Portable TOC in a Box

you know there is no way I'm going to be able to talk about this without this being way too complicated oh well let's give it a shot anyway hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today I thought I would answer a few direct questions we've gotten regarding how to set up a talk in a box what is the most condensed way that you can put a bunch of radios computers and all the hardware you'd need to actually build a tactical operations center in the most compact way possible now right up front I want to say there's no perfect way to do this this is just what I'm using for now and the usual disclaimers of this is probably not going to work for everybody but cutting right to the chase this is what I've kind of settled on for now and it works really really well for what I need to do now I will say right up front that this is not for the faint of heart this is really hard to explain and I'm not really great at explaining it so the best way that I found to actually describe this is to take a trip with Dante down to the seventh level of PowerPoint that's right if you spend enough time with PowerPoint you live long enough to see yourself becoming the enemy but anyway this graphic outlines the basic architecture of how I have things set up now right up here at the top uh the main meat and potatoes of this system is a mini wifi router yeah I know this is going to bug a lot of people when it comes to emissions control and things like that but just bear with me for a moment first and foremost everything that you see here can be done with cables I just prefer the mini Wi-Fi router for a couple of different reasons mostly because it makes everything a lot EAS easier to use the problem with a lot of this uh radio stuff and writing reports and working in kind of like an office environment out in the field if necessary one of the problems with this is death by cable right I don't want 15,000 cables running around the place potentially offering up more vectors with that moisture and dirt can get in it is really really frustrating so I've kind of gone to centering everything around a little mini low power Wi-Fi router and this means I can have three main connections to this router I can have a Raspberry Pi connected to the router either wirelessly or through a small jumper cable which is what I'm using and I can also connect my computer wirelessly to it so that it's you know because it's a Wi-Fi hotspot I can also connect multiple computers to this so now you start to see how the staff functions come out I can tell everybody to just bring their laptop or bring a tablet with them and they can connect to this Wi-Fi access point and have access to a share drive right we can also bring along a portable printer and map uh a portable printer to the share drive as well so that everyone on the network can be out in the middle of the woods or in a situation where they're not using the internet and they can still print documents right so we're building a functional office right but without the cubicles and usually in the middle of the woods or something like that or in somebody's backyard it doesn't always have to be completely off grid but really the most important part of this whole Arrangement is the HF radio now I know I sound like I'm probably selling ing the Icom IC 705 quite a bit I'm I'm not I have no uh basis to recommend this other than my own experiences and for one specific feature the IC 705 allows you to connect this radio to a wireless access point it can also serve as a wireless access point itself so you can connect and it will emit a Wi-Fi hotspot signal that you can connect to with your phone or your uh tablet or computer or whatever and you can just have a direct uh connection that way that wireless function is really the the selling point for for kind of the the ecosystem I've built here and that is because you can connect the IC 705 to the wireless router and that way you can run a bunch of different software without having to change Wi-Fi access points now I tried this initially by using the standard uh Wireless feature to create an access point on the 705 you can go into the settings and turn it on and then connect to to the IC 705 like it's a Wi-Fi access point you know very easy you define the password and all that kind of stuff uh there's many tutorials showing how to do that however when you do that you eliminate the ability for that tablet or computer to connect to anything else it's got to stay connected to that one Wi-Fi access point now you can use multiple uh Wi-Fi cards if you want but really one Wi-Fi access point means one connection on your laptop for the most part this is limiting uh because you're not able to connect to say a Wi-Fi printer or a server like the Wi-Fi router so by setting things up on the IC 705 as a server now I have one master connection to make the mini Wi-Fi router now I can run my HF radio I can talk to my Raspberry Pi I can share files between other computers I can plug in a hard drive to the mini Wi-Fi router and now I've got an organic local share Drive uh to share files with as many computers as can connect to the Wi-Fi router so potentially uh many right so this is kind of the architecture for how I have things running I know this sounds pretty complicated but you guys asked for it so here it is this is how I have things kind of set up and I'll show you uh the the physical arrangement here in a moment so that's kind of the basic outline for what I've got so far again I don't want to make this super boring or super complicated but it kind of is so I'm sorry if it's a little overwhelming now I'm sure a few of you might look at this and say this is a little bit excessive this is is probably not needed and I'm sure the screaming question that is being asked right now is why even bother with a Raspberry Pi can't you just do everything from the laptop or the tablet and the answer is yes you can but I prefer to not do that because I like to run multiple uh software packages at the same time and I have found that based on the unfortunately Windows offerings uh it tends to bog down the laptop and if I'm using a tablet I really have very limited uh USB ports to plug things in this is why I've offloaded most