GhostNet Q&A - April 2024

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground after dark edition so to speak so uh like you guys have probably seen on social media um I have decided to put together kind of a question and answer session um that hopefully will serve to answer some of your uh questions that you might have for me out there and I thought I would start by getting back into the swing of doing these with radios communication stuff so uh this first question and answer session uh is going to be kind of a dual purpose because today is Thursday and it is ghostnet night so I've uh got a couple of things going on here in the background and we'll we'll see how it goes so so just off screen I have my uh laptop here my typical Windows tablet here running js8 call and that is hooked to my talk in a box sort of setup that's in the other room I don't have an antenna strung up in here and I've got it kind of a hasty uh setup uh in the Next Room over where it's a little bit easier to access so this is what I'm going with for now I'm going to kind of keep this off screen a little bit because it's got some you know kind of sensitive information on it but over here uh in the corner I've got another laptop going with js8 call as well but this is purely my receiver so this is uh running with a web SDR I can show you which one it's actually the web SDR in Pennsylvania so K3 FF just a standard SDR I've shown you how to use this quite a bit already this is exactly the setup from the uh free js8 call video that I've got um that I've put out quite a while ago so this is what we're going to do um this uh receiver is kind of at the edge of my receiving range so uh I've got my receiver here which is my localized antenna my local transceiver my local radio here but I also have uh this setup just so that I can kind of extend my range a little bit and see what is out there I did not announce this ahead of time that I would be kind of showing what comes in through the ghost net in real time more or less uh because I wanted it to be kind of natural and organic and you know see what's going on if I had solicited this and said hey I'm going to be recording uh during the ghost net session so if you've got news reports push them out well people would do that and you wouldn't really get a good feel for how these normally go so this may be a total failure may be a good success who knows we're going to give it a shot anyway so uh since this is probably going to be fairly boring uh just watching me look at js8 call Messages as they come in uh I thought I would also take the opportunity to answer some questions that you guys have so so I am already several hours ahead of time I actually just checked the clock and I'm I'm actually quite early for the JSA call Net so I'll just casually kind of check things out and see what's going on and see what we get coming in over the wires of course have my ghost net plan if you don't know what that is uh I have a whole slew of content out there explaining what the ghost net is and how it all works so um yeah let's just go ahead and get started here you know in in retrospect I should probably do these as a live stream and I'm may end up uh doing those again but uh I I don't know about you guys what do you guys think I mean I think you know sometimes live streams especially when it comes to like radio stuff yeah you know it tends to be like you know I can talk for a long time and I don't I don't want to sit here and talk for two or three hours and uh just bore you guys to death about this stuff so maybe um by cutting out some of the chunks of of time where it's not super super interesting uh we can kind of uh be a little bit more more effective I don't know though if you guys want live streams I'll start doing them again but uh for now I thought this might be a good way to get started again so of course got uh I've solicited the the questions from many different platforms so I'll just go ahead and start with uh those of you who contributed on patreon and we'll see what you guys have so quite a few of you have some very very in-depth questions so let's go ahead and Dive Right In so on patreon Andrew asks hi S2 I've been watching a lot of tech prepper that's great uh and your myself on comms I'm a fast learner generally but I find setting up a Linux machine a huge and frustrating time drain that doesn't seem realistic for most yeah I guess so do you see there being a relevant privacy benefit in using Linux over a Windows system for running Comm software or do you see the differences as a material since the primary purpose of the Comm system will not involve internet connectivity H good question uh I knowe your portable talk system runs on Windows is this to your satisfaction ction have you considered Linux reasons why not employed any particular privacy protections implemented in your Windows setup thanks for your excellent work to date all right Andrew getting us started really nicely with a very in-depth question the answer is uh the reason why I don't use Linux and and I do sometimes okay so right to start with I did use a Raspberry Pi setup um I got started uh kind of along the sort of along the same lines as um Julian oh8 stn on YouTube kind of has a lot of Raspberry Pi setups and um from a while back that's kind of how I got started however really the reason why I don't use Linux is because I'm stupid and it takes me a while to learn how to use Linux and two I find that it's the software's problem so when it comes to ham radio software specifically a lot of it just has a very very hard time working on Linux and I know the Linux guys say no it's not true well you know in my experience because I'm not a software engineer um I I find that I have fewer errors on uh Windows when it comes to ham radio software I would prefer Linux because as you mentioned uh you know I'm really not a big fan of Bill Gates just in case you didn't know uh and really anything that windows or Microsoft in general stands for so you know same thing with apple I prefer Linux because um you know for privacy concerns because there's it's just a you know a more open and you know I just better allaround operating system but I'm too stupid to figure out how to get it to work with ham radio sometimes so this is really kind of you know lowest Comon denominator right and when I say there are errors I mean like how should I word this like you get your stuff you get you get all your your your uh radio gear together you get out into the woods you put your antenna up you get your radio up you get everything and then something doesn't work like there's always something with Linux like maybe it's just me um but it's like okay why is JSA call not talking to this why is you know this not working with that and then you know we're we're trying to a lot of times use uh some proprietary software where there is no Linux version so now you're talking about using like like some kind of emulator or shell or something to get this stuff to work and it's like I do not have time for this uh out in the woods so yeah um that's really kind of um one of the main concerns that I have is just Windows just works better with ham radio software now I sincerely sincerely hope that the ham radio world catches up uh and starts working on some some better stuff now I know that uh the tech prepper is working on um the mcom tools thing and I'm really excited to see what that um what that is when it comes out when it's um all ready to go but uh for now you know I've got to use JSA call I've got to use wind link begrudgingly and windows is kind of a pain but it's the least painful solution so um again yeah security is a huge huge problem right like you know I I'm kind of of the mind with technology you know maybe this is just kind of like an old archaic way of thinking but I'm of the mind to where I did not code it I did not develop it I did not write the the lines of code myself and I am not smart enough even though software is open source a lot of times I'm not smart enough to go in there and go line by line and say oh this line of code is is some kind of back door I that's just not me right we all know how the whole VPN thing worked out VPN scandal from a few years ago you guys remember that where it turns out people were doing reviews of vpns and it turns out that the people who are doing those reviews of VPN and the companies they worked for were just either fictitious outright or they were directly paid by the VPN person so these so-called third-party reviews uh of products and software like I don't trust that like you know you know I I just don't so um when it comes to Security on Windows you can just do the best you can you know um uh and really air gapping is preferred for me now I don't do that as as as much as I should and it's one of those things where unless it's air gap totally it's you're going to have vulnerabilities right so air gapping is kind of one of those things where either you're connected to a network or you're not you can't just like connect to a network and then do a bunch of stuff no you've got to like you know stay either on or off the network that's just kind of how it works so um if you're you I will say this though you know coming from a a complete non-expert non-software engineer it is a very very bad idea to run old older software systems uh that are connected to a network so for instance I do have a couple of Panasonics that are running windows8 um and that has depreciated so much there's so many vulnerabilities I don't think it's supported anymore so if you're running a very ancient system you you absolutely have to air gap that uh because there's vulnerabilities that just can't be patched or they're not being patched so that's a that's a pretty big concern but yeah if you can if you can run Linux um that's that's anything's better than Windows really uh but I'm just kind of stuck on it right now uh for the time being so um yeah hopefully that kind of answers that question so uh moving on to a very different question entirely we have Dan who asks in yesterday's wire report you mentioned a baseline increase in Us stri com activity based on hfgcs radioactivity can you explain these terms and maybe how we in the field can make similar observations great question uh so the hfgcs I I mentioned it in some of good grief I can't remember which video I specifically mentioned it in but it's in the Sig playlist if you want to go check that out uh I think it's the basic sign hfgcs is the highfrequency Global Communication System basically the radio network that uh us stratcom uses to uh communicate with uh resources and assets out in the world basically to prepare for World War III so remember the movie tide where Jee Hackman and Denzel Washington are arguing over this e right well E's emergency action messages they get sent over the hfgcs uh a lot of times it it's a really really complicated system um but the the short version is what we can do in the open source intelligence world and is look at the hfgcs and um basically count the letters in an eam so eam uh any kind of like burst radio traffic anything um even um things like Sky King messages man this is a whole Rabbit Hole stay out of the rabbit hole um really we can monitor a lot of the US Air Force's Communications when it comes to nuclear weapons uh believe it or not um it kind of makes sense if you think about it uh it's all encrypted so we can't decrypt anything of course and it's all code words right um so so what we can do though is we can listen to the Air Force's transmissions and listen to see maybe who they're talking to so the hfgcs there's some you know Air Force officer technician or whatever um sitting at one of the transmitting locations they will fire off a message to an aircraft that is circling around somewhere in the world that aircraft will pick it up and will retransmit it or send a different message or so to submarines that are down uh underwater so uh this is one way the hfgcs works there's other many ways as well think of um kind of like Doctor Strange Love remember you know where slim Pickins gets up in there and uh is working with the radio stuff about you know the recall and there's authentication codes that's very close uh to what's really done in real life and the hfgcs is the radio transmitting communication system that handles all of that so what does this mean for us right we can't decrypt it so what does it mean well basically we have a list of frequencies that the hfgcs uses the Air Force uses for the hfgcs and we can monitor these and if we notice that there is a sudden burst of traffic we know something's going on we don't know what that's very very important we don't know what because I've seen some news agencies claiming oh my gosh hfgcs is active World War III has started they're going to Nuke us all oh my go God no no almost never uh as a matter of fact it has never happened yet every single time we have seen an hfgcs like boost of traffic it has been due to uh training so usually it means there's a training exercise and right now there actually is a uh training exercise going on um it's kind of a continuation of a later one so um that's what this is all about so the hfgcs can be an indicator for hey something wrong in the world okay but only if it's combined with other things because guess what the Russians those uh Wy ruskies they have one too we call it the baret they use the baret which is a term we have given it um they have their own very long acronym term for it uh but we use that as well to figure out where they're at so for this war in Ukraine a lot of people were tracking the baronet because they were using their bare bombers to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine so as soon as somebody saw the baronets active and they said oh no there's a lot of there's a lot of aircraft in the air they knew missiles were incoming within an hour or two so this is one of those things where it is an indicator of the end of mankind but only when combined with other things so if the hfgcs is hopping and there's a lot of messages flying back and forth we can't see what they are but uh we can't decrypt them that as we can see you know what type of message they are generally there's a lot of messages being sent um also this is a one-way system by the way it's you know uh it's not two-way there's other parts of the system that make it two-way but uh anyway if the hfgcs is active and the baret is active and the