EMCON: Managing Radio Risk

these days we talk a lot about the risks of using radios in a less than friendly situation why is it sometimes not a good idea to use a radio in certain ways and why are some techniques a little bit better than others and what can we do about it what can we do to reduce these risks well right up front most of the concerns that people have really fit into two different ideas the first concern being everyone will hear what I say and the second concern is people will Direction find my signals and Hunt me down so right up front let's just go through the textbook answers turns out the US military has done a lot of research on this so we've got a good base of understanding to start from even though it's a lot of times like shoving a square peg in a round hole if we take a look at some of the military manuals and Publications on the subject one of the better ones that we can lean on is the US Marine Corps mcon sop or emissions control standard operating procedure this is a fantastic publication that I would highly encourage reading through all the way but if we're trying to introduce the concepts of being a little a little bit safer when it comes to your radio usage there are a few categories or ideas to think about the first idea is intelligence preparation of the battle space we have to understand what threats are in our area so that we can tailor our responses to it the next idea that we can kind of think about are emissions control levels and emitter matrices basically different levels of operating so that if we're in a really risky environment we can only use the bare minimum of communications tools that we have whereas if we're in a more permissive environment we can use a little bit more tools a little bit more safely the next thing to think about is the Ten Commandments of imcon which are 10 general rules for ensuring that your Communications are as low profile as possible stepping outside of this particular publication we can also think about things like isolated Personnel practices the Lesser cool side of things like sear or survival evasion resistance and Escape we can also think about General Soldier practices like Readiness conditions and outside of military Doctrine we can think about how these concepts are interoperable with a civilian life as well as using radios in a non-combat situation and in a fully permissive environment again as a prepared citizenry we're not always going to be preparing for war even though that may be on a lot of our minds these days sometimes radios have a use that is not related to combat actions and is really more of a safety thing so if we were to tackle this sort of nebulous idea of trying to use Ros in a situation where we're not exactly at peace but we're not exactly at War either one of the better ways to start is with ipb or intelligence preparation of the battle space you can call this whatever you want uh ipb uh intelligence preparation of the operational environment and area study terrain analysis all of this even though they're technically slightly different they all kind of fit in the same general idea of understanding the battle space around you or understanding your community right up front the general idea of of just assuming that there's a drone orbiting over your head 24 hours a day this is just not going to cut the mustard when it comes to risk analysis it's just too broad of an idea to list on your risk assessment as well I'm always under National level surveillance right this is just not a good idea to to lean from you need to be more specific what electronic surveillance is in my area what do local authorities have at their disposal do I live in a major city where the police force is like a modern-day Army you know a modern day military force or do I live in the middle of nowhere with two sheriff's deputies you know who are probably not going to have that many resources you need to be able to understand the intelligence picture of your environment because that's really the more important factor when it comes to well really setting up your Communications we have done dedicated videos on intelligence preparation of the battle space and the combat Intel cycle which may be helpful for you again not perfectly doctrinal from the textbook but nothing is in life so having a general understanding of your environment is going to be very very very important for countering the threats you may face step one is to know what the threats are right and once we know what threats we're up against what sort of intelligence collection assets might be in our area and what the risks are we can then start thinking about our mcon levels now all service branches have very radically different ideas on emissions control levels and procedures but I'm going to take this template directly from the textbook so that we can have something to work from because this I think is a really good uh basis to work for these four levels basically dictate the situations and procedures for using radios in a variety of environments up first we have the first level mcon level one which is Radio routine this is going to be your peacetime radio usage where there's really no threat you're in a friendly area there's no threat of being Direction found or targeted in any way so you can use any radio to send any message to anyone really this is not going to be very commonly used the most common one to be used is going to be mcon level 2 radio essential this is basically limiting radio messages to essential traffic only if you don't need to use the radio don't use it fairly simple again the situation where you might use this is where you're in a sort of not quite peace time but you're in more of a neutral environment where there aren't adversaries that might kinetically Target you but you know adversarial spying might be an effect up next in terms of seriousness is mcon level three which is Radio silence now this is what you're going to use in a situation where you're in a hostile area you're in conflict and your adversary is going to be looking for you in