of this to the Raspberry Pi so you'll see this uh in just a moment when I explain what is plugged in where uh but for the most part I've got my aircraft tracking my adsb stuff running on the P so I've got dump 1090 and a few other programs as well like SDR Angel if you prefer that uh running on the P instead of running on the laptop this saves me a lot of you know CPU power that I can use for other things like running my HF radio so I'm running a lot of the heavy lifting stuff on the pie I know that's less than ideal pies have far less capabilities Than People kind of make them out to be and it's probably not the best idea to run the pie very intently like this but it's working for me right now so that's kind of what I'm using if you so choose you can also run a tack server on that pie as well again more options if you so choose to do that I don't really use that so much but it's there if you want the option now when it comes to the tablet or computer itself uh really we're using this in a couple of different ways we're using this as the control head for the IC 705 but we're also using it to control the Raspberry Pi as well and since I have dump 1090 running on the Raspberry Pi which is connected to the Wi-Fi router all I have to do is open up plane plotter on this Windows PC and that way I'm just viewing the data that the uh Raspberry Pi is pumping out to the server for some of you out there who have gotten really down into the weeds of this stuff and you you've set up a plane plotter kind of arrangement you might find that running dump 1090 and plane plotter and a SDR scanning utility or something like that all at once on one computer kind of kind of bogs you down a little bit um depending on the specs of your your computer right I know for sure without a shadow of a doubt if I were to use a Panasonic tough book or something like that I cannot by any means run plane plotter and my IC 705 uh software my remote control utility at the same time I just can't do it it's it's just too much demand for for that you know underwhelming CPU so by doing things this way on the laptop I can have my 705 running I can have plane plotter running which is just viewing the the raw data coming uh over the the server there and I can also uh run something like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint if I'm trying to do AEF in or something like that I can do all of this on the same device this is super groundbreaking and it may seem to be really ridiculous to even talk about it but you know this really does help quite a bit and jumping back to the Raspberry Pi because there are multiple USB ports I can have multiple sdrs plugged in using multiple utilities to control that so I can scan a bunch of different things I can do acars uh I can do uh HF data link kind of stuff I can do all kinds of cool things if I need to using the raspberry pi and feeding that data over that Wi-Fi router to the main laptop which is doing other stuff one of the main goals for this is to have as much automation as possible and to make it as easy as possible for me to run this basically by myself another major uh consideration for me personally is the ability to bring other people in so uh if somebody shows up with their laptop I can put them to work by connecting them to the share Drive connecting them to the printer connecting them to all this stuff uh and they can start helping me out doing different things if they've got plan plotter all they've got to do is double tap that uh icon on their screen and they're in it's all automatic so enough PowerPoint for now uh you can kind of look at this and see how I've got things arranged a little bit better if you want but let's jump right to the desktop and let me show you how a lot of this stuff comes together I thought today we would just talk about the hardware and some of the logic that I have kind of arrived at regarding how to set up a portable operations center now if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say a tactical Operation Center or a talk it would be really good for you to check out our original video on the topic called the Tactical operations center this kind of highlights how military talks work along with the reasoning behind why you might want to use one or why you might need some of the gear contained uh in this box here this is not going to be for everyone but for those of you who are kind of nerdy and like to talk about the real intricate details of how a lot of this technology is set up this is going to be for you so again not really for beginners uh but this is something that is very much neglected in the sort of tactical Community these days so I thought I would uh show some of the things that work or in this case don't work for me and that's what we're going to be starting with we're going to be starting with something that I would considered to be the very bare minimum because this particular setup does not work for me me the reason it doesn't work for me is because it's too small uh I was trying to go for a few somewhat arbitrary criteria I wanted to have a One-Stop shop onebox talk a whole communication Suite A whole briefing Suite A whole information and intelligence processing center that is contained within one single case turns out this isn't the option because th this case still needs the laptop itself and it also needs a solar panel to go along with it so not everything fits in this box which is why I'm going to be upgrading larger box here in just a moment for now I wanted to show you this just in case you might find some use in it speaking of those uh criteria that I wanted I wanted a a box that could serve again as a One-Stop shop for everything but I also wanted it to be light enough to be carried by one person in one hand that's kind of the criteria that I wanted it would be nice if it also fit inside a ruck sack which is why I went with this uh Vault 200 size from Pelican because this does fit in most Ruck sacks it's not going to fit in many assault packs but if you're using you're you're really not going to be using a a talk in a tactical environment remember we have three levels of warfare strategic operational and tactical the concept of the talk for the prepared citizen is really going to be