Chinese are active something's going on right and that's when you're going to start me seeing uh me type out a wire report saying um fellas something's going on I don't know what it is but something's going on so that's uh what the hfgcs is and why it matters um again please do not get caught up in it because there there are drills on this system like every week or every month or so uh and and four or five major major exercises uh once a once a year so or four or five times a year so um when people kind of they don't know what they're talking about they're just like reading my wire reports or reading some other people's and they're putting it in their own news reports and you know they don't know what they're doing so they don't know what this means they they look at it and they say oh good grief the US government is sending messages to you know nuclear submarines practicing launch sending launch codes you know nuclear launch codes well yeah they do this all the time and that's the whole point the entire point of the system is to make an exercise look like war and to make war look like an exercise they're not that's the whole point right it's nuclear deterrence mutually ass destruction this goes back to Grand strategy 101 right um so the point is is that you're never really going to know if the hfgcs being super active is meaning that World War II is about to start in a few hours like you're never really going to know that uh unless there are other indicators stacking up behind it that kind of help indicate that um as well so so hopefully that answers that on the hfgcs maybe I should have a more in-depth video on that one um I don't know we'll have to see about it it's it's a real deep Rabbit Hole you can go down and for me like it's fascinating it's very interesting but at the end of the day it's not that useful it's an indicator it's not proof remember that it's an indicator it's not proof so uh moving on let's see here Steven asks as someone relatively new to JSA call I know that my biggest and most persistent concern has been whether or not I'm being heard yes so I'd W your both novices are probably tinkering with their coms outside of their schedule G no windows yes okay okay let me skim through here okay he wants to set up like a test group yeah I might do that I might actually do that um I've been thinking about adding in um 10 m uh the 10 m system for um for technicians people who don't have General they just have their tech license I I have have to read up on that I'm not entirely certain if if that would work super well um if I were to do that I'd have to have a video on it h let me think about that yeah I I I think I might do that um as for now for those of you who are trying to test your gear like I already see some people see I've got a couple heartbeats coming in I've got a lot more on my antenna here because for whatever reason my local antenna is doing really well tonight it's never this it's never this really it's never this good anyway uh a test group would be good um but I think that you could just use a normal ghostnet tag you know @ ghostnet make sure you're following the tags right guys like uh make sure that's the whole point of the system where am I at here f it up in my handy dandy notebook see here ghostnet North America boom if you guys can see that or not question yes no all of this stuff right here read that it's important there are tags you can follow so that you can get an alert when people are talking about ghost now otherwise you're just going to get gar garbage and garbled messages through you don't have to do this I don't suppose uh but I would very strongly recommend it because uh it's how you know you're getting messages across and it helps you people help helps people break out by locality so you can follow at ghostnet in JSA call and anytime someone sends a message to at ghostnet you will get pinged right and here's the cool part you can send messages so you can literally send a DM a directed message to at ghostnet and whoever hears that message will store it and you're so you're sending messages to people whose call sign you don't know is that not cool or what exactly right so that's that's what this is for you can also do it by State a lot of people break this down by state and they're able to follow the at ghostnet Main tag um at GST flash that's your World War III one right that's the one that I'm going to be using if you know missiles are in the air kind of thing like in an an emergency traffic kind of thing uh and then at GN then your country thre letter state two letter uh that is for local localized Communications so hopefully that will help break things out because on JSA call hundreds of people can be talking all at the same time on this waterfall and things get pretty busy so you want to be able to get pinged when um you've got localized traffic coming in so yeah uh I I think I will have to create another at something test group and just kind of put it in here uh but for now until I can get the latest update going the next update we're on what are we on version 1.4 right now 1.5 is going to be pretty big I think uh just cuz I got a lot of pages to add to it but anyway yeah hopefully that answers that one oh um yeah somebody else mentions here psk reporter pskreporter dotinfo I think psk reporter is uh one of the main tools you can have to make sure that you're uh trans see how far you're transmitting so you can go into pskreporter doino I'm I'm fairly certain that's the URL I'm sure someone will correct me um and you can put your call sign in and click you know select JSA call on this band you can do all bands or whatever and it will show you on a map all of the people that heard you um of course this requires those receiving people to upload this information to you know psk reporters uh web servers uh so that if they're using an air gap system like me you're not you're not going to you're not going to get that information you're just going to have to get stuck here uh with what you got but uh yeah that's really good also SNR requests uh do an SNR request on ghostnet preferably before the window and uh the before the com window and you'll be able to uh see who can hear you and uh who can transmit back and forth so that's a good way to do that all right next one uh this is from DJ rabbit S2 what can I do to start networking with people in a preparedness mindset as you have mentioned fairly recently not everyone has friendly neighbors and many don't have peers next door who know how to use a radio or don't want to learn it here I am surrounded by both with some who believe that quote if we got if we got to prepare that much then we're just they're just going to Nuke us so there's no point in preparing cuz we'll die anyways uh I want to find people I can work and prepare and train with great question I'm sorry I don't have a great answer for you this is something this is for those of you want a little peek behind the curtain this is officially the longest episode that I have been writing I've been writing this episode to talk about building Community for six years I have it here in my notes uh a draft that goes back 6 years because every time I get close to publishing it I realize I don't know what I'm talking about so um yeah it's kind of unfortunate and I think the solutions that I have come up with over the past few years that seem to be like my own worldview I don't think is shared by by very many people um I I think it really goes back to us having to wait literally until a new generation comes around um before Mass organization to help you know build a good Society is going to be possible that's a super super pessimistic Outlook isn't it um so I I don't want to say All Is Lost uh when it comes to building Community because there's certainly the laundry list of things to do isn't there uh all the people that get on you know YouTube or the internet and say oh you want to build your community here's how to do it here's the magic keys to the castle here's here's the solution to everything all right cool um what do they say I say all right um get involved in your community take classes take courses get involved in your kids's school um go to church get involved in your church activities that's actually a pretty good one U it's not available for everyone um but that is a good that is a good solution uh but you know all the things they tell you to do you know get you know start volunteering well you know sometimes there's just not that many people um around and it seems like even in Rural America we're having we're having some hard times trying to get people to to care about their local area um so again I don't want to be super pessimistic and I don't want to brush the question off because it's very very important uh I just I just don't have an answer for you um I can tell you what everybody says do but I myself am living proof that you know it hasn't really worked super well uh so you know even though you do everything right sometimes you're just in kind of like a Personnel desert you know a lot of times and it has it doesn't really work out super well um hopefully hopefully we can come up with some solutions um not just the ghost net stuff oh look by the way somebody's somebody sent something what was that heartbeats yeah quite a few heartbeats I've got here on my local local stuff here my local my personal antenna I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 people and we're like 3 hours early so that's pretty good pretty good um you keep expectations realistic right um but yeah building Community man is a hard one it is really a hard one and you know I'm afraid that when I flip this you know camera on and I just start ranting and raving to the world that I'm just going to sound like you know like really negative and I don't mean to you know because this isn't a discussion really this is just kind of like a one-way thing you know a lot of times and it's hard to uh it's hard to get across what I mean uh in a video sometimes without sounding like super super pessimistic but yeah it is a challenge isn't it it really is it really is but I there'll be there'll be there'll be more on that later I I'll I'll figure out some way I'll figure something out I'm I'm working on it I'm working on it maybe we got to get out indirectly maybe this ghost net is kind of helping us with that I don't know I don't know we'll we'll come back to that there all right let's see what we got here one more question one more question from patreon here let's see Hello S2 oh this is from Frank hello S2 I followed today's North America to Europe data Bridge test good from a web SDR located in Europe and I received multiple ghost net Transmissions from three different ghostnet participants in the United States okay okay let's see he uses uh he's got call signs here so K9 dgy in Illinois kk4 qig in Florida and W b5v AI in New York City all these are thousands of miles away so I would like to know how many watts they were transmitting and what kind of antenna they were using if it's possible to ask them so yeah if you guys are watching and that's your call sign you know hey hop in the comments let this guy know let Frank know what you were using um because when you're on web SDR you can't really ask him can you it's kind of a one-way thing um you can I should say um for anyone out there concerned uh you can put there [Music] um can you do that I don't know if you can you can go into psk reporter and you can put your own call sign in I know this you can put your own call sign in and then click people click the little um bubbles the little um uh like timer Bubbles and it will tell you the info of their station so normally um if you're able to transmit you can ping these uh people and hit them with an with an info uh request and what they whatever they have put in js8 call so let me go ahead and just I actually open it up for you settings this is again this is not my real call sign this is just a receiver so we don't have to worry about any of that so let me go to General yeah so you can um put your station info in here mine's blank because it's just a template and I can't transmit from this obviously this one I do uh and I don't think I have anything listed but if they have something listed if they have their info listed it will some a lot of people will tell uh what St what their station info is so there's the info and then there's station uh on js8 call if you can transmit so uh sorry about the guys who who just receive only for now you're not going to really know what they were using but let me see here let me let me look at this again here okay whatever it depends on what antenna you were what what web EST y you were using because some are better than others so let's see it also depends on what Transmissions you were using because heartbeats sometimes go further than regular messages so H Illinois Florida New York City all East Coast stuff so I mean it depends on the time of day they could I mean I can hit um the Canary Islands regularly any any well not anytime I want I have to actually wait for the for the window to open uh to get over there on uh 20 M um let's see oh that's actually a second question yeah my second question is why not use 20 M as the main ghost net frequency see I'm on the west coast and I'm missing most of the East Coast traffic on 40 m but 20 M seems to cover the entire us even at 10 to 20 watts thanks again for getting this all set up Frank well I've got the answer for you Frank I've got the answer for you one word skip so this is something that gets left out of HF radio a lot the skip range so imagine your station in the middle of this circle here okay so this is a huge problem when it comes to trying to get radio stuff set up because 20 M you're absolutely right you can talk a long way on 20 M which you can't talk very locally so what happens is your let me see here your um see what happens here is say this is the ground okay and your station is here well what happens is your your transmission comes off of your radio and radiates away right and it goes up into the ionosphere where it comes back down to earth well see the thing is is that it doesn't entirely do that one time it does it several times sometimes so the range is a magic circle where uh on usually it's usually a circle uh where people cannot hear you locally so you'll have a really tiny circle around you to where someone who's maybe a mile away can hear your 20 M message