this case the military Doctrine tells you that no radio calls with voice are authorized again this is a little bit of a deviation from the past where we've heard terms in you know Hollywood movies like radio silence right well in the past we didn't really have super great data burst modes so right now the current Doctrine is to use Radio Data modes only in this uh in this situation so instead of hopping on the on the mic and just talking constantly using your voice you can send a data burst message and compress a lot of text into a simple message that gets sent out very very quickly and the less time transmitting the harder it is for you to be Direction found and finally we have mcon level four which is a total Communications blackout absolutely no signals being emitted by any kind of force right this is also the level where people tend to default to if they over assess the risk for their area now one thing to keep in mind is that there is no point in remaining at mcon level 4 forever no combat force or any Force whatsoever can remain at mcon level 4 indefinitely right this is something you're going to do temporarily when you know that signals are going to be targeted this is a little bit hard to transfer into a more citizen friendly uh situation so let's go ahead and take this mcon uh level template and talk about the next thing which is emitter matrices now again pulling this graphic directly from the textbook we can see that this is largely a military Centric idea but even though this may look a little bit you know scary and confusing this is actually a very simple idea an authorized emitter Matrix is basically just a chart that dictates whatever gear you have and whether or not it can be used at a certain mcon level so as we can see on this chart in this example with listing a lot of military hardware we can see that at mcon level 4 everything is turned off except for GPS receivers which don't emit a signal they only receive so at mcon level 4 again everything is turned off no emitters are are transmitting whatsoever backing down things a little bit we have at level three we've got things like Al chat right actual physical uh chat applications that are a little bit harder to Direction find because they tend to use sort of you know data burst modes and things like that again just think broadly for this we don't need to get super down into the weeds just yet because we'll talk more about this Matrix in just a moment moving on from The Matrix another idea to kind of understand are the ten commandments of emissions control or mcon the first one is to talk less this means to keep your transmission short because the longer the transmission goes on the longer you're holding your finger on the transmit button the easier it is to Direction find you keeping messages as short and concise as possible goes a long way to reducing the risk of being located the second one is kind of along the same lines schedule less this means to reduce the amount of reporting that your organization requires so instead of having 15 sit reps you know being mandatory per day you can cut that down to the bare minimum that you need to get the mission completed if a meeting is absolutely not required then don't schedule it same thing with radio communications number three is to move again this is a major tactic constantly keep moving although Direction finding efforts can vary widely in the hardware used and the type of signals that are trying to be located moving around really does help as a general rule keeping on the move is a major tactic that can again reduce your overall risk number four kind of goes along with number one which is to chat do not call if we're trying to use radios as a tool rather than a hobby we don't want any rag chewing we don't want to have very long drawn out conversations regarding the weather or your radio no we're using radio as a tool right so we want to keep messages as short as possible in the milit AR context of things this is specifically referring to chat programs so text messages instead of voice messages we'll get to this in a minute because as this applies to the civilian world there's a lot of things that we can do in this regard so we'll we'll come back to this number five is signal again if you don't need to use the radio don't use the radio use hand signals visual aids other kinds of markers and things like that instead of hopping on the radio to talk to the guy that's 15 ft away from you if you can use signals instead of any kind of radio transmission number six again thinking outside the box using wire again field telephones things that are not radios if there is no signal going through the air you cannot be Direction found so by using wire telephones especially in uh places where uh like static locations like between a command post and an observation post uh this is a really great way of moving a lot of your Communications off of the airwaves and into a harder to detect system right number seven is to mask antennas something that we definitely need to think about in the civilian world but it really mostly applies to large antenna Farms that can easily be spotted or detected by aerial assets is part of like a military unit sort of thing there are concerns for having random pieces of wire strung up in the trees in what is supposed to be an unpopulated area but by and large masking antennas is going to be something that is is more along the lines done for cooperation with like an HOA the whole concept in the civilian world of building stealth antennas or HOA compliant antennas hiding and concealing an antenna from say you know prying neighbors eyes that's really how this is going to apply in the civilian world but again we'll talk more about that in a moment number eight again another great tactic reducing power use only the power needed to get the message across don't just set all of your radios onto you know high power high power yeah you may get the message across but you also may get that message across to someone who doesn't need to hear it as well so use barely enough