along the lines of operation you're not going to be kicking doors with this thing on your back likewise you're also not going to be working out of mahogany lined conference rooms either with you know suits and ties walking around this is not going to work for those environments either this is going to be somewhere in the middle where you're going to be feeding the door kickers information and generally being aware of your immediate area while not exactly being in Mortal danger yourself so again fitting inside an assault pack is not really a need uh but it it would be nice if you could take this put it in a ruck sack and then Ruck in 3 or four miles to some place or even longer uh if you've got more time so that you can establish a a an operation Center really anywhere you want with this uh I still need to keep my laptop solution outside of the case which is not ideal again which is why I'm upgrading now starting with the laptop itself what I'm going with for this particular setup is a Microsoft Surface Pro I went on eBay and got the best most recent uh Surface tablet that I could afford and in this case it is the Surface Pro 5 which is uh ancient in terms of uh this particular like ecosystem but it works well enough for me and I was able to get a good uh keyboard here with it as well so that worked out for me now for this one of the main concerns for any laptop system is battery life and we will get to that in a moment Surface tablets have never been really well known for their battery life so this is a concern you guys also know that I'm also a very big fan of Panasonic tablets because they can be charged in the field via a 12vt solar panel so that works out pretty well the problem is that it takes a long time my Panasonic tablet's battery life is double if not sometimes triple what this is and this is not as rugged and this is bigger however this charges a lot easier from a standard or rather kind of like the new thing that everybody's going with which is a PD uh power bank so a power bank that is capable of power delivery so uh we'll talk about that here in just a moment but I wanted to show that you kind of have to keep the charging cable which is a smaller smaller apparatus than a whole 12vt cigarette lighter adapter uh you've got to keep that separately with this kind of setup so that's kind of the Computing solution that I've got for now you can really go with what whatever you want but there are some reasons that I wanted to go with something like this because this talk is Wireless so let's go ahead and open it up here and I'll show you what I mean now opening up the talk here if you want to call it that really this looks an awful lot like just a simple ham radio gokit and that's basically what it is with a few modifications right if we remember are six main functions of a talk most of the reasons why you might want to have an operation Center uh involve Communications uh Communications is really the heart and soul of any Operation Center no matter what you're doing if it's combat stuff or it's or if it's humanitarian stuff you're going to need Communications which is why a core part of this is the ham radio setup now I've gone with kind of the Gucci solution which is the IC 705 not simply because it's like the Cadillac of qrp or low power radios these days but because of one specific function which we'll get to in just a moment when we talk about what's in the lid here for now let's talk about what we've got kind of sitting here on the top which is a bundle of coax and uh this is a lot more coax than I'm normally comfortable with carrying I don't like to carry so much coax because of course there's line loss and all that kind of stuff but you really do need an awful lot of coax if you're going to be going with an antenna system that is like uh the chameleon lefts or lightweight infed sloper now I'm not sure if this is the most recent iteration of this I think they may have upgraded this I'm not quite sure but uh this I like a lot because again it is a simple infed antenna it covers all the bands that I need it to cover it's compact it's lightweight but most importantly you can see here that I've made a little bit of a modification to it is that I was able to put this inside a dry bag and have the opening right here uh be the only opening here where the wire comes out so the coax cable which is waterproof itself except for the end connectors right um these ones I have on here are not waterproof but one end of the cable is going to be plugged into my radio here inside this water type box or inside a tent and the other end of the cable is going to be going inside the dry bag this is so that I can use this antenna system in the rain uh even in pretty substantial rain the way that you can have it uh arranged in a sloper configuration means that all of the con ctors here are are protected from the rain now there's some argument as to whether or not you should be using your radio in the rain uh certainly not within a thunderstorm if you think lightning might be a concern for you but um really there's been a lot of debate on that now the reason that I wanted to mention this specifically uh is because this is one of the only antenna systems that I found that allows me to do this uh because I am rarely operating from the field in good weather I'm almost always is going to be doing this stuff in bad weather or I'm not going to be operating from the field I'm going to be operating from a structure or something that uh I can have a pre-established antenna and I'm not going to need to use this so This setup is for when I'm out completely off the grid in a new location and I need to set up an antenna in the rain and keep the connectors dry and uh keep water from seeping in this is the only system that I found that will do it you could do this with any infed system but this one I like a lot a lot because it uh works really really well for me and um I really like that the wire is exceptionally durable so again you can use anyone you want chameleon is a very well-known very uh well established company that have been around doing antennas for a long time kind of some of the more pricey options out there but hey you know it's up to you again when it comes to antenna options like