but somebody like 3 miles away from you to like 20 or 50 or sometimes 100 miles away from you they're not going to hear you at all because your message uh propagated away from you and it's kind of like um think about it like an like a water hose pointed up right well this is why we're trying to use 40 MERS because if you have your antenna set up in an invas you know near vertical incident skywave kind of arrangement what you're doing is you're sending your signal directly up as best you can so that it can be reflected directly back down well you can't really do that with 20 M you can but really you can't so 40 m is that happy medium to where if you have your antenna set up you can talk to somebody a mile away from you or 300 miles away from you but you can't really go any much further than that on a low power setting you absolutely can but all things being equal generally that's the way it is whereas 20 M usually most people in 20 M are using vertical antennas so the takeoff angle of that signal it's going to it's going to leave that antenna like this and it's going to go up into the atmosphere and all the people that are over here they're not going to hear you so that's why you'll see people talk about Skip range a lot with 20 M because and you can test this yourself you can absolutely test this yourself you can find an antenna like a web SDR antenna that and and punch it into 20 M and you can see you probably won't see very many stations close to that antenna you maybe have 300 miles away from that antenna that's the closest you're going to get so on 20 M generally speaking again this is all debatable but generally speaking on 20 mters you're going to be talking long range because that the takeoff angle for that signal and and the well really the takeoff angle of how most people have their antennas Str strung up is going to make it so that it goes away from the antenna up to the ionosphere and then back down 3 or 4,000 miles away but anybody closer like over here they're not going to they're not going to see it so that's why we can't use 20 M uh is Skip range that's really it uh I would like to find a way to integrate it more but 20 and 40 m is basically that's basically where we're at um for now so yeah hopefully that answers your question skip range that's why we can't use 20 MERS all the time otherwise you know you ask yourself well why can't we just use the longest range system every time well there's trade-offs you know you want to talk far or talk close and that's what you got to choose so um yeah just looking over here again sorry for being super [ __ ] today I had too much coffee uh throughout the day today um but got a little bit of interference coming through on that web S strr I can see it partially here so it must be pretty pretty substantial but yeah some people coming in somebody talking about there is no way that person is coming in from Sydney there is no way maybe somebody was talking about something else who knows I got a lot more on my local antenna for some reason Pennsylvania not doing so hot tonight but yeah I'm not quite sure what's going on with my local stuff let me so yeah just got a few people here and there heartbeats pinging back and forth I like to let it run for quite a bit like several hours before the the window just so that I can see who's out there and my and my software here can um can start to build this list over here we can so we can start to see who's who's actually out there and who might be able to hear me so that's what I like to do all right let me go ahead and jump around here a little bit all right so just moving on here with some of the questions let me check gab really quick I do have a gab account for those of you who don't like Twitter whatever um it's not super great but I am on gab as that's that's that's genuinely me um yeah it's not a very strange things on gab very strange things indeed anyway uh first question here this is from Phil since all the family net type radios are built in China may we assume if they are ever used as intended by many then the Chinese have have Breakin control override and location ability built in already um that's a good question I'm not really concerned about it but that is a good question uh you really um how should I answer that um there's always the concern with any piece of tech that there's some kind of back door backdoor uh entry right there's some kind of secret back door that um uh you know can be taken advantage of by a international agency or the Chinese or whoever right that's a good concern um there's not much I can do about it I have long suspected I have long suspected that HF radios probably have a back door in them um that probably can receive a message over HF and brick themselves it's just my wild Conspiracy Theory with no evidence of supported whatsoever but I have a theory I have that theory and I um it kind of makes me hesitant to say to to say it out loud like that because I have no evidence but it would make sense you know if you know Chinese or Japanese with the help of say maybe some American agencies right um it would make sense for somebody to walk into Yu's Factory and whereever and flash a badge and say hey put this code in your radio so that um you know we can burst out a message one day over the emergency alert broadcast system and brick all Ham radios now that's a crazy conspiracy theory I as far as you know reality um I I will admit that that is is not I mean I have no evidence to to prove it I have no evidence to disprove it uh I can answer your question on the location thing though uh if you want to make sure that there's no uh location concern make sure you're not being tracked through your bowle Fang Crack the Case open and look for a GPS chip GPS chips are really easy to find on the motherboard and they got to be there right they they're not going to be really tiny they're going to be fairly large uh every radio that I've bought does you know if they have a GPS capability it's it's a selling point right so they're going to put that in there um but it's only a receiver it it you know so um with some of the more softwar defined radios that are coming out it may be more of a concern but you know what it's it's like one of those things where you know if I'm that concerned about it then I don't think we have any wiggle room to work with so we just kind of have to do the best we can and if you know if doomsday comes and the the missiles are in the air right and you know we got Armageddon coming down um and it turns out that there's this been elaborate conspiracy to Brick radios um and my radio gets bricked and this you know this ghost net plan here is worthless well you know I can't really do much about it at that point um and I don't see any alternative solution other than building your own radio with your own software um sorry I can't do that I would like to but but I can't I'm not I'm not I I I can't right now um not that smart so this is a concern I guess how much of a concern not hardly a concern at all something that I'm not I'm not really I'm thinking about in the very very very back echelons of my mind but not right now um sorry if that's not really a super great answer um but it's it's kind of what I've got um let's see here so continuing on here chadre chadre sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong I enjoyed your video on talking a box how would you adapt that to a vehicle Command Center like a Toyota 4Runner it probably wouldn't change very much um because the talk is basically built around HF radio and as far as I know there are not a whole lot of ways of getting in um a an HF antenna for 40 m and 20 m in a whip could you do it yeah it has to be a it has to be a loaded coil system using the vehicle itself as a counter Poise I think I could do that I could do that I don't have a I don't have a Toyota 4Runner um but uh I might have to look into that I might have to look into that um yeah that's really just kind of like a check mark for me for later so sorry if I don't have a good answer for you but uh right now it wouldn't change very much for me because I got a string up 60 ft of wire anyway um so no no real big change it basically be the same thing maybe some more maybe integrating maybe UHF VHF more um adding in maybe a CB radio for people that are into that sort of thing um probably just adding in more because I'd have the the engine of the vehicle to be able to generate power so I could run a more powerful radio for sure yeah that's probably what I would do but I have to think about it I have to think about it I I'll think about it and get back to you on that one so let's see here that's it for gab let me move over to the Tweeter Twitter good grief lots of questions okay let's see here let's work let's let's work them in order here all right so Alex asks great work you provide you often discuss close- range coms for local teams what about longer range HF for international coms and teams thank you uh yeah that's what we're doing this is all HF this is all HF stuff so yeah yeah HF is good HF is great okay Brian asks comms is great Intel analysis techniques are are great it would be good to hear about building a tribe you tell me uh it would also be good to hear about plugging your tribe into your community yeah yeah it would wouldn't it yeah yeah um I don't you know I wish man I wish I had a solution for this um you know I feel like I feel like you know you know some parts of my career basically have you ever heard let me ask you this have you ever heard don't bring up a problem don't don't discuss a problem don't bring it up don't complain about anything unless you have a solution has anyone have you ever heard of that been been taught that before it's kind of like a I don't know if it's a military thing I definitely heard it in the military an awful lot but you know I kind of understand the sentiment behind that like you don't want to needlessly complain right you don't want to just sit there and just just continue moaning about a problem right if you don't have a solution to fix it quit moaning about it well you know I feel like people use that a lot of times to say don't talk about problems well that's that's ridiculous right you know we've got to talk about these problems or we're never going to fix them so you know we we we can like not dwell on it but we got to bring it up in the first place and I can tell you man we've got some problems with community in this country around the world too it seems like less so around the world but here in this country man good grief I don't know if you have noticed or not but uh we're living in an Unholy land aren't we many ways in many ways for sure a lot of crazy people out there a lot of people that are crazy and need help a lot of people that are crazy and need help don't want it a lot of people who don't know they're crazy that's probably me to be honest anyway yeah I I wish I had a good answer for the tribe building thing because people ask about it all the time I have been working on it for years and I have not come to a good succinct like solid solution for that so I'm terribly terribly sorry about it um oh cool uh somebody just uh did a message check I must have not caught the first part of that but somebody requested okay they may be actually see there they may be actually transmitting here hang on give it a second um no I just somebody checking in somebody said they're talking to each other somebody did a message query message queries are great because if someone has stored a message for you on their system then you can exchange it and get it across um the only problem with the message system and and and maybe I'm just too stupid to realize why js8 called did it that way but anytime you send a message like check to the network uh everyone who does not have a message will send the word no and it just absolutely floors the entire system so that is uh kind of a problem it's kind of a headache because you just get a bunch of like like 15 or 16 stations at the same time saying no no no no no no you know all you know all over the waterfall and it's kind of frustrating so um yeah that's kind of one of the downsides of sending messages on js8 call so yeah all right let's moving on here to looks like an anonymous username on Twitter is varac varak varac it's varac uh being considered as a mode for ghost net so many good things about it yes yes VAR VAR is a what is it how do I describe this it is a modem basically it is a way of compressing information uh into a format that is much more efficient staying within the bounds of what the FCC says is okay for us to use um yeah so VAR AC is uh let me see do I have it in here I hope I do yeah so wind link wind link peer-to-peer using Vara the problem I have with Vara is that it's paid it cost you a lot of money it cost you I think last time I checked 70 bucks for a license for Vara uh VAR uh VAR HF VAR HF and VAR FM um and varac is like the chat client so it's um it's not a replacement for js8 call but it's like a good grief what is it it's like a blend between js8 call and rid and wind link kind of compressed into one um I like it I really do like it the license thing I don't think you need a license for varc um I'd have to check that uh actually uh but when it comes to using Vara on HF man it is so much faster to send an email than with something like ardop ardop is great cuz it's open source worse but VAR AC or VAR man that is so much better so yeah somebody's sending a turbo message let's see here they didn't get the first message so they're saying again yeah turbo on JSA call is great I love turbo mode but it it really sometimes drops an awful lot of characters just that's just D due to the nature of it um so yeah let's see moving on down here pass some comments I would love a okay here we go um V vile I'm not sure if that's a a pseudonym or a proper name that I'm mispronouncing sorry about that um I would love a piece on how the wire is produced the structure and how multiple countries could report these uh let me expand it how would they be combined reduced and by which metrics SL weights would one do it say each country in Scandinavia made a report how would one group and and condense these into a Scandinavian report the wire is great but obviously it has a perspective from the US yeah I'm American sorry uh would be tremendously cool to compile multiple ones you know like SCU insert the iso country code yes that is a great question how