power to get the message across number nine is to prioritize LPD Nets this is again one of those military terms that is very very interesting and we'll talk about that here in just a second but what this means is prioritize low probability of detection networks meaning if you're going to set up your pace plan have your uh Communications methods ranked racked and stacked based on your adversary's ability to detect that signal for instance if you're going into an area where you know that the enemy is listening to VHF signals maybe not put a VHF radio as your main method right you want to maybe use a lower probability of detection something that is a little bit harder for an adversary to identify and detect in the first place wrapping things up with number 10 we have plan simple flexible operations I suspect that this particular category can be nestled underneath a couple of other categories but we can clearly see the Marine Corps needed 10 uh things to round out their list here so this is one that is separated out specifically but nonetheless it's a good idea to plan to use less radio communications really this last category is meant to encourage Mission planners to consider planning efforts that do not necessarily mean using more radios for instance if you can get by with going up to this Mountaintop and using a signal mirror to signal to another team on another ridg line that would be a good planning Factor if that means changing your route so that you can visually see each other a little bit better then that might be something that you want to do as opposed to just blasting out a signal on the radio again this doesn't really happen that often but it is a separate category that is worth mentioning when we readdress our civilian concerns we can simplify things quite a bit remember the civilian Factor brings in a lot of different concerns which make this Doctrine not fit perfectly for instance let's take that term I just mentioned LPD low probability of detection another similar term is low probability of interception so if you're researching things on your own you will sometimes see this listed in books as LPD LPI or LP o or lpoi you know low probability of detection or of interception depending on what you're reading these are slightly different terms but for the most part the general idea is the same an LPD transmission is a transmission that has a fairly low chance of even being detected in the first place if you are hanging out on the airwaves like Jack Burton just blasting away to anybody and everybody the chances that your message will be detected is pretty high conversely if you send short Texton data burst messages compressing a lot of information into a tiny transmission that only takes a second the chances of someone tuning into that transmission at that exact Split Second it's much lower well here's another slight problem with this idea for the civilian world and where the prepared citizen has the advantage almost all military Doctrine including the 10 commandments I just outlined makes the assumption that any radio signal will be targeted this makes a lot of sense Warfare where any unaccounted for radio signal in the middle of the woods is suspect however as bad as things are here in the United States right now and even though many cities are basically War zones at the moment we still have the hobby use of radio so we have kind of a different factor to consider the probability of understanding in other words How likely is it for an adversarial Force to pick out your transmission as being different than the hobby use of radio a prepared citizen has the option of trans transmitting in the United States without being immediately struck with a Hellfire missile even as bad as things are right now the hobby use of radio is excellent camouflage for more important information just something to think about really just a seed to be planted now for later and it's also a good illustration of how the pre-existing doctrine that has been learned the hard way doesn't really fit perfectly within our modern civilian world now I know a lot of you are thinking this is a lot to take in and it really is a lot of times radio stuff can be quite overwhelming so let's take a break for a moment and think about another concern that you might have that's semi- random in nature sometimes a group may have a concern that's rather specific and that concern is that if someone in my team gets captured the adversary can use their radio to listen in our team's Communications or even worse if a team member gets captured they can be coerced into setting up an ambush for the rest of the team again this is a really specific concern but it may be a thought for some and it really is a good way to think outside the box when it comes comes to Communications planning so I did want to mention it really the best ways of mitigating this question lie with the choice of radio for instance most Motorola radios used by law enforcement around the world have the ability to remotely disable that radio in the event that it gets lost makes a lot of sense from the perspective of law enforcement if an officer loses their encrypted radio you don't want just anybody and everybody to be able to use that radio if they find it other features include the encryption Keys being dropped in the event the radio runs out of battery now these are Advanced features of some radios that are not really for the novice user what's a little easier to do is simply changing out the encryption Keys frequently but again encryption is something that gets a lot of hate on the hamide of things so it's a bit challenging to even talk about so for the average group out there there is a planning effort that you can undertake to address the concerns of lost radios but is really intended to address the second question the team member under duress this is a little bit more nefarious and probably not really socially acceptable to talk about I guess but if you are concerned about someone getting captured and being being forced to use their radio to lure the rest of your