I briefly mentioned the main idea here is to have a whole comms kit that's ready to go so I've got my throw line here I've got a throw bag so so I don't have to worry about any structure I don't have to bring anything else I can just uh use whatever trees or structures are around to imp place the antenna however just being perfectly honest a lot of the time I'm going to be using pre-established antennas so I can go and go onto eBay and get a lot of 40 m antennas 20 meter antennas dipoles whatever uh waterproof them in such a way that they'll be able to withstand the weather year round place them up in places where I know I'm going to be operating and just leave the coax there right waterproof it as best I can that way all I have to do is go to my listening post or or my little uh quasi like safe Zone I guess you want to call it that your bug outside whatever and just plug this box open this box and plug in the antenna right into the radio you don't have to put up your your portable antenna you can just use one that's already there if you have a home based antenna uh I tend to not operate from my home so much uh but if you do a lot of lot of ham guys have permanent antennas put up at their house this would be a good solution for that because you can just use one of these little extensions uh to to plug right into the side of the radio there so you don't have to worry about putting up an antenna every single time but again if you're using an infed antenna that's in a sloper configuration you're going to need more coax because the end the feed Point uh for the antenna is up in the tree so you you need to have uh enough coax to reach your radio all the way on the ground if you were doing something like an inverted V you could get away with shorter uh coax you wouldn't need as much but for whatever reason in my area a sloper configuration for this specific antenna works infinitely better than an inverted V but anyway that's just personal preference and it's really going to vary depending on where you are at we can also see I have my uh antenna analyzer here now this isn't exactly needed 100% of the time I just like to keep it in here because one it's a very expensive piece of gear this is a pretty costly investment this particular one here so I like to keep it in the place where I know it's going to stay safe from you know getting banged around uh but also because it's occasionally nice to be able to hook the left's antenna up and check check your s SWR just to make sure that everything's functioning uh well it's good to troubleshoot if you're having some some problems uh with your radio good a good way to do that is just to get an antenna analyzer and uh double check and make sure that it's not the antenna uh that's causing you problems but again not necessarily needed and there are much much cheaper options out there for an antenna analyzers now like I mentioned before uh one of the main problems that that every talk in the world has is electricity power consumption is off the charts for talks usually now in the military uh you've got to worry about generators and stuff like that to run your talk but but for us here and considering that I'm trying to stay a little bit more lightweight uh in terms of you know consumption I can't exactly carry a generator on my back everywhere I need to go uh Power banks are the way forward now as many of you know I prefer to build my own batteries in pelican cases and stuff like that because I can I usually in the past uh I could have done it for cheaper nowadays not so uh the lithium Market especially for lithium batteries is insane right now and it is literally cheaper per kilowatt to just purchase a bunch of power Banks uh on Amazon or wherever and use it like this if I were to take every single battery out of here and uh and and uh try to buy them separately it would cost like twice what this cost on Amazon and you can frequently find these on sale uh during the holidays or during some kind of sale event whatever so power banks that are capable of power delivery PD are what you really want uh because that allows you to get that high power uh output to a device like a laptop or something like that a lot of the newer laptops out there on the market are using either USBC to charge or they're using some kind of proprietary connector like uh the Surface Pro does but as long as your power bank has PD um and it has a decently High wattage rating um you're you're good to go to charge pretty much anything uh this is why I like this setup because I can take something like this power bank here which is a 6 5 watt power bank that is the same as charging from a wall outlet for this uh this energy Cube here charges a lot slower but it will charge uh enough to where these my solar cycle so my my hours of daylight can actually recharge this with an appropriately sized solar panel uh and I can keep this going indefinitely one of the big problems you run into with power Banks and batteries in general is you're almost always going to be running into a a battery energy deficit meaning your laptop will discharge maybe you'll use 80% of it during your workday and you so you're down to 20% battery but you let it charge all during the daytime when you're asleep or if you're on an off cycle or something like that and if even if you have 12 hours of daylight a lot of times that's not going to be enough time to fully fully charge your device and since you're not being able to fully charge your device with a solar panel each day each day that goes by your your power level is going down so you might find that if you're lucky after a week of going only solar all of your devices are dead and they're all competing for that same solar panel you want to avoid that if possible so striking a balance between the right power consumption the right power storage and the right power generation via a solar panel is very very important and I think I'm getting really close to cracking the code on that because this is a really decently sized battery 70,000 m mamps and I'm able to charge this uh not it takes more than one day to charge this fully but I don't use uh very much of it running this talk uh speaking of total battery life here uh if we're talking we are running the