do I make the wire oh good grief it's a lot more halfhazard than you might want to think it is um the wire reports for every 3 minutes of narration um um they take me about four to five hours to make so it's not exactly a it well it's a it's a very time it's a very um time intensive task right uh I really probably should do a video on this how I make the wire they are the sum of my Collective Insanity that's really how I make the wire all of it is basically just what I think um I should do a video on that though um because it's really hard and people always ask me well what sources do you use for the wire oh good grief good grief it's a it's a valid question it's a valid question uh however I don't have a good answer for you because um I get uh a lot of of of information from just random sources um and sources which would probably not appreciate you know their username being out there I'm sure um basically Twitter telegram stuff like that it's just a collective Insanity that I create for the day uh but I will say this I will say this um since I can't or I can but since I haven't found a good way to list the sources for every wire report it would be too long to put it in the report and I'm fairly certain I'll get a lot of people banned um uh if I put out that you know I use their you know information in a wire report um since I can't do that right now I do not put anything in the wire report that can't be found with Google so if I do put something and you'll see the wording change drastically if I do put something in the wire report that has a very obscure Source or it's like very hard to find or something like that uh I'll put it in there but most of the time if you see something in the wire and you're like really is that true Google it and you'll find it because that's the answer um when it comes to the wire reports I'm not going to to hide any of this information and you know when I use the Obscure sources people are people just really do not like that people want to hear mainstream news and that's where most of the wire stuff comes from mainstream news like at least the indicators you know the details of me like drilling down to find out what the mainstream media is lying about that takes a lot of time um but most of the time yeah it's it's not going to be anything hidden for sure so yeah I'll have to I'll have to probably drill down and do that a little bit better um let's see here spooky spooky asks I have a pretty good grasp on local comps for situational awareness local emergency and ham Freaks and a scanner okay good uh but despite owning a couple short wavves not sure how I would employ these in an emergency other than randomly scanning okay don't really understand those bands either okay uh important freaks by us geographical area reception zone times of day and what I could realistically pick up abison and outdoor antenna are probably all knowledge gaps for me fair enough okay not looking to become a ham but basically to have some Intel capability during a power or internet outage all right okay that's good that's what this is for that's you know I hate to say like this is the answer it's not I mean it's the answer we have now it's a slip God hastily put together plan uh basically you can do exactly what I'm doing over here listen only to JSA call and see what you can get uh in terms of people that are not affiliated with me right not the ghost net not stuff like that shortwave radio does have uses unfortunately shortwave radio like broadcasting in terms of like commercial broadcasting has really gone downhill over the past few years um shortwave radio is like the 4chan of the internet you know of the radio world excuse me um it is uses some really weird stuff on HF radio so um you know um yeah uh there's a lot of weird just a lot a lot of weird stuff a lot of weird stuff on HF radio go down to 80 MERS go down to the 80 meter band and just scan around and listen and you I mean some some of the weirdest programming I've ever heard is on HF radio um I'm not going to say nothing super use but there aren't I mean you get the voices of certain countries so if you want to listen to China's state sponsored news they have a programming for that they have voice of America um uh programming for you know shortwave radio Every Nation pretty every big nation pretty much has their own like state sponsored news that they push over shortwave radio um a lot of times it's in other languages but there's a lot of English stuff too if that's what you want to use um it's pretty handy um really I can't say there's not a whole lot of good programming though in terms of like what's out there now the reason that you might want to keep a shortwave receiver on hand is for like a doomsday scenario right where internet's down TV's down everything's down well with a shortwave receiver let me see do I have mine here finally found it here it is just have something in my hand literally before I started this and just found it so something like a simp you know gp7 SSB this is the newer one with the rechargeable internal battery um there's a million of these kinds of things on the internet this is probably one of the most capable yet still the cheapest it's not cheap though um but not what I would consider to be cheap you know this may be a hefty investment you know if you're hesitant to spend money on like a bow Fang that's like $30 to $50 depending on which one you get you're probably going to bulk at this um or any other shortwave radio um this just a receiver and cuz you're going to get it this what's going to happen you're going to get it and you're going to turn it on you're going to scan and you're going to hear a bunch of weird stuff and you're going to say this was a waste of money well it's not really a waste of money in the long run because this is more of a doomsday preparedness thing what I'm trying to do with ghost net though is make it so that if you bought one of these and you have a shortwave radio you will get some kind of use out of it so um I hope that you know the work I've done here with the ghost net will be able to encourage more people to kind of you know start seeing the uses for shortwave and kind of using this a little bit more um but for now we're just we're we're still getting started right so if you have a shortwave receiver don't throw it away um don't like I mean you know keep it around it it's pretty good uh to keep for now it may not be super useful at the moment but I I think that it will um in due time once there's more commerci commercial stuff on shortwave radio I'm not aware of any projects though um but I think it'll be probably the amateurs uh that start adding more use to radio radio has exploded in popularity especially on HF radio the harder side of radio um it's exploded in just the past few years you know so this it it may you may have buyers remorse when you buy a shortwave receiver uh which is why I've been hesitant to say you must need this you don't uh you can get by with something cheaper um a a an SDR you plug into a computer is probably better in every way anyway but this is more of kind of like a doomsday into the world kind of thing um so yeah there's uses for these and I I may have a video I may decide to do a video uh for people um that seem to have these or some kind of shortwave thing and they're like man I spent like hund and something bucks on something that's useless right well it's not I mean it's not useless entirely um but yeah I need to uh I need to do more on that so all right what we got here on the ghost net somebody just did something I can see it on they're they're really close or they're they must be exactly between between these two receivers because it's the equal strength over here it's the same SNR no it's not it's close what are they doing some kind of message because somebody just somebody said somebody sent an acknowledgement I don't know what that is somebody on here on my antenna is talking about they're talking about the radios got FL Digi and js8 going need more monitors yeah yeah yeah we all do don't we all right so yeah all right let's see let's move on here let's go and answer some more questions I hope this is not super boring for you guys like I mean I feel like a c you know I've been how many how long have I been doing these videos for like 5 years now four or five years something like that seems longer two or three years I've been going two or three years pretty strong I think since Co but uh I still feel like a crazy person talking to myself a lot of times let's see here okay Pitchfork operators union all right nice uh is there a c's drone uh commercial off the shelf just a thing you could buy uh that I can buy that won't go out of its way to blow my cover bonus points if you can program a flight plan and send it off uh on to get some images and come back with radios totally off good question I'm not a drone guy uh I have a couple of drones but they're just DJI so most intensive spy drones you can get uh I would say generally speaking because well Ukraine and the whole drone War thing with Ukraine has really um he's really gotten people thinking about this sort of thing I would suggest look into building your own because then you're going to know what's on it you're going to be able to look at the software you're going to be able to look at all this and you might be able to do it for cheaper if you're just getting into drones you know DJI may be an option I would go with the smaller ones though that don't have the um uh ID broadcast though um because some of the bigger ones have that and it's like unless you're using it to like videotape weddings or do some photography stuff or something like this is not this is not good so um some of some of the more sketchy Chinese made drones you know may have um some features like that but yeah I uh I don't have any models to mind so I'm sorry if I I I can't help you out a lot but I know that do do-it-yourself options are are are kind of um preferred a lot of the time when it comes to um drones these days so let's see here moving on simple okay Andrew has a question simple question what is the cheapest radio to get involved in Ghost I'm currently looking at an rtlsdr but the setup won't really allow me to actively participate okay yes uh UK based if that has any impact on the question it it doesn't um finally love your vids appreciate the wi keep it up all right thank you appreciate that um if you're looking to transmit okay if you're looking to receive you can there's a bunch of different options but if you're looking to transmit let me see do I have one yes I have one this is about the cheapest you can do right here the true sdx um I haven't done any videos on this yet uh but this is about in the United States it's about 130 bucks straight from China you can get it in the UK uh there are I got this off of Amazon and there are a lot of clones on AliExpress and so on and so forth now something that you need to be aware of there's a little bit of controversy with this radio with the Clones um so just be advised if you you want to update the firmware for this device you need the serial number for it and the serial number for mine I threw away in the packaging so no firmware updates for me uh I have to basically just completely reflash everything and maybe somehow get it to work um now it works for me but um I I don't mean to say this um uh how do I say this diplomatically I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings but the developers of this have have got the firmware locked down so the fir so the developers of this um are looking to have a little bit of control over it after it's been um sold to you so you know I'm sure that that's um you know just all on me you know it's maybe my fault for not like kind of understanding that but um uh this is a really great radio I just want to say this is a great radio it does uh several bands it's the probably the cheapest HF radio transceiver you can get it's just that the whole put your call sign in download firmware thing is is is kind of rubbing me the wrong way but I that's that's of course just my uh my own problem but anyway this is probably the cheapest you can do uh in terms of being able to transmit now you're going to need a little bit more than this you need the batter you need a battery uh thing you need um an antenna system which is probably going to run more expensive than this uh depending on your experience and whatnot but yeah look check out the TR X sdx um really yeah I'm trying to think is there a cheaper one zyu g90 if you're willing to spend about 400 bucks 450 bucks zyu g90 is a really good option um I don't have one yet I'm getting ready to order one uh but everyone seems to be perfectly fine with it uh you can use this with uh without a Digi rig I'm trying to get mine to work with the digi rig and it's given me a little bit of an issue um but this should be able to function with a USB sound card they're not it's not the greatest way to do it if you're wanting to be like super prim and proper with radio it's not a great option to use with a USB sound card interface you can you can do it absolutely can um but I prefer to use a Digi rig as much as I can just it's just a cleaner more professional less noisy uh way of doing it so true sdx that's probably the cheapest you can do um yeah this this readily available so uh I think it's still readily available in the UK actually too so Mr wojack here is balang pronounced bof Wang or bowang it's definitely bof Wang I've been wrong I've been lying all these years it it is absolutely bof Wang bof Wang that's it gif or GIF well you want the real answer you're not going to like the real answer well since the G doesn't the G stand for graphics doesn't that make it gif like we all have been pronouncing it for so long yeah something like that okay let's see here John says all right is interesting to me that many young folks seem genuinely interested in com/ radio as a tool for tactical or prepper situations however if you go to any local radio club Gathering or just get on the air you'll find very few Young Folks how do we get them on the air they're already on the air that's my guess they're probably already on the air you're just not seeing them they're not going to clubs because they get shut out they get shut out of clubs really quickly ham radio clubs are still not I mean I don't want to oh man how many hams do I want to offend today let me see I think I'll be nice