team into an ambush one of the things you can do beforehand is make everyone fill out an ISO prep form now I won't go into too much detail as this is rather off topic but this form which can be downloaded for free is basically a document to prepare a service member for becoming a prisoner of war this verifies things like family data what languages you speak and other details about your life that can be used to verify that you are well you specifically included in section nine are places for random questions to be generated in a dire situation such as being captured you want your rescue team to have a question or a series of questions that only you know the answer to if we look back to when the concepts of sear and Personnel recovery really became a high priority we look no further than the Vietnam War one interesting anecdote comes from the shoot down and recovery of Roger locker locker was shot down on May 10th 1972 deep Behind Enemy Lines in North Vietnam during his shootdown no one saw his parachute and there there was no indication that he was actually alive however since the North Vietnamese did not add his name to their list of captured Pilots reconnaissance missions were flown to try to contact him via radio almost 3 weeks later he finally managed to make contact with a reconnaissance plane with his survival radio the problem was that since he had gone missing 3 weeks prior he had long since been out of the rotation so his codes were older but they did check out Providence also played a huge role because as luck would have it one of the guys flying Recon personally remembered that older call sign well as the recovery Mission progressed which was challenging since this rescue mission was the deepest into North Vietnam during the entire War the recovery team needed to have a question to ask him in order to verify that it was really him because from the very start this sounded like a trap the North Vietnamese army or NVA could have captured him and tortured him into using his radio to lure in a rescue team which would have been a fat juicy Target so his buddies back at the Squadron knowing he was from Kansas came up with the question to ask him what is kite now as several members of this operation have noted in interviews over the years this was an absolutely perfect question because this word has two meanings in English which would not be understandable by a culture that is not American for instance if he was under duress and being forced to use his radio by the NVA he could answer it's a thing that flies in the sky and the NVA who would have had interpreters listening would not pick up that Locker had given the wrong answer because to them a kite was in fact a kid's toy that flies in the air the real answer was that kites was a bar in Manhattan Kansas so when Locker transmitted back over the radio it's a bar the recovery team knew they had their man and the rescue mission went ahead this incident and countless others is the reason for this section on the iso prep form that we still use today and from a concerned Citizen's perspective this idea can be a really good way to ensure that a lost radio or even worse a lost person with a radio doesn't end up increasing risk for everyone else this anecdote also hints at something that is really unique to the operational use of radio and bringing things back to a more prepared citizenry perspective this really becomes apparent we can see how by mitigating one risk we increase another for instance using Code words and brevity helps to prevent an adversary from figuring out what you are saying especially if you're using an unencrypted radio but if you are using so many code words you are increasing the time you are transmitting you are increasing the risk of Direction finding likewise you may be concerned about Direction finding so much that you make it impossible to communicate with anyone having communication so strict that there's no flexibility if you are at mcon level 4 all the time and risk aversion is over the top you actually increase the risk of something bad happening if you are getting shot at in a war zone and you are wounded or about to be captured but you are so scared to transmit that you don't do anything you may go missing without your team knowing what happened so they are going to go search for you in a hostile area and increase their risk unknowingly in this case emissions control mcon levels something designed to reduce risk can actually increase overall risk the bottom line is that risk mitigation in the radio world is tricky because the risk itself is very hard to assess especially from our modern perspective you never really know who's listening to your transmissions and what gear they have because most prepared citizens are not going to have a super high-speed intelligence section they're going to be Flying Blind a lot of the time and highly Advanced and really capable equipment is already out there in the civilian Market even though its prevalence is probably overstated at times so wrapping things up what does all of this mean well it's really hard to explain like everything in the world of radio since these ideas are really at the bleeding edge of innovation in the prepared citizenry space there really is no one answer and even even though cherry-picking information from military manuals is probably not the best idea sometimes it's all we've got when the rubber meets the road we can do the best we can we can use basic Emissions Control procedures and we can rack and stack our technology in a matrix such as this sort of using the bare minimum Communications plan we mentioned previously this is an example of what an authorized emitter Matrix may look like but as we can see it differs from what's in the military manuals because we and the prepared Citizen Space have to deal with the lack of encryption not only is this a cultural problem because again the hams will just freak out if you mention encryption most of the time but also it's more along the lines of a hardware Gap we just don't have HF radios on the civilian Market that can handle encryption just yet so we end up having a lot of maybe categories there really isn't one answer so I'm sorry for those of you who are expecting to be told to just do this and you'll be okay there really isn't that much fleshed out in the prepared citizenry space and as it turns out when we take a lot of military Doctrine and try to apply it to what's going on in the United States right now we find that it's not exactly a perfect fit and a lot of times there's more exceptions than there are actual cases where the rule actually works if you're going into an open state of near peer War hey this publication is probably going to fit a lot better than anything we can come up with in the prepared citizenry space but if you're just an average person with a day job who's trying to navigate through these crazy times and you are already aware of a lot of the concerns that are out there and and you're motivated to to increase your Communications capabilities and so on and so forth something like this might help you out a little bit better we can take for instance at the very top here the analog VHF UHF radio the classic bow Fang is it fine to use in a permissive environment mcon 1 absolutely would you want to use it in a situation where there might be people listening well maybe it's up to you it's all on how you want to implement that particular technology most of the time we try to match a technology to a capability and not the other way around but sometimes in the world of radio you have to explain things backwards and this is one of those cases and at the risk of getting way down in the weeds you can even take something like mesh tastic when and put it in two different categories based on how you want to run it for instance the standard mesh tastic is great for situations where you're in mcon 1 or mcon 2 so you're not really in a situation where somebody's trying to track you down and kill you right however mesh tastic with a few caveat can be used in a more non-permissive situation one of the great ways to do this is in the settings menu you can change basically everything about mesh tastic and how it operates in the settings menu mesh tastic by its very nature will transmit quite frequently every few seconds uh depending on how often you have it set so there is the concern there with uncontrolled emissions right you always want to be able to control that emission well there's something as groundbreaking and shocking as a power switch so you can actually install a power switch in line with the battery so you can actually perform a hard shutdown of your mesh tastic and no signals are getting out then when you need to exchange some text messages via mesh tastic you can turn the device on and mesh tastic actually has this built into the settings where you can store and forward messages so basically you're sending a poor man's data burst and having some really Rockstar capabilities even in a situation which is less than friendly and then of course at the bottom we have receive only equipment which works no matter what depending on where you're at if you are concerned about emissions control and you don't want to transmit because you're under you know a really uh intense uh surveillance profile then maybe you just want to receive messages so having a receive only setup to where no one can detect If you're receiving anything the recipient can listen to messages even in a situation where surveillance is very intense now obviously the sender is going to have to be in a situation where they're at mcon one or two but you get the idea I know that at times this this is very very hard to understand and very hard to kind of talk about right because we have to explain a lot of very intricate and Technical knowledge in ways that are understandable but it requires a lot of Base knowledge to understand in the first place this is why it's very challenging a lot of the time to understand the ham radio world in the first place and how radio signals work but it's even harder to kind of you know take that knowledge and take the military side of things and how small unit tactics play into things and kind of mesh these together taking the Best of Both Worlds for our strange times that we're living in it's really hard to do and a lot of times the efforts that we undertake are going to be a swing and a miss especially considering that what is considered to be the basics right or the bare minimum is debatable this is so developmental it is so at the bleeding edge of innovation that it's really hard to get everyone on the same page of what is considered acceptable the military has their way of doing things and the people that come from the military with their great experiences sometimes don't understand that we just have to do the best we can in the civilian World likewise the ham radio Community brings a lot of technology and Innovation to the civilian Marketplace but a lot of times it's a swing and a miss because the tactics the clubs the radio Nets that are out there aren't really the best for helping people overcome the adversarial things that they're up against today but that's okay we're doing the best we can and really that's all we can be expected to do we can apply things as best we can we can take mcom procedures and the Ten Commandments of mcon and kind of apply that as best we can but we can also think outside the box and try to take the Best of Both Worlds and develop new ways of doing things that are a bit more tailored to the concerns that we have and using these tools is a great way for us to help assess our risk understand the environment we're operating in and mitigate that risk as best we can all the while considering that we've got daily life to worry about almost none of us are professional soldiers even in times of adversity we've got day jobs and family life to worry about so we can't dedicate our entire lives to digging down to the very bottom of a manual sometimes but this is a good way to get started in the right direction and a great way to help us all fight in the shade