HF radio and some of the other gadgets we've got in here I can run all of this for a minimum of 24 hours if I were to switch over and use the alternate battery for the IC 705 just click in a new battery that's a lot more uh battery life as well especially if we're doing something like digital modes uh or if we're doing something like js8 call only um that's a really good way to save a lot of power I rarely use my IC 705 for voice uh SSB voice I just I'm just not that kind of operator and I don't find a whole lot of utility in doing that so I tend to not do that too much so speaking of the other Gadgets in here that make this just not just another ham radio gokit let's take a look at what's inside the lid here so moving up we can see that I've got the foam here which is hiding a lot of stuff so I just keep this foam in here again this kind of shows us to why this solution isn't great because I would really like to not have to use this if I take this foam out and uh go with no padding or anything here I can take and put this uh Surface tablet in here and that'll work but I really prefer to have some a little bit more stability here just so that this case uh doesn't get banged around too much and a lot of these uh connectors don't come loose so again I I thought I could get away with much less uh I thought I could get away with just this but it turns out I need a lot more but let me show you what I've got going on here right now so despite the fact that this is a raspberry pie here one of the absolute core of the system to make the entire thing work the way that I intend for it to work is this right here this is a mini Wi-Fi router this allows the Raspberry Pi my ham radio here and a few other toys to connect wirelessly to my laptop so I have Z this is exactly what it looks like when I'm using it I have nothing plugged in to my uh to any of the ports on this on this device this uh laptop here is connected via Wi-Fi to this and this is uh connected to everything else so let me show you how that works running from the Wi-Fi router I have a simple uh short little pigtail ethernet cable to the Raspberry Pi now the Raspberry Pi has got a lot of stuff going on uh on it so we we'll talk about the software uh at some point but for right now it's running pretty much all of my Sig stuff that's what is running on that uh you can do a lot of Sig stuff on your laptop so you probably don't necessarily technically need a Raspberry Pi I know nowadays raspberry pies are uh getting hard to find uh they're kind of expensive uh for what you get you can get a a a cheap beater laptop for a lot cheaper than Raspberry Pi um but it's what I had I had this before the whole uh crisis with the you know chip shortage and all that kind of stuff so this is what I I use um I think it's an underwhelming experience if you're trying to run some pretty heavy lifting stuff but I'm able to run adsb on it and that's really the main thing that I care about and some scanning stuff as well uh I'm able to run multiple sdrs or software defined radios at the same time and that CPU power is burning through this little guy here instead of bogging down my main computer I use something like real VNC viewer uh to virtually uh control this to to kind of uh remotely connect to this Raspberry Pi again the main heavy lifting of all the signant stuff is done here with this little guy for now now speaking of the cables running in and out of it let's talk about what we've got here we've got our radar box adsb flight stick this is the SDR that I would very strongly recommend if you're just concerned about adsb this is not a general purpose software defined radio so if you're trying to track aircraft this is probably this is a good one to go with uh but it won't do much else it just does uh 1090 MHz and that's that's about it but I like it because it's small it allows me to still use that other USB port right here and I can and uh hook in the antenna over here so right here is the adsb X boost antenna this is an overpriced antenna I think I think when I bought it it was like 50 bucks uh so I think that's a little bit more than what most people want to spend on their uh adsb setup but despite its small size and despite me being very skeptical this is the best adsb antenna I've uh I've ever used so uh that's why I I tend to use that one uh the same one that I keep in my little portable chest rig setup and uh it fits really nicely here it's also one of the shorter ones that you can use not one of those little cheap ones that you get from Amazon when you get uh when you get your stdr this is a dedicated one that works very well for tracking aircraft I also have uh my uh unit in scanner here just a general purpose police scanner with a with a small extension So the antenna will fit connected now I haven't done it yet but I have very ambiti plans in the future to run this the output for this scanner into the Raspberry Pi so that I can do some uh uh squirly software stuff with regards to automatically receiving signals and generating text reports from what it hears on the radio so that's coming uh down the line uh but it's uh something that's very developmental right now the other USB port uh coming out of the Raspberry Pi is just simply a USBC cable to power uh the mesh tastic device we have here now this is the the new hotness when it comes to mesh tastic this is the lyo T Echo uh this is a whole new mesh tastic board it's a whole different system for using mesh tastic and it is much much better than what's uh been used in the past so battery life on this is a minimum of 24 hours uh with moderate use with heavy use it may be a little bit less than 24 hours with something like AAC it's definitely going to be less than 24 hours because AAC sends a lot of traffic uh but for now I have it plugged in so that when I plug all of this stuff into the battery here this begins charging so it's it's always kind of uh charging just through the simple USB port there so given kind of a generic rundown let me show you how all of this kind of comes together uh really the only thing that I need to do is you know get open the box pull this piece of foam out set it aside and plug in two USB cables one us be is the power for the Raspberry Pi so I plug that in the other one is the power for the router uh and I plug that in as well doesn't really matter where they both are are are able to pull their appropriate amount of power and all I got to do then is turn my radio on here my radio will connect the Wi-Fi access point there and I'm good now I can grab my laptop and go a decent distance away uh and control everything I can run from this one laptop I can run plain plotter with js8 call uh with some Sig tools running as well and it sounds underwhelming it doesn't sound impressive at all but anybody who's tried to mess around with this stuff knows how difficult it is to get multiple sdrs to work while running really weird and ancient HF radio software as well uh that's hard to do or at least it's easy to do in theory but if you're trying to do it regularly simply and wirelessly it's uh it's not so it's not super great so uh you can if you don't want to use the router and if you don't want to use the Raspberry Pi you can just connect the IC 705 to your tablet or computer wirelessly as a Wi-Fi access point that's easy to do and you could just do that but I like having this set up to connect to the Wi-Fi router so that I can run all this other stuff as well uh and then I'm I'm free to do a lot more heavy heavy lifting stuff on this computer as well I can process uh information reports I can sit here and type the wire uh for the day I can make PowerPoints while all of this is running in the background we don't have to uh sacrifice a whole a whole lot when we offload a lot of the CPU power to something like a Raspberry Pi so this is kind of the logic that I'm that I'm working with for now I want to I didn't want to lean on a Raspberry Pi I did didn't uh because I just think that again they're they're kind of underwhelming when it comes to how expensive they are now I think that it's been hard for the Raspberry Pi to get out of the developmental world and into like real world use um but you know this does work it works quite well um and if I wanted to I could run something like I'm not running it for this example but I could run something easily like pyac or some kind of AAC instance running on a server that I can control with this again wirelessly so that's the whole point here is again you know using something that is a a wireless technology using a Wi-Fi access point for communications and things like that is definitely an mcon concern Emissions Control right if there is a signal being emitted by something that means that an adversary can potentially receive it and if they can receive it they can potentially exploit it so I get it it's uh you always want to kind of reduce your your El electomagnetic signature especially if there's going to be some kind of you know aerial asset trying to hunt you down um but in terms of making steps in the right direction I think this is pretty good uh you could of course uh remove a lot of the wireless capabilities and just run cables everywhere but I'm trying to use these tools daily I'm trying to use them in the long term this is not just a hobby for me this is everyday life I'm trying to really get used to and and work out a lot of The Kinks when it comes to using these tools in a daily non hobby Manner and uh I think this allows us to do it because as we've all found out if it's not convenient you don't want to do it and if you don't want to do it you're not going to do it in the long term so uh this is really easy for me to just grab this out of my bag you know open it up type away whatever I want to and all I got to do is plug in a couple of things now when it comes to uh the case itself like I men mention this is too small for me because there's a few there are a few other things that I need to add to this that are not part of the sort of communications infrastructure there's some other uh talk things that you need to kind of um be actually functional uh in terms of being an operation Center and not just a radio gokit so so let me reorganize this a bit and I will show you what my newest solution is all right everybody this is what I'm currently using right now so as you can see I have upgraded inside to the Pelican Vault 525 now the Vault series by Pelican is again their kind of budget option for hard uh cases that are allegedly waterproof not as good of quality in my opinion as their main line uh but this one is just slightly larger uh in terms of of height or or depth I tried this setup with the Pelican 1535 air and also the Pelican 1510 which are both kind of comparable in size to this and the the Pelican Vault was actually just a little just a little bit better fit uh and I'll show you why here just a moment so opening up the case uh we find basically the same kind of arrangement I've got the IC 705 here uh underneath that spare fabric here is all of my antenna Arrangement uh antenna analyzer all this stuff spare documentation as well I've got spare notebooks uh message book for uh taking messages that come in over uh the HF radio but by and large the biggest change is going to be the battery just briefly shifting upward uh to take a look at the lid we can also see it's basically unchanged from the uh previous version except I've got a lot more space over here on the right hand side now right here right now I've got just a basic uh velcro pouch uh they can hold cables and spare uh little bits and Bobs like that uh this can be removed to make room for other things so uh I I have tested here an amplifier for the IC 705 and it does work uh it's not the best arrangement with cables but it does work unfortunately I recently fried my amplifier uh working on some stuff that was my own fault so I've got to get a new amp uh to put up here to get a little bit more power out of the IC 705 but other than that it's pretty much the same the biggest differences are power so before we take a look back at the battery solution that I've going with uh briefly wanted to mention solar options finding a solar panel that will fit inside this uh case is challenging especially with all the stuff here in the lid now if I were to remove some of this stuff if I didn't need uh some of these sensors or or stuff like that I could um I could make room for a solar panel but finding a solar panel that works is pretty challenging so um one of the things I did find here is this uh big blue 28 w solar charger will fit inside the lid here if I take this pouch out it will fit inside the LD here just perfectly and that will be a good option the problem is is that this is only for charging USB devices uh which I'll talk about here in just a moment otherwise I can use a much larger uh solar panel this is I think a 60 wat panel or something like that just a generic uh you know Chinese one from from Amazon kind of deal and that fits right here on top of everything if I can tilt down just a little bit so we can see this uh this is kind of the arrangement this will fit all together just fine uh but I don't tend to like doing this so I I've kind of uh come full circle with with my expectation of management I guess uh because I'm not really able to fit as many things in this case as I even even thought so so coming back to the laptop solution laptop fits in there just fine this uh the padding for this pads this uh if I wanted to take the laptop out and just use nothing that will work uh same thing with sop binder so if I were to have an sop binder with a large uh a large format version of our uh ghostnet plan I can do that put that right here um right on top and it it fits just fine as far as power options goes I did not mind using the small USB or rather large uh USB power Banks uh to power the IC 705 to charge the internal battery on this and just kind of be okay with only using five Watts most ham radio guys are used to buying or making their own batteries uh their own little 12vt batteries and solar charge controllers and all that uh to power these at their maximum output right of of 10 watts however I have been trying using a different solution and it's worked out quite well um and this solution is these uh ecoflow uh River series of portable power stations I guess is what they're called sometimes you'll see them being uh referred to as solar generators or something like that now this is an interesting solution and I I think I know why it hasn't been used by the ham radio guys one is cost they're very expensive and it used to be vastly cheaper to make your own batteries than it did to to buy one of these uh that's not the case anymore but as far as I can tell but uh one of the main reasons why this kind of system has not been used to power Ham radios is because of interference potential I don't have a good way to test whether or not uh solar generators like this produce a lot of interference for ham radio use but uh through my own real world testing it seems to not be that much of a factor really the setup that I have gone with for this is to use a uh 12volt cigarette lighter adapter that is capable of pushing with this particular one pushes 30 watts and also 100 WS of power via USBC so I can plug this in right here to this device and run a USB uh to DC input uh these are you these you can find these all over Amazon uh for powering drones and stuff like that uh some some kinds of uh LiPO batteries can be charged with a cable like this and I just plug it right in turn on the uh port and we're good to go now that IC 705 will be charging and it will also be able to pull enough power to run at full 10 watts from this device and it's it's perfectly clean as far as I can tell my range is the same uh with my homemade batteries uh as opposed to using something like this I can't vouch for it though so all I have is my anecdotal experience so of course your experiences may vary but using something like this I can easily plug it in here in the box and then take my two USB leads one for the Raspberry Pi and another for the Wi-Fi router plug them right in and I'm good to go I've just plugged in three things and I've got a functional running top that is completely uh automated so this is an option now of course there are downsides uh this particular solar generator I specifically purchased uh on sale uh because it came out with a new model um with the intent of making it fit inside the box here so if I put it back in there you can see oh man this fits perfectly in there now obviously you've got to kind of kick it out like this if you're in a hot environment so this cooling fan can have uh space to run uh circulate air but this seems like a perfect solution doesn't it well doesn't really work for me uh this is not something that I would like to use in the long term because the charging options for this are very limited again this is the ecoflow river mini this is the non wireless charging version I got it on sale uh during the holidays for half price which is why I got this I would never buy one of these at full price there's plenty of sales every couple of months and you can get one of these uh for very very cheap one of the reasons why I don't like this is because the charging options are limited you can't just charge this with any solar panel you have to use a uh solar panel that is capable of putting out power through an xt6 connector so if you think you can use this charger here with this you can't because this only puts out 5 volts through USB uh usba connectors and it's just not enough to to charge with this so if you are so inclined uh the reason you might want to use something like this is because it's compact it fits nice in the box there it allows us to have a lot more space and we can take advantage of some stuff uh storage space in in the lid it is an option I'm not going to say I don't use it because uh just for my own kind of benchmarks using this battery powering all of this stuff I can run this talk for 72 hours without question um if I'm wanting to charge my laptop maybe a little bit less than that but uh no problem getting several days of of use uh out of this now again if I'm going into a situation where I'm not going to have the ability to charge this via the AC plug or I'm not going to have the ability to bring along uh a larger solar panel uh what I will do is upgrade to the river 2 Series uh now this is a very much an upgrade uh it does fit in here if I were to remove some stuff like these spare phones uh I can just barely fit it in here uh you can't run anything with it plugged in um so if you're trying to plug stuff into something like this and then close the box so that it remains waterproof uh you can't really do that you have to kind of wrangle it in in a different way but this is a much better much much better uh tool here because you can charge this via USBC so I can bring along this uh River to and I can bring along this solar panel and charge it uh with this panel which is a lot smaller uh is going to take a long time uh to charge via USBC but it is it is doable and I have the same cigarette lighter adapter here now when it comes to interference I can say that I have noticed a lot of interference from this Center USB connector I have two of these River twos this one is really noisy through the USBC uh right here so if I wanted to plug uh let's see here if I wanted to plug in this USB connector right to here just like like that uh it's really noisy and uh I get a lot of interference on the radio running it like that on the other one I've got it's no problem uh so I don't know if I've got like maybe an older unit or defective or something like that but um I just use one of these uh Chinese grade Amazon quality uh 12vt adapters right into the 30 watt you don't even need the 100 watt and right into the 12volt adapter you would expect these to be very noisy but I've tried three different ones and uh they're not bad so the ones made for uh Power delivery PD are probably a little bit higher quality than your standard um uh low grade uh ones like this so anyway uh that's kind of the power solution I'm going with this will power this whole s situation for a week no problem uh there's really not going to be a situation maybe I don't know maybe in an extreme situation where I'm trying to set up a talk in like the winter where I've only got maybe four or five hours of sunlight a day during a week where it's expected to be rainy and I'm not going to have the ability to charge this um but again we're getting kind of into the really contingent situations right so for the most part this works for me quite well uh going with these solar power power Banks is kind of an expensive option or at least it used to be uh I was able to get this for for less than 200 bucks whereas if I were to buy the lithium battery that are inside this um by themselves man it it cost me more than that just uh in Parts alone so we're in this kind of weird economic situation where it's cheaper literally to buy the solar batteries pre-made than it is to actually make them yourself in the past it wasn't always that way I remember uh a lot of us cracking open uh modem batteries to get the uh 18650 cells out of the inside and making our own batteries to run our HF radios from that way uh but now you know that's still an option I guess but it's really expensive so it's cheaper just to go with something that's not designed for that uh even if you uh potentially have uh noise issues um I've been really lucky so far so maybe maybe the quality on these is coming up um and one of the main reasons why I would prefer the river 2 over this uh is because of app so there is a way to connect this uh the river 2 via Bluetooth to a smartphone and you can manage your power that way um you can do this via the river uh the river mini with Wi-Fi but it doesn't work super well uh and it I just don't really like the idea of connecting your you know battery to the internet like why would you ever want to do that Bluetooth is a good idea though uh I don't know why ecoflow has the a Wi-Fi option like I'm really struggling to think of a case where I'm going to be halfway around the world and need my battery box to be connected to the internet that makes no sense to me maybe in a very very remote use case but Bluetooth is a good idea because I can set this outside uh being Char I can take this out of the box I can set this outside along with the solar panel and get a pretty good reading on how long it's going to take to charge uh and all kinds of data like that so again from an emissions control perspective it's a nightmare when even your battery is emitting some kind of signal um so again I wouldn't probably use this in every situation but again if I'm in a tactical situation where I'm worried about getting you know struck with a Hellfire or something like that this Arrangement is probably not going to be used super much but anything less than that uh certainly for ordinary benign Community you know response for you know disaster preparedness and stuff like that hey this is this is a good option but again it's not an option for for everyone but it's worked out pretty well for me I've got a lot of capabilities in this box here you're not going to be carrying this on your back very far uh you can I guess you could strap it to an ALICE frame or something like that and and go a pretty long distance um I've tried that with a couple of uh the Everly stock packs I've got and it works out really well uh I just I just don't know if if that's a something that most people are going to be doing uh I can't really think of a scenario where uh you might be carrying this uh on your back for miles and miles and miles just probably short distances or working out of your car there are uh good reasons why you might want to go with the smaller option that I mentioned earlier uh and that is if you are planning to carry a tolik function out into the absolute middle of nowhere and you need a way to keep your your radios uh and your sensitive Electronics dry and protected that might be a better option than bringing this uh big honking Arrangement here but in terms of day-to-day use using this as a workspace this works out very well for me and you can use the smaller box uh if you end up uh upgrading to the larger box you can use smaller uh boxes to hold things like your printer extra batteries solar panels stuff like that again kind of goes against my philosophy of having a one One Stop Shop grab and go box but you know this is what has actually worked out in real life for me so hopefully this has been helpful uh I know this is probably not something that is going to appeal to to most people but uh again you guys asked for uh what a talk in a box might look like and here's what I'm working with for now thank you all for watching hopefully this has been helpful and we will see you next time and as always F in the shade