um a lot of ham clubs are not what where the cool kids are going these days they're um they're not interested in participating in the ham radio hobby they're interested in having like results right they're not interested in radio Theory they just want to talk to someone and they're more interested in stuff like that you want to get more kids you want to get more young guys you want to get more young guys in radio here's what you do if if you have a ham radio club do something other than ham radio do something like orienteering uh set up an orienteering course you know get your local ham radio club set it up do an orientering course medical get somebody to come in and and teach a a first aid course or uh CPR course get everybody on your your ham Group H uh CPR certified do something like that um Adopt A Highway do that go pick up trash on the highway do something other than radio get Outdoors you know um try to show how radio can be used as a tool um and you're you're going to have a lot of push back like it's easier just to start a new ham radio club most of the time than it is to actually like go with a pre-existing Club most of the time CU I have not found a single CL I mean granted okay this is just me just me don't throw things at me uh I have not found a single hand radio club that I feel like welcome at for one uh but they're just not interested in the things I'm interested in so I I'm willing to to to go of of course more than halfway I'm not just meeting people halfway I'm going like 90% of the way here and I'm I I get nothing from clubs a lot of times it's changing okay it's changing a lot but um there's it's an uphill battle it's definitely an uphill battle um so if you want to get the younger guys involved you're going to have to do something other than radio or show how radio can be used for something other than just talking with other hands about what radio you're using because that's like 90% of ham radio traffic right there is hams getting on the airwaves and talking about the specific radio you're using or other more delicate things um and yeah that's uh that's a problem if you want to expand and grow and and develop and things like that all right let's see here radio research group all right awesome uh we were thinking of doing a simple ghost net receiver setup video like the cheapest SDR setup you can use to pick it up yeah go for it um the cheapest SDR setup I still think you know going for the absolute cheapest is you're you're running up against diminishing returns a lot of the time you know um I still think the RTL SDR is probably the probably the best Your Best Shot um RTL SDR V3 uh I think the V4 is coming out man I need to get one of those the V4 is supposed to have better receive on the h Chef bands instead of having to go to this sort of weird back door cheat kind of mode um the biggest problem with with radio with the SDR set is the antenna that's that's where people are going to going to run into some problems so uh the antenna is going to be your your hardest part for most people it's now it's an easy problem to solve if you're a ham it's easy problem to solve so I need to do a video on that um let's see here see Sebastian asks okay how do you format research etc for the wire okay um as a doc I only get told the info but I never put it together I was wondering because I want to use them for my military science fiction and writing nice uh yeah hopefully I kind of answered that one for you already um it is just a collective Collective insanity is going on up in here doesn't have to make a whole lot of sense um is there a military publication on intelligence report writing there is one on report writing but I don't think it was helpful hm I have to look into that look look into the uh download the military publication for intelligence analysis they just did a recent one uh that's really good uh the Marine Corps Marine Corps has probably got the best publications of anybody uh they have one on intelligence analysis and they have one on intelligence preparation of the battle space spoiler alert if you learn and read about intelligence preparation of the battle space you may find that that's a very useful skill to have very useful and a lot of people are charging an awful lot of money for uh for someone who can be able to do that so yeah ipb intelligence preparation of the battles space it goes by other names too but once you get into it once you'll realize what's going on so let's see here let me do a quick check yeah I got some people banging around on js8 call not Super Active tonight um I was hoping it would be um but you know again wanted this to be a little bit more organic now that now I've recorded this you guys are going to know the cats out of the bag I may I may be doing this more often um any who yeah so always you never know who's watching you never who's who's watching so okay Nathan is this a question or comment I'm not sure EMP protection for devices to ensure redundant coms can actually be redundant okay EMP electromagnetic pulse hm H EMP stuff I've gone full circle on EMP stuff I went and thought all right this is probably one of the bigger concerns um and then I realized it's not really that much of a concern and then it came back around and now it's kind of a concern again and now it's sort of like not becoming a concern for me anymore um bottom line is uh EMP stuff is is pretty important to prepare for but maybe not in the ways that you think now I'm I'm not a scientist um who's that guy that does the EMP stuff I forget hang on let me look him up right quick okay here he is uh the EMP doctor right Dr Arthur Bradley he's got a YouTube channel go check out his stuff uh and it'll give you a lot more a lot more um good information on how much of an emm risk uh there is for you for me um let me see here let me show you grief what have I got here all right right so I do have um you know fair day bags and things like that uh where's my other one a better one ah here it is this one's got a clear clear thing on it so you can see the screen of a device through it I keep my um my GPS and this one just kind of my into of the world GPS kind of thing um I I'm not really super concerned about it because it turns out for most modern consumer Electronics they're going to be okay unless unless there is an EMP so strong that it it just kind of wipes out all human life sort of thing um that's not really how it works sorry if that's kind of confusing but if you want to get one or two of these it probably doesn't hurt this is one of those things where it's like do the risk management check out the risk management Matrix if you haven't already did a video on risk management um you know it's one of those things where How likely is it exceptionally unlikely but if it does happen how severe can it be well people tend to think they looking that 5x5 uh chart they think all right how bad can it be okay How likely is it to happen one on a scale of 1 to five one not very likely uh and what's the damage that could happen if it were to happen well they think five it's not really a five I don't think I think it's maybe a three or four um you might find some electronics are are taken out um I think I think and I think Dr Arthur Bradley would probably agree that surge protectors are probably your best shot so um surge protectors help quite a lot and uh that's something that can help you against normal Power surges anyway so um check out Dr Bradley's uh channel on that that should help you out quite a lot I think uh let's see here Thomas Thomas asks I'm I'm wanting to run a trunk radio scanner with the rtlsdr uh V4 and I was wondering if you have a video on that or have any resources for setting it up wanted to get my own little local talk awesome um yes there is a very poorly made video that I've made uh on like basic Sig so check out the Sig playlist I've covered this a couple of times um but really you need to go through and find out what frequencies you want to um uh you want to scan for because well trunking is a little a little bit little bit more difficult hm maybe I should do a video on that should I do a video on that I think I should I've already got like 5,000 videos planned good grief okay so sorry Thomas I don't have a solid answer for you right now I got I've got what I've got check out the second playlist but um I need to probably do a more solid video on that because it's not easy it's not easy to set up trunking at least not for me so let's see here tequila kid nice uh list of radio bands in order of importance F FRS Ms ham Etc well there is no order of Precedence they're all different bands for different things so um I don't think one I don't think the bands have precedence I think your pace plan has precedence so um if you want to use f FRS or Ms whatever um it's going to be in your pace plan right so if you want to use VHF or UHF that's in your pace plan I would say that the HF is probably going to be lower down in the Precedence still very important but again HF radio is a strategic resource it is not a tactical resource please please don't conflate the two you know you're not going to be sitting there getting shot at you know taking cover in a fox hole and you're going to whip out your IC 705 plug it in string up 60 ft of wire no you're not going to do that right you're going to be you know shouting rather exuberantly into a handset of a radio that's probably got an antenna you know um this VHF or UHF so HF is not really a tactical it's not at the Tactical level we have Strate you know we have tactical operational strategic strategic operational tactical uh levels of warfare and all of these that you mention here are VHF UHF kind of things so um that's going to be in your pace plan that's what's uh that's what the precedent is there okay uh let's see Coco Coco asks what antenna to listen to the ghost net from Europe what antenna if I also want to transmit uh good question um if you want to listen and transmit I'm tempted to say you probably just need a wire reel antenna do I have one of these I swear I have everything at my fingertips tonight see I'm super prepared as usual for these things I don't think I have one hang on give me a moment aha it was right in front of my face the entire time all right uh this right here you want to receive get yourself one of these this is it doesn't matter these are all various chinesey kind of names uh this is the sangen uh ant 60 an-60 antenna it's a simple wire reel antenna there this I think this is probably a knockoff of a knockoff um um this is just a simple wire antenna that has a 3.5 mm it's not it's it's a TRS style but I think it's just a TR or TS connector um that's what you can use to plug into something like this if that's what you're trying to use so you can't transmit on these um you'll burn it up pretty quickly um as in immediately uh but this is what this is about I don't know 10 bucks uh I don't know what it is in um in the UK but you can find them everywhere uh this is what I would recommend if you're starting with like an SDR or if you're starting with one of these if you got a receive only setup start with that because this is a solid investment no matter what you do um because you always need a long random wire antenna I think to receive always very handy if you want to transmit that's a whole other story you're going to be shelling out a lot of money probably 100 to 200 bucks for an antenna um and again that depends on your preference for me I prefer infed halfwave uh antennas because well they're fed by the end and that's really efficient for me so uh really easy to get them undone in the dark uh usually I try to get my antennas from uh chameleon antennas they're not a sponsor or anything um but they make really good antennas and if you're going to be spending a lot of money on antennas you might as well get one that's made by like a professional company because I don't know if anybody's noticed or not there's awful lot of guys on eBay making like handmade antennas which is fine but they're charging exuberant prices for them so uh yeah uh that's that's probably what you want to do is go check out chameleon Anna and see what what whether you want to go the resident route or the uh tuned drought but um if you're just getting started to receive get yourself one of these nice real antenna so yeah let's see here all right continuing on here let me see let me check on my ghost net situation here let's see somebody's checking in from North Central Florida people are starting to roll in we're getting close to the window here so uh even though it's daylight savings time and the the time window is later um in the year now at least for for my time zone uh people still kind of you know check in and what the the old time window uh was so let's see here somebody's talking about all right they're checking in but they have no traffic from northern Maryland land or Delaware all right cool two people oh two different guys checking out from Northern Florida okay nice I'm hearing them all the way up in Pennsylvania on this web S strr I can hear them here as well let's see somebody says all right checking in no traffic from Midlands of South Carolina okay good to see good to see got quite a few people checking in all right that's good to see awesome all right let's chass on Twitter here says question I am looking for a good com to fit inside a motorcycle helmet and possibly wired to F FRS gmrs radio all right trying not to use Bluetooth but would like to possibly patch and cellular fun operation okay that's going to be a little little hard to do um the anyone 878 series does Bluetooth and they have a setup to where you can have like a Bluetooth earpiece and then you have like a push to talk button that you put on your wrist is I bought that I bought that whole system and it's uh it's kind of dodgy but it does work sometimes I don't know it's really hard it's really hard to say because the push to talk is uh linked via Bluetooth to the radio and the radio is also linked via Bluetooth to a Bluetooth headset so uh you can try that try that and see if it works it's just any Bluetooth headset that fits inside a motorcycle helmet will work um with an8 878 uv2 I think uh whatever the latest anyone 878 series is um check that out that's where uh you can get a pretty good Bluetooth setup that way uh I have I tried one out running with encryption and the delay between the push to talk and when you actually like like you actually transmitt it from the radio it's like a full 2 second sometimes so not super great but if you're running on like regular DMR with no encryption and uh um probably even analog I didn't try it with analog H maybe I should that be a little bit better to use let's see let's see doc doc has a question what is the best of the best and best of the cheap most of us can afford I guess you're talking about HF radios um probably uh let's see if you can transmit if you have the ability if your license you got the ability to transmit um I don't know what is what is the best of the best okay well I just give you the Front Runners uh if you're looking for an HF radio the most common ones right now that people are kind of using that are affiliated with the stuff that I do zyu g90 Yu ft 891 uh ft 818 if you can get it um they're kind of drying up though because they're discontinued or 817 as well um but ft 891 is pretty good you still need to I think you still need rig with that uh like I said zyu g90 um depends what kind of radio you I mean what's your what are your needs um that's why I'm really hesitant to give out answers but uh you can't go icon the Icom IC 705 is probably the Cadillac of the small qrp radios it's just like a smaller ic7300 um does kind of the same things but just with less power there's a few things it doesn't do I don't think but for me it's it's pretty good um way more expensive than I probably should have spent on it but um I like the wireless capability of that but again that's like the top of the top of the line most people are probably going to be going with zyo g90 400 450 bucks you get it for 400 on sale all the time um that's probably what most people are going to probably go with so yeah all right Matthew says a note on concealing ants antennas I'm guessing and repeat ERS might be good yeah yeah I have a whole video on spy radio and uh the things you need to think about when concealing your antenna um because it is a concern uh for some people um I'm going to do a lot more spy radio stuff you guys like that spy radio stuff everybody likes spy stuff it's really hard you got to read a lot of books I can tell you how many time how much money I've spent on on books to uh like talk about spy radio stuff just to get one sentence from the book yep it's like there's my 15 bucks not not coming back so yeah okay let's see here let's see let's see how do you get your information for the wire yeah pretty common question isn't it social media Twitter telegram random randomness usually mainstream media is a pretty good source cuz people seem to be okay with mainstream media sources despite people saying they hate mream media when I put a story in the wire that isn't on mainstream media people lose their minds people are crazy all right let's see uh okay let's see we've got question from hi all right hello hi relatively easy backup coms for my family mainly wife and I she doesn't have or want a ham radio license considering doing gmrs and putting a repeater up at the house yeah that's probably what you're going to do I want to learn more about mesh tastic too is that a good option yes yes mesh tastic is great people seem to hate mesh tastic because they don't understand what it's used for and they seem to have you know a a really really averse uh mentality to reading the manual for mesh tastic um because a lot of the cons of mesh tastic just aren't true um anyway I don't want to start an argument but you know mesh tastic is a good is a good tool um it's really cheap to get into things are kind of backlogged because a lot of dudes on YouTube are talking about it so that always kind of tends to sell out sources but M tastic is really good like I mean I really do like it um text only but voice I think is coming I think Voice is coming it's going to be I technically like it used to be like very very hard to find out if voice would actually work on mesh tastic but I think they're figuring it out technically it shouldn't be possible but I think they're I think they're going to figure it out I'm optimistic but um for now yeah just the basic mesh tastic use would be good um what you've already you're already on the right path gmrs and put a repeater up um if you want to say super legal that's the way to do it buy the license gmrs repeater done um you could do all the same thing though with f FRS and gmrs or excuse me uh F FRS and Ms um you know but uh that's kind of sketchy right so I don't know if there's a legal way to do that but technically I mean any battle thing can can do that um but yeah if you're wanting to stay above board then yeah gmrs gmrs repeater that's probably your best shot I would say though when you're looking into somebody else had a question about that where did I see that at somebody had a question maybe I'll uh I'll scroll down and find it a little bit later uh about line of sight so make sure you do line of sight analysis to make sure that you're going to be able to where you're going to be able to communicate I maybe need to do a whole video on that line of sight analysis uh there's several tools you can use I I'll get into that later somebody remind me talking to myself again all right so moving on here I have another question from pimus let's see here I have always been curious about encryption yes aren't we all I think it's generally not legal for hams in most cases in the US but are there any areas that are gray or where it is straight up allowed second are there reasonable solutions to scanning trunked Public Service coms uh encryption yeah there are plenty of opportunities where it's legal just not on ham stuff uh gmrs look into that look into uh commercial radio look into uh the commercial radio regulations and you'll find out a lot more about what is allowed um encryption is definitely allowed it's just not allowed for hams on on the H bands but yeah it's loud sure that's why a lot of radios do it that's why a lot of um uh Chinese and Japanese radio manufacturers they're trying to double dip so like the anone 878 technically it can do AES 256 bit encryption but it's a ham radio is it is it a ham radio so uh it's meant to be a commercial radio that also does ham stuff so that's where you kind of find that distinction uh but with encryption so yeah absolutely it's allowed on uh in some circumstances but just not with hams that's why hams get all been out of shape because ham seem to think that the only radio you can use is ham radio but yeah there are definitely other other opportunities for that so uh secondly are there reasonable solutions to scanning trunked Public Service coms yeah those where you live go to Radio reference.com radi reference.com and you'll find out what's in your area and what you need to scan before you go out and shell shell out uh hard earned your hard-earned money uh on a scanner or some kind of system like that uh figure out what coms are in your area because if you live in a city where they're using encrypted stuff you're not going to I mean even you got to be like KGB level to to have the equipment to uh break that so yeah all right let's see Rico question how do I get friends so that I can actually use my radio for more than trying to listen to Air Traffic Control when I'm near an airport building Community is hard isn't it I can say this so if you don't have any friends get on HF radio I'll be there I'll be there ghost that will be there if you don't have any uh have anybody to talk to HF broadens or Horizons broadens number of people that can hear you let's see Daniel I have a question okay which radio or way of comms will be best for short and long way range that do not depend on internet and can be used in Denmark for someone who only have $100 per month to spend okay um let's see Daniel you are a good candidate for the true sdx I think it was developed in your neck of the woods actually I'm not sure the developer comes from Denmark or maybe the Netherlands I'm not sure I can't remember anyway yeah check this out the true sdx good good option for you very cheap very cheap just save up for a month get you one of these next month get yourself an antenna um get yourself some wire make yourself a make yourself a resident antenna on 20 M or 40 m and uh give that a shot I think that'll be pretty good for you uh you're going to need you're going to need a computer though uh you can do ft8 you can do ft if you don't want to do js8 you can do ft8 on there's an Android app for ft8 uh I think you have to buy it though but it's not much but you can get like an OTG cable plug it right into this and uh they work on um uh digital modes with um your Android app so yeah that's a good option for you that's about the cheapest way you can get into it that's actually reliable there are cheaper radios than this uh but they're uh they're a little sketchy if you know what I mean so all right somebody just ask to ask for messages somebody sending no man for whatever reason like my local antenna is doing super well and like this one is not getting anywhere from Pennsylvania come on Pennsylvania You' got to give me something normally normally these web sdrs have really like way better antennas than I do but for some reason like like this one is not doing super well tonight I don't know why anyway kind of goes the show right this is real it's organic you know it's so real semi- real time it's not a live stream but might as well be I guess at least for me okay let's see here let's see Mr geek Mr geek has a question thanks for the work you put on The Wire reports I share them with co-workers who aren't on team blue but can't filter the propaganda all right cool I'd like to hear more I'd like to hear about more secure internet coms radio is great but what about when the internet is still up and being but being restricted excellent question Mr geek from it looks like the great nation of Ireland um how do I say this alternative media that's probably where you're going to be at uh telegram is really hard to I mean h I don't want to say that I was going to say it's really hard to censor but it's not really I mean it's Cloud flare and Amazon web services AWS man they can lock down pretty much all human Communications and we can't do a daggum thing about it um How likely is that well unless you're talking about um political stuff in the United States probably not very likely um but yeah alternative media is probably your best shot I just you know internet-based comms it's like every time you know like oh WhatsApp WhatsApp was so secure everybody used it from the FBI to Al-Qaeda use WhatsApp and it turns out oh back door you know it's like oh signal signal is so great everything everybody's on Signal and then it's like is it really is it really I don't know I'm I'm not that um not that well versed on all the different ways that uh we're being spied on I just know that if it's got a one or a zero anywhere involved in it it's probably being spied on so if you've got something s this like hey Crystal Ball time if you want to say something sensitive that is not socially acceptable don't say it on the internet iners why is it such a hard concept for people to understand if you got to talk about some uh some uh sensitive things don't do it on the internet come on please it's not that hard actually it is that hard that's what people ask the question I don't mean to belittle yeah it's really hard I mean I can't just say well you know talk to people in person but you can say like part of part of a message online and then like finish the rest of it in person but if you're talking about like information gathering well yeah that's a lot easier to say I mean Twitter though Twitter is slowly creeping back into censorship isn't it on that one topic uh telegram's a little better but telegram's got a lot of a lot of bad information on it a lot of people who uh pushing fake information on telegram but hey I'd rather have the fake information discern it for myself than have somebody censor it so yeah I need to do a video on that but I need to learn it myself I'm no expert on this stuff I'm just flying by Night Fly by Night operation here okay Mr Machina or Machina I assume it's probably Machina how soon World War I okay it's already begun how long times of survival us Fleet Assets in theater operations what are you talking about sorry hang on let me read this again how long time was survival us Fleet assd and theater operations how soon China retakes how soon North Korea re reifies okay this is more of like a Pacific Theater kind of question um I don't think the US Navy is going to last very long in a direct knockdown drag out fight with anybody um as evidenced by Yemen US Navy you know all credit to them you know they uh they can't save unarmed you know commercial ships from being hit with improvised missiles that are being shot one at a time China's entire coastal defense like system is to send thousands of anti-ship cruise missiles thousands per second that's what China can do and they train for that that's their entire military infrastructure is built to take Taiwan back how sh how soon do they take Taiwan I I know uh pay attention to local elections in in China though oh Mr xinping has replaced quite a lot of people I think he just booted their uh Secretary of the Navy a while back a few months ago I thought oh that's that's pretty big but yeah watch for his consolidation of power he's still got a few people I think he's going to replace but um I think I think China is probably going to try to sleepwalk into this thing more than more than people think maybe not but um I don't know North Korea reunify South Korea uh North Korea the dprk the Democratic People's Republic of Korea yeah they have given up on reunification in case you haven't been following that they've been uh really they destroyed the arch of reunification uh they've removed all reunification references from all their propaganda websites and Kim Jong-un came out and has basically said several times reunification is not is not on the table anymore um we're just going to continue building our nation the way that it is so this this may be his own legacy I'm no Korea guy I'm not a Korea expert um but I think that reunification is off the table for a very very very long time very long time okay let's see here toddle media asks another topic that need is covering is power consumption yes yes uh many people don't understand turning volts and amps into Watts also yes volts time amps equals Watts uh they don't understand solar charging and its true Effectiveness it's nice to have those flashy systems but they are also a waste of valuable power yeah absolutely I did a whole I've done a couple of videos on energy um energy stuff and yeah it takes so much more battery power than you think doesn't it even just running this tablet here this sucker's getting hot you know um takes a lot of power um to to run to run things here so yeah you need a lot more power than you think you do and your solar panels are not as efficient as you think they are um uh I really do like thin film panels even though they're they're half the efficiency or something like that they're half the efficiency on the box like on the face value so maybe you have a 10 wat solar panel uh that's like a thin film panel like Power film you may have like a 10 watt panel well really you're you're you're not even getting a fraction of that out you may be getting five Watts on a good day but they work more hours of the day so you like man I need to I need to like get Excel out and prove this but I have found that like because thin film panels work in less direct sunlight I have found that with a 10 watt panel on a cloudy day I can get more juice out of that than a monoc crystallin panel which isn't charging anything at all because it's a cloudy day so you find that the least efficient panel is half the efficiency but it's actually many more times efficient in the long run because it works under more conditions anyway yeah I need to I need to bust out my Excel and actually start testing that and and and like proving it because my anecdotal evidence does not really help much so let's see Pete Mr Pete here do you see any use for VAR AC and ghost net yeah uh yeah I already covered that so yep um it's getting mcom features I did not know that I did not know that store and Ford actually no I did I did hear about that sorry I forgot about that yeah store Ford I knew that was coming um that's going to be interesting that may that may get a that may earn a place in the ghost net um yeah I may want to replace I don't know they want to replace wind link with varac I might get more people to use it because wind link I mean to be honest wind link sucks like I I don't like it I don't like it it's just the only way to send like a longer text message uh that's in an email format it's not really an email and it's not encrypted uh but it's really good um for sending these longer reports and you could store you know forms and things you make your own forms but it's not I don't I just don't like it like it just I don't know using Vara with it makes it an infinitely better experience you can send like a whole page of text in like just like a minute whereas here on you know js8 it takes me like dep on what mode I'm using it could take me like a whole minute to send like two words so yeah that might be that might be useful okay let's see all right so moving on here Edwards says okay I think your channel is great cool my daughters are performed many experiments all right nice cool uh I would like some videos showing the use of SDR receivers like the SDR play DX Etc uh we use these so it would be good to show the power of recording a whole band and how to use it I need to do more Sig stuff uh and yes I concur I do need to do more of that more more of that once I figure out see the second stuff takes a long time to film because there's inevitably some kind of issue right or it's just like not it's really hard to explain a lot of times so I have to sit there and think about how am I going to explain this in a way that people will understand it so yeah it just takes a long time to get set up but I'll I'll get back more on that sure all right moving on Mr douglas douglas says it seems likely that at some point a play will be made to take out or at least control the physical layer to control information flows and stomp out crypto yeah probably uh who is building a means to transact crypto via radio I don't know I don't know who's doing that um I have seen some things um but nothing super reliable I'm not a crypto guy yeah I don't know maybe I should talk more about crypto I don't know I don't know who's doing it via radio that would probably be helpful but maybe I think may it may be asking too much because there's a lot of dropped characters in in radio so you drop one character suddenly your money's gone your currency is gone let's see here all right future group asks thinking how to get new radio users started quickly are there region specific repeaters emergency channels weather police fire all documented somewhere yes so if I have a friend in San Diego that just bought a uv5r can he just download channels to quickly program His Radio yes uh go to radi reference.com and click the county that you live in and there will be a whole list of all the frequencies that you can track and like you know monitor public service Ham Radio repeaters all that kind of stuff it's all there radi reference.com I think I think it's Doom yeah it's do let's see here doc has a question all right I'm just getting into comms what radio should I buy is a dumb question it would be nice if you had a guide for three budgets Rich poor and something in between of some Hardware to buy the skills you need and the time it takes to be proficient yeah I agree ah man so you know which radio to buy you know it it it's a question that people ask because they they don't know what they're asking and Engineers often times don't know how to respond to that um but yeah I can definitely do that I can definitely do that I I I've I've been thinking about it for a while but I need to purchase the radios myself and that takes some time um to to get in and my whole mental my mentality is um I have a certain IDE ideology when it comes to radio I am a qrp guy I prefer low low power small compact rigs I do like the man pack stuff but I'm definitely not a base station guy so you know people who might be wanting to get into base stations I'm not your good I'm not a good source for you but uh yeah I'll do that I I'll do that work I I'll work on it oh yeah Theo philis has the same question can you do a buy this guide yeah also more videos on mesh devices yeah I'll do that mesh tastic definitely needs some more practical practical content not just content selling it I have no like I have no like sponsors you guys are my sponsors um that's that's really it people who support us on patreon and uton all that and you know the platforms like that that's um that's where where our funding comes from I have no I have no coupon code I have no affiliate link I have no sponsors so yeah seems like there's not that much content out there these days that isn't sponsored in some way but anyway all right let's see somebody's doing a CQ contest come on oh good grief come on you're you're doing a contest on the ghost net H whatever it does it doesn't really matter doesn't really matter let's see it just it just might clog things up it looks like it looks like nobody's participating anyway let's see Mr naah Mr naah has a question radio guides question mark I have a cheat sheet for the spouse how to tune up the Noah stations but it's a full page and kind of clunky thing when written for non-radio folks discreet radio discreet antennas for the home try not to attract your attention I'm working on things you guys haven't seen yet so there will be Publications on this don't worry don't worry working on it working on it all right let's see Zena Z Industries asks so my friend lives in an apartment that is a faraday cage no no is there a way for him to set up a radio there yeah sure sure there is you probably need a tuner though uh you could probably if you have a window hopefully you're living in an apartment with a window a windowless Apartments just basically prison um if you have the ability to fling a wire out of window or attach something to something metal on the building you might be able to tune up and get on the air that way um other than that you might want to look into mag Loop antennas they are expensive though so um it's one of those things where you might have to just shell out five 600 bucks or mag Loop only to find out that it works like marginally better than just uh trying to use a wire thrown out the window but if you're in a confined space you might find the mag Loop has a high enough CU to get a message a message out through a very um restrictive area uh Na again has a question for limited budget is a used HF rig better or is low power and smaller new rig better oh like which which kind of ready to buy um it depends on what you're trying to use it for uh I would say me personally I always go for the smaller radios uh smaller qrp kinds of radios um you might find though and this is kind of a hint with with really anything on like eBay or something if you find the same radio for sale like a lot on the secondary Market you might find what you might think well wait a minute why are people selling this radio like a lot you know um something to think about for sure um you know you and and also there are a lot of very entrepreneurial people on the eBay machine uh people will price guide you on eBay on radio stuff they will try to sell you like a 30-year-old radio for what they bought it for or for more like there was a guy on eBay I was trying to find a tuner a small compact tuner and the dude was selling it for $50 over MSRP and I could literally go to the company order it like right now and was on eBay selling it used for 50 bucks more than what it what what it cost brand new so anyway just be careful with that uh when it comes to buying used radio stuff you can get screwed really easily let's see Freedom actual has a question very interested in invis Communications good near vertical incident skywave and whether or not there any truly there are any truly Mobile Solutions uh good question I haven't found one that works yet uh does a truck make a good ground plane for invas my experience no I haven't been able to get that to work very well uh invas is one of those things where you really got to you really got to test it um because it it's it's almost impossible to determine if you're actually doing it uh because some a lot of people claim that they're doing invest they're getting invest propagation and it's really just a ground wve so uh you you have to be able to compute the time of day and the atmospheric propagation that actually is resulting in you getting invest because a lot of time you might find all right cool I think I'm getting invis propagation I see a lot of people in my very local area on like 40 MERS or something and then you go and you compute it and you find out oh wait a minute it's impossible for me to use this because uh the minimum usable frequency was above where I was at so it was not possible for me to use um invas so yeah um tough one tough one I would really like to find a good whip antenna for 40 MERS that works on a car or a vehicle or something you know that would be really cool um but I haven't found one that works super well yet they're always comp antennas like that are always compromised so all right Mr Boomerang here has a question mtic and its use case okay what would be an ideal set up for encrypted mesh chastic comms and a contingent or a way to detect tampering or compromise mesh chastic net nice or mesh tastic and AAC plugin how-to I have a whole video on that from a couple years ago I check that out it's on like mesh tastic and AAC uh it's like well decently popular I guess it's a little older but it's still still the same thing and in that video it shows you how to set it up but it also um has a use case for it so uh that's that's a good answer to your question right there I think but I will probably talk more about that later on okay Arc Blaster is it possible to get into radio with a cell phone instead of a laptop yeah depends on what you want to do there is no good app I don't think there is any app at all for using um js8 call on like a cell phone I wish there was because that would be so cool um but right now there isn't so you're kind of stuck with tablets uh unfortunately uh but if you want to do ft8 ft8 which is I don't find it to be very useful for information exchange for testing yeah it's useful but that's that's really all you've got uh and then if you want to do like more tactical stuff um you can use uh AAC and stuff with a cell phone with a radio so through the hammer Plugin or through some other stuff if you want to use like mesh tastic same thing uh well not same thing but you know same idea so you know that seems like that would would work very very well uh let's see here all right Nikolai Nikolai has in the list of priorities where would you put radio in the grand scheme of things obviously food comes first but are you spending $1,200 on an optic for your DMR or buying and building a new stationary or vehicle mobile long range radio system uh good question and I have a whole video that'll be coming out if it has has already come out um uh on prioritizing radio so check out the prioritizing radio video when it comes out if it hasn't hasn't already come out um I haven't decided when I'm going to publish these so uh that should be a good answer for you answer your question more directly I think it would make a lot of sense to think about radios in terms of the way that we buy guns uh it makes a lot of sense to think about radio the same way uh every gun is a tool so are radios and they tend to be pretty pricey investment sometimes um so I will let myself do the talking in that other video um but to answer your your direct thing I think that a lot of people a lot of times just say well I've got this extra cash laying around let me buy another gun well if you already have your needs met on defenses then maybe you might want to start thinking about investing in radio um because that just makes sense you know the the gun culture nowadays I mean people kind of make fun of it but still you know people spend you know you know thousands of dollars on their 12th AR you know so maybe consider consolidating a little bit just just saying but again the priority is up to you uh the individual user so all right continuing on Fred asks what would be a good long range emergency comms option I need to reach a little over 400 miles to let my wife know I'm alive and on my way home foot mobile would be best but at least vehicle mobile all right if that's what you're looking for I would suggest maybe looking into not just radio stuff it maybe looking into a satellite Communicator um because that seems like a pretty good use for that um again you don't want to ever like totally and completely rely on something that is um going to rely on somebody else's infrastructure like a satellite right um but if you're looking for a good like middle of the road comms option um and you don't mind a monthly fee uh that's it's not too bad it's like 12 bucks a month you know depending on which one you get um if you don't mind that then you might want to look into something like that uh 400 mil is a long way uh when it comes to radios and you haven't given me any any indications as to what the terrain's like so yeah um if you don't have line of sight you're going to have a hard time mesh tastic is out you can't go that far with mesh tastic um VH F UHF is out you're not going to be able to do it that far um even with a repeater that's that's way that's way pushing it um maybe a repeater network maybe but generally speaking that's that's a little that's a bridge too far but 400 miles is right there on that skip range so um you're probably if you're going to if you're going to do that you're probably going to have to you know you could probably do a man pack uh depending on the terrain if you got clear line of s between the two of you you could do that but um you're going to need at least a man pack probably zigo g90 ft-891 something like that uh that allows you to push out a lot more power um on VHF UHF but again that that assumes that you both can see each other so you need to do the line of side analysis somebody asked about that I was going to come back to that um I'll probably find it again here in a minute but do line of sight analysis um and uh you can just Google it line of sight analysis tool and like the first one that comes up I think is skada systems and it'll allow you to determine between two points is there anything like a Mountaintop or something like that that's kind of blocking your way if you've got clear line of sight then you could you might be able to push it with a decently powerful VHF UHF option probably VHF um uh but 400 miles man I think more reliably you probably want to go with HF 400 miles you could do like an invis kind of thing and maybe get a pretty good uh pretty good return on investment there so yeah I would look into that I look into invas your vertical incident skywave that's just the way that you arrange your antenna it's not anything special it's not anything magical uh it's just an interesting way of propagating but really you're you're kind of in that sweet spot where you're you're too far away from most V most VHF you're way too far for I think UHF but definitely you might be able to do it with VHF you're going to need a lot of power though um depends on how high you can get your antenna you might want to try I mean if you've got this space to put up a gigantic antenna maybe look into gmrs but you're still limited on power on gmrs so that's a tough one I need more I need more specifics to answer that a little bit more intelligently um yeah so let's see here yeah sorry I don't have a super great answer for that one I maybe need to come up with a better answer for that because that's a that's a tough one let's see here Bruce long question here okay maybe introduce people new to radio on tuning an antenna and use of a nanovna yes yeah definitely once these concepts are understood the sky is limit with regards to making antennas which I personally prefer yeah that's good yeah uh yeah this is a picture of one I spent many hours yeah okay cool talking about antenna builds let's see aprs yeah $300 into the project yeah um building antennas is is is a tough one um because it's not it's not super hard to do it's just hard to understand at first uh and it may be a little bit over people's heads um when it comes to uh building them for the first time so I always try to suggest people to go like buy a pre-made antenna to to start with um just to get you out the gate um but when when it comes to like HF stuff but if you want to make one yourself it's pretty good to I mean can't beat a dipole you know I just I just prefer the the infed halfwave system so okay moving on see have you considered being a guest on a space yeah I need to do I need to figure out how to do live streams a little bit better a little bit do do like Twitter spaces um I need to uh to get that set up it's just really hard to schedule this sort of thing uh you guys you guys know how it is um so yeah plus I'm really I'm still like I said at the beginning I'm I'm really like torn on how much do I waste you guys' time watching a live stream or just me talking to myself and uh I mean I can answer your questions in real time I guess but yeah I just find that when I watch Like live streams maybe it's just me like I'm I'm trying to like you know try to cut out some of the more um like like wasted wasted time sorts of things but I know isn't that that's weird me me talking about being too verbose good grief man I could talk forever I just don't I'm trying to like I'm trying to be better at that I'm trying to like not waste your time so much all right so Z Patriot all right within the satellite ecosystem okay specifically satellite constellations how can these resources be leveraged and moreover integrated into ghost net for ENT and or Sig datam and perhaps uh OT Over the Horizon alternative to HF communication or peer-to-peer good question um okay so there are some radio satellites out there um I still think they're pretty hard to leverage I still think it's it's a it's a bit more a little bit more involved um for your average bear to get into and I just when we're talking like the ghost net supposed to be for the lowest common denominator well even then it's it's pretty Advanced you know um I think that might be a bridge too far for now but I would like to I would like to start looking into that a little bit more um yeah so that that's a tough one that's a tough one I don't know how to leverage uh satellites into the ghost net just yet but if I could find a way I will do it because I think it's cool and I think it might be pretty helpful even though satellites you know you know are not the most reliable thing somebody else's wire you know all that let's see here let's see Ordo Ordo asks who owns Airwaves FCC and supreme court has repeatedly ruled on this subject and concluded that no right to broadcast exists I don't know what you're I don't I don't know what you're you're referencing but I don't care uh because the radios are there what are they going to do Jam me yeah you get the picture you get the picture there's also a difference between broadcasting and transmitting like you know broadcasting is not um allowed on amateur radio I don't think anyway it gets sticky into the definitions of what is broadcasting and what is transmitting but either way technolog is there use it use it all right so toddle media again has another question question comment I see a problem in new radio users gaining a faal sense of security with all the repeaters available in a real emergency those repeaters will no longer exist leaving them with little contact area also do they have the ability to charge batteries in shtf yeah yeah exactly your repeater is not going to last very long one word Maui you know what I'm talking about yeah repeaters are great in a peacetime situation repeaters are not great when they can be struck with a munition or something else in like a war zone again something hams completely don't think about but yeah I I repeaters to me are disposable like yeah you can set one up for an operation but take it back down and don't expect for it to stay up forever you know like repeaters have a use they do but when it comes to like ham clubs and like networks and things like that no I'm not relying on that if it's there good if it's not don't be don't build your whole Pace plan around a repeater please don't do this uh please do not build your whole Pace PL around somebody else's wire you know that's that's just using a cell phone with extra steps basically you know if you're using if you're relying on a repeater in an emergency situation man that's you know probably not the probably not the best probably not the best way of doing things so another question from toddle let's see I think you should also discuss the importance of small community groups getting their own cheap Farm repeaters that they have complete control over if it's an emergency to happen at least you know your coms are available to you and your group without anyone else inter yeah yeah exactly just what I said yeah uh if you're looking to GM gmrs repeaters looking into doing more repeaters for yourself they even have DMR repeaters now that you can get for decent I mean they're not cheap but you know in terms of the capabilities you might have to use one of those I've got one sitting in a box around here somewhere um but yeah yeah build repeaters you can control so yeah scrolling through that looks like pretty much much it I think I'm I think I'm out I think I'm out of questions I think you guys have have tapped me out for today uh let me check here on the ghost set again we got I haven't had a little bit of traffic here on my own radio for a while um let's see got some SNR requests maybe some heartbeats perhaps um we'll see I mean a few people have been sending messages back and forth I forgot I forgot to mention um normally someone picks up the wire and transmits the wire uh for that day normally I've seen it from for from a few people um I guess it's probably a little um little much to expect now that I'm trying to record isn't that how it works every time you're trying to record something you're trying to show something out it doesn't work out anyway um oh somebody somebody just did a heartbeat somewhere I'll decode here in a second but yeah I mean it's it's um it's an interesting thing you know it's not perfect you know um but I think that there's some there's definitely some use there uh it'll get better with time more people will get on it with time and I think as real world events transpire we can actually start to see the the use for something like this uh is a little bit you know hard to quantify you know if I'm just talking about it so yeah I think uh I will um finish out the Comm window here uh it looks like I mean I'm still early I've been able to get through these questions pretty early um but I will finish uh checking out this ghost net session see who else is out there see what's going on um do some messages of my own and I'll probably pack it in and call it a day uh like I said it's still early uh but I found that most people despite the the window starting later due to Daylight savings people still uh come in pretty early so um some days it's busy some days it's not and I think the real benefit to the ghost net is during world events um you know the uh the weekly Nets are are there for people to exchange information and have like a good time to test stuff because you've got if there's ever going to be people on ghostnet it'll be during the window right but uh really the the benefit for ghostnet is when it when there's an international incident or some kind of disaster a comm's outage or something spy balloon whatever uh ghost net people will be on it and talking about it so um I really do appreciate that because it allows people who might not have the reach on social media um to actually get information out to the world in a way that's not driven by an algorithm so um very cool stuff to see so again somebody transmitting it off let of information but somebody checking in from Florida nothing to report that's okay sometimes it's nister nothing significant to report nstr sometimes that happens um but yeah uh hopefully this has been useful for you guys um uh I I don't really know what else to say uh again I think I've I've I've talked myself to death here tonight um but uh let me know if you have any other questions if you've made it this far you you'll know where to where Toop the questions probably just you know on Twitter or social media or somewhere um YouTube's probably not the best place to ask questions because I don't read YouTube comments um I stopped reading YouTube uh comments on YouTube uh on my own videos I think three years ago um so you don't really find anything good in YouTube comments these days uh but you guys know how that is so um we'll see about it um I'm going to look into doing some like live streams but again I don't want to waste you guys time if uh if you know I'm just sitting here you know watching js8 call for minutes and minutes and minutes uh it's going to be pretty boring but any who hopefully this has been helpful for some of you um again uh if you have any questions let me know uh you can you guys know how to find me you can put comments on this um whenever I do do something on ghost and on Twitter I I know that I'm really really hard to get a hold of nowadays um because I don't I don't read comments on YouTube I I very very rarely respond to emails or DMS um just because it's just an overload first of all I got an overload of spam so you know my inboxes is full of are constantly full of spam and then I found that you know as unfortunate as it is I just find that waiting through the Cesspool of comments and and nasty emails is to find the one person I can help is really hard to do so uh please forgive me if I'm not able to get to everyone who's got questions um I'll figure something else out one day but uh right now I just I just can't afford to do it you know it's really tough um but uh yeah um hopefully this has help has helped answer a lot of your questions and hopefully we can get a lot more questions going um maybe on some other stuff too some other topics maybe some Intel related stuff whatever you guys want I mean I'm here to help as best I can probably can't help very much but do what I can so um yeah I think I'll pack it in I call it a night for the recording at least I I'll see you know some more messages come in now of course everybody's trying to say something on ghostnet now that I'm trying to check out for the night that's how it goes every time isn't it anyway we'll see what comes in and uh yeah thanks for for watching thanks for putting up with me um thanks for for sticking out so yeah uh thank you guys all for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade