why it's so hard I think maybe it's just I'm not very good at teaching it but I see other people trying to struggle with it too and like I can see a lot of the other guys talking about radio a lot of other you know like YouTube channels talking about radio and I see I see what they're trying to I see what they're trying to do and it's really I agree you know they're doing the best they can and it's very it's a very tough topic and one of those is the question of how much do I need to prioritize on radio uh I think you're just going to have to deal with the fact that it's a sliding scale if you're in a leadership position I would prioritize it more that's my opinion if your livelihood is in the information space I would prioritize a little bit more if you like the field of intelligence and doing local um intelligence preparation of the battles space stuff you like the Intel cycle you're you're like you like doing more Intel and news and stuff like that and the differences between the two um you you like doing that kind of stuff well you know maybe radio is probably a good investment for you but if you don't need it I I can't convince you that you need it because that's disingenuous I'm not trying to sell radios here you know if you live in a great Community where you know you've got great neighbors you've got great family you you you've you've got everything you need you know uh locally to you you might not need more than this that might be all you need so hopefully this helps people figure it out and and for all of those people out there who are in more of the camp of the HF radio stuff uh fear not I will have more content on this soon I just thought that this might be helpful for kind of breaking out of of of of our uh intellectual fog so to speak and talking about some of these uh different and some of the considerations you might have because obviously this is a very big question and I get it a lot and I don't have a good answer and I figured that by turning the camera on and just kind of trying to trying to meander my way towards an answer might be helpful for some of you so uh we'll see though right we'll see and hopefully this Sparks a lot more questions that we can kind of get get down to the nitty-gritty uh when it comes to the physical technology that actually is very very helpful so thank you all for watching again thank you for sticking with me as I kind of meander my way through some of this stuff I am not the endall be all source for radio stuff as you guys know I know just enough just enough to get by so um and for sure uh there's a lot to learn uh left for everyone out there so hopefully this has been helpful for some of you if nothing else hopefully it starts getting uh some more more questions to ask you know what's my situation who do I have to talk to if I don't have to talk to anybody is that really true is are there people out there that I can talk to you know what capabilities do I need what am I willing to compromise on based on price you know all of these things need to be considered before we can start talking about the actual radios themselves um so we will get there though we we'll we'll get there um but I think the best way to do that is to talk about maybe some of these specific scenarios and come at it from that angle uh because it's going to vary quite a lot so but more to come on that later uh for now I think I've taken far too much of your time as is and I will uh start working on some more concrete things that might help a little bit more than just um thought processes right so thank you all for watching thanks for sticking with me again and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade