It is real, and in some areas it is awesome. Willamette Valley Mesh is quite active. Meshtastic is cool, but I feel like my comms have to be at 1.4kb/s or lower and may not ever get a message to a recipient. I can do teams meetings on my local mesh (inter homes on the same street), but not if SHTF due to Microsoft not being available or blocked.
It is not quite there yet, and likely will not be due to oligarchies and governments. Starlink is cool and all, but screw Musk.
You make me laugh, get a donut. My point is business comms would shut down. The comms I have between two "family" homes on the same street can handle teams meetings on a local mesh, likely I would not be able to get out of my county on meshtastic. If Microsoft is unavailable in any circumstances, Teams is shut down from our perspective.
Point being, meshtastic sucks for bandwidth unless local, but that doesn't matter if you want Teams-level quality WSHTF for long distance comms. I am a Han with global contacts.
Last I heard about mesh it was literally just pushing texts between points unless I’m thinking of something else or its earliest iteration. I thought the whole point was it is entirely off grid and user to user pushing it along.
There are a lot of different things that use the term "mesh". I am a licensed ham radio operator and use a local meshnet to communicate with my family, neighbors, and the internet, but if the internet goes out in SHTF (root DNS failures), then it falls back to more local nodes like my on the same same street family with a node.
Currently, I can have a video call via Teams (as one example; Zoom or WebEx are other examples), but if SHTF I likely could not have the same video call due to these megacorps requiring all traffic to be routed through their servers. If their servers are unreachable, then my on the same street family would be unreachable via Teams (zoom, WebEx, etc.).
Does that make more sense?
Mesh, Meshnets, and Meshtastic are all different things but similar in the mesh sense.
Ham radio is a test to get a licence but it's not very hard. This is the only long distance coms without outside help. In my state and many others this gives me interop with the PD EOC and hospitals.
Commercial radio bought into my statewide DMR network it includes some off network channels as well. Encrypted with my own keys.
Either one gets me a simple arrow pointing at the other person and a range if GPS is working on the radio itself.
Who do you need to communicate with, what critical mission is the communication going to achieve, and how far away are the parties you want to communicate with?
No one in particular. I can walk to my immediate family. Extended blackouts are a possibility, and I was wondering what someone would do if there was no cell, email, easy communication stuff. Sure we are all being watched. I guess I didn’t need to add the screening part
Absolutely I could, but, People often have goals for communications that are hard to meet, and provide little prepper benefit. Without knowing what the goal is, its hard to offer advice.
I want to be able to alert my neighbor 1 mile away, if I need immediate help while the grid is down. Practical need for communication, and lots of ways to accomplish it.
The grid is down I want to talk to my family 3000 miles away to tell them I'm okay. First, they are far too far away to actually help if you weren't okay. It is possible to do, if you both get the right HAM gear and training, and the atmospheric conditions are good. But does trying to set it up really make sense when its not going to help either party survive?
I’m hearing HAM is the way to go. Quite a few steps for that, so I think it can be a family discussion. I only need 1.9 miles to contact family if walking/biking isn’t an option, for weather, stuff like that.
If you're in the US, GMRS is perfect for this use case (assuming no terrain issues). No test except for figuring out how to navigate the FCC's website and pay them, and the license covers your immediate family members. To quote the law:
Any individual who holds an individual license may allow his or her immediate family members to operate his or her GMRS station or stations. Immediate family members are the licensee's spouse, children, grandchildren, stepchildren, parents, grandparents, stepparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and in-laws.
What Winlink does is allow you to send and receive e-mails, even to non-hams, over the radio. It's set up with 3 independent servers distributed around the World that talk to each other, and hundreds if not thousands of radio gateways.
So let's say I am in a disaster area with no electricity, cell service, or any other communication method. I can hook my HF radio up to a deep cycle marine battery I keep charged up to power it, and I have the Winlink software installed on a laptop. The laptop is connected to the radio via a soundcard interface.
So I can compose my e-mail in Winlink Express, and using that software connect to a radio gateway. If we assume a region affected the same as the 2003 Northeastern Blackout, I would pick a gateway outside that area and connect to it. The software would negotiate the connection and if successful send the e-mail to the gateway, which would forward it one of the 3 servers, from whence it would be sent into the regular internet and on to its destination.
Aunt Marylou gets my e-mail, and she can reply to me because she is on my whitelist.
However I won't get her e-mail until the next time I connect to a gateway.
There are limitations. You don't want to sent huge files. Short text only e-mails is the way to go here, because you're doing data over HF, and you may not have the best conditions. Though you probably won't have that high local noise level!
Plus, you can sent a position/status report than anyone can see by going to aprs.fi or any other APRS website. I usually send one once a week, along with getting things like weather reports, solar predictions, and a list of the 30 WL2K users closest to me.
So even if I don't send an e-mail to Aunt Marylou, she can always look and see where I am (well, house don't move) and any status message like "Doing fine." or whatever.
Couple of years ago this month, I contacted a suburb of Melbourne, Australia from here in upstate New York.
While I was driving into work in the morning.
Using Morse code.
Bragging aside, that was probably via long path, based upon the time of day and where the sunlit side of the Earth was, and the band I was using. So around 14,400 miles.
*HOWEVER*, it was a rough contact. We were both fading in and out, and we both had to repeat our information, and we kept it short because of that.
Impressive. I know a bit about radios from my time in a special ops unit in the Air Force. HF seems the way to go for LONG distance and FM for shorter distances. Are these available for civilians?
BTW you’re mixing up frequency bands and modulation types. HF is a frequency band, FM is a type of modulation. FM is usually used on VHF and UHF, but is sometimes also used on upper HF frequencies.
Send a letter to your family 3000 miles away. The post office got letters to soldiers in active combat in other countries and even a civil war didn’t stop the mail. Hurricanes and tornadoes don’t stop the mail even when entire towns are destroyed.
If you want the most secure, unbreakable means of communication?
A one-time pad that you write out two copies by hand, on paper. Keep one for yourself, give one to the other person by hand (don't ship it through the mail, or digitize it / email it, etc.)
Assuming you only use it once to send a single message, it's completely unbreakable by anyone on this planet from now to generations to come.
And you could send the encrypted message over any form of communication - email, SMS, chat apps, etc, and not have to worry about it being broken.
A one-time pad that you write out two copies by hand, on paper.
There is a better way.
You use a manual typewriter (not an electric one), and 2 part carbonless forms. Then you have two perfect copies.
The best way to make up the random keys is to use dice. For numeric pads, you want d10s:
Roll a handful of d10's, type them in as a single group, lather, rinse, repeat. You can build up a good amount of key material faster than you would think once you get into a rhythm.
To use them for plaintext like above (as opposed to code numbers), you construct a straddling checkerboard like up in the upper left hand corner. The key for that is based upon "A sin to err", which contains the most used letters in English, but it could be any phrase that is agreed to.
In that, ASINTOER all get single numbers, and any appearance of 1 or 5 is always followed by a second number. So 6 is T, but U is 52.
So you first encrypt your message using the straddling checkerboard to turn it into numbers, and then you use the one time pad page to encrypt that, using non-carrying addition.
61532
70054
-----
31586
Note that 6 + 7 = 13, but we ignore that, and just write the 3.
When decrypting it would be 3 - 7, which is a negative number, so we mentally add 10 to the 3 making it 13 - 7 which equals 6.
And of course we would have to use an identical straddling checkerboard to turn the plaintext numbers into letters.
You can also do this using alphabet dice, to make alphabetic one time pads, which allows you to skip the straddling checkerboard part and simply use a Vigenere table or simple cipher disk for encryption and decryption.
Very nice! I didn't want to get too in depth, but I never would have thought of using a typewriter. Can you still get carbonless copy paper these days?
Also probably worth mentioning that each one time pad needs as many characters as the message you plan on sending with it, so people may not need to spend as long as they'd think to generate one.
You can still get carbonless paper. You generally have to order it, but you can get carbonless receipt books and the like at stationary/business stores and use that. You can also get carbon paper but that needs to be destroyed after use, along with the typewriter ribbon.
However, very worn fabric ribbons probably don’t need to be destroyed. But for the truly paranoid, you want to do that very thing.
Typewriter is the biggest issue. I have an Olivetti Lettera 32 that’s been in my family for probably 60 years now or more.
Yes, if your typical message is only about 100 characters long, there’s not much point in making your pads much bigger. The occasional longer message can be split into multiple parts if necessary.
In this case you have a number of strips with random alphabets on them, and your key is the order in which they are arranged in the holder. You then spell out your message, in this case "SEND LAWYERS GUNS AND MONEY XX" right above the bottom holder.
You then pick any other line as your cipher text. In this case, we'll use the third line down from the top holder:
CCPEJ NAWVX XHCHU WPCBW XDUSW
Now, this isn't as strong as the one time pad, and there is a known cryptographic attack, but if you make your own strips and enough of them, it's reasonably secure for relatively small amounts of traffic. The advantage is that it's very fast to use, and there are no notes or worksheets to be found later. But you have to keep the strips secret, but that's not much different than keeping one-time pads secret.
You can make the strips random by using Scrabble tiles, pulling them out of the bag. You only use A to Z, one tile each. Mix them good, pull them out, write them down. Each strip needs two copies of the alphabet.
A good start would be something like 50 or 60 strips, only 25 or 30 of which would be used in any one key period.
Another good use for those d10s is to pick which strips to use in what order for any keying period. Roll two d10's, and use that strip or if you role, say, 89 and you only have 60 strips, roll again until you get a number of 60 or under. Keep doing that until you fill up the key space.
You can also mess with the cryptanalysis by using different lengths. Roll the two d10's until you roll a number between 25 and 30 (or whatever) and that's how many strips you'll use for that particular keying period.
But again, this is fast, convenient, but no where near as secure as an OTP system.
You can also do this using alphabet dice, to make alphabetic one time pads, which allows you to skip the straddling checkerboard part and simply use a Vigenere table or simple cipher disk for encryption and decryption.
I think I have some alphabetic pads I made using some software (*BAD* ditty!) so I may be able to do up an example of that if I can dig them out.
If I were doing it for real, I'd use alphabet dice and the typewriter.
I want to emphasize something: You can't use encryption over amateur radio nor over GMRS.
§ 97.113 Prohibited transmissions.
(a) No amateur station shall transmit:
...
(4) Music using a phone emission except as specifically provided elsewhere in this section; communications intended to facilitate a criminal act; messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification.
It would be very difficult to detect hidden meaning, let alone prove it. "Tell Aunt Maryloui that Zack and I are safe!" Harmless message, or secret activation code for Plan Z?
Think total SHTF. Food stores empty,roving gangs looting no law enforcement. Total chaos. That's what I'm worried about. Say I go out to look for food. I want to communicate with my family without someone listening in and knowing where home is.
Doesn't matter. Trust me on this one, I'm a former signals intelligence professional, and a life-long student of the matter ever since I read "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn as a tween back in the late 1970's.
ditty's first dictum: "If you radiate, you can be located. If you can be located, you can be killed."
Even if you encrypt, it's likely that you could be located. And you have to worry not necessarily about law enforcement, but military.
So imagine that SHTF scenario where the police are not around, or are at best looking out for themselves. Military is almost certainly still going to be at least somewhat effective. I can't imagine a scenario where you and your loved ones are still alive, and the military is completely kaput or at least ineffective.
They have incentives to stay with their units that the police don't have. Besides things like unit cohesion and the like, they have actual regulations that keep them there. No police officer to my recollection has ever been executed for desertion, for example. Soldiers have been executed for that. And in a scenario like that, you can be damned sure that execution for desertion will be on the table.
So given that there will be at least some effective military in pretty much any SHTF scenario, how do you think they are going to interpret encrypted radio traffic inside the territory of the United States?
They'll have the equipment to locate you. If you're *LUCKY*, they may be able to break the encryption and decide you're not worth looking at.
But we're talking probably degraded capabilities, especially with the assumption that Fort Meade is now a glass parking lot, or at least at very reduced capacity/capability.
They may not be able to break your encryption, but they will be able to break *YOU*. They may decide you're a Spetznaz or PLA SOF unit, or possibly domestic elements assisting whatever enemy hit us operating inside the US and simply bomb you.
Or they might send seriously operational operators who have operated on operations in an operational fashion to assist you with rapid tactical ballistic trepanning they think you so desperately need.
I just don't see a lot of scenarios where that kind of thing works out for you. Maybe a huge natural disaster, but in that case you're more likely to be decomposin' instead of Motorolin'.
A much better scenario is to not use encryption at all, and absolutely minimize the use of communications technology to when it's absolutely needed. Make plans ahead of time and stick to them, and only use radios when necessary, like "Route 7 is blocked, go with Plan B" or something like that.
BTW, something you might find interesting. "The Radio-Direction Finding Threat". It's from the 1980's, but the basic physics haven't changed, it's just that processing the information has become much faster.
BTW, my second dictum is this: "You don't have to be able to win. You just have to make it too expensive for the other side to win."
That's not the problem. The biggest problem is that any broadcast for any significant amount of time over an any significant distance puts a big, bright target on your back.
Problem #2 is that reliable broadcast over a significant distance is unreliable and requires outside infrastructure and circumstances out of your control.
Are you planning on saying things over the radio like "I am currently at Walmart at 123 Fake St, and will be heading home to 456 Main Street in 7 minutes"?
I'm not sure what scenario you’re planning for. You can communicate without giving explicit details.
If all the available and normal means of communication are comprised
Dude... not only have our communications been compromised for decades, but SS7 means that anyone with minimal competence and enough motivation already listens to cell phone traffic, SMS messages, etc.
what is your plan for communicating without having it screened?
During a disaster, I think They are going to be too busy with other problems to screen your comms.
That one of homesteading's purposes is logistics is irrelevant to the fact that it's a strategic plan (since it's long term), not tactical or operational.
I think you've got it backwards. Homesteading is all about the logistics. As is most of prepping, outside of learning skills and keeping fit.
How much do I need? Where do I put it? How do I get more? When do I get more? What can I substitute if the genuine article is not available?
The strategic plan is subservient to the logistics. You can plan all you want, but if you can't get Bovril, Marmite, and digestive biscuits, well, you're up a fecal rivulet without a manual propulsion device.
I think They are going to be too busy with other problems to screen your comms.
Depends on the type of disaster, and who "They" are.
Using encrypted communications after a massive attack against the United States? Guaranteed you'll be of interest to the military and other elements of the federal government.
Umm, I used to be in the signals intelligence business, and in fact I worked in the same top secret facility in Hawaii that Edward Snowden worked at, albeit while he was still in kindergarten.
I've kept up on developments as much as the open literature allows, and because I've been there and done that, I can read between the lines.
Now imagine you're communicating using encrypted radios. Don't you think the government is going to be very interested in what you are saying?
Doesn't matter that it's not related, either. They don't know that. And even if they can break it in real time or near real time, they may assume you're using innocent sounding language as a code.
I don't see how the Malheur or Wounded Knee incidents fit in with the r/preppers "Statement of Purposes":
Learning and sharing information to aid in emergency preparedness as it relates to both natural and man-made disasters. Discussion for those preparing to weather day-to-day disasters as well as catastrophic events. Insurance for tough times.
Even the Jan 6th riots are sketchily related, since, while Capitol Hill is a neighborhood, the riot was pretty localized.
Doesn't matter that it's not related, either. They don't know that. And even if they can break it in real time or near real time, they may assume you're using innocent sounding language as a code.
I'm pretty sure They know the difference between "on-going riot" and "disaster".
What I'm pointing out is you can still end up with unwanted attention if you do something unusual like using encrypted radio communications near incidents like that.
It's entirely plausible that states could use language models and other AI to process a populations intercepted messages on masse. Bodies running surveillance operations already use cloud computing extensively.
Playfair combined with transposition. It only needs two key words that can be memorized and is still very difficult the break for small amounts of traffic.
This method is outlined in the WWII training syllabus of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).
BTW, I misspelled "FLINTLOCK" up at the top as "FLINTLOCH", but I spelled it correctly for the transposition part.
Not sure why, but it was after work and I also had the distaffbopper talking to me as I was doing the work. I used her red Hello Kitty pen to make things easier to read.
I’m a life-long student of signals intelligence and cryptography (especially manual cryptology as you can see in my posts). History is replete with examples of impromptu codes that used baseball, football, and other American cultural references that were laughably easy for the Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Vietnamese to break.
To be clear, ham radio is not private. I hadn't thought about it until now, but it would be extremely likely that the NSA or some other TLA monitors all ham frequencies as a matter of course.
It's not legal to encrypt, although it's unlikely that anybody would expend the resources to track you down if you did. But who are you going to talk to with your encrypted radio?
I am going to say here, first and foremost, that you should never transmit encrypted stuff over amateur radio, except as allowed in the exceptions in Part 97.
Can you encrypt in a way that isn't noticeable? Almost certainly you can. We can easily come up with several examples of this, actual practical exercises or examples from history. Best practices dictate that the encryption shouldn't look like encryption. Scanning this you wouldn't think it contains any kind of secret information. Little do you know that it actually does. I've actually hidden a message here. Ignoring it because it seems normal would be the normal reaction, with the proviso that I don't admit to there being a hidden message. Figuring out that a message contains a hidden message if it's about common every day activity is a much tougher prospect. After you clear that hurdle which is a significant one, smart as you are, extra work is still required to figure out what specific encryption might have been applied. Again, scrambled letters sent by themselves would be obvious as encryption. Overlaying that encryption in unrelated text can be effective, hiding the information in what is known as a Null Cipher can prevent it from being noticed in the first place. Were you to do this it would be indistinguishable from a random missive. Pity that the examples usually used like the PERSHING SAILS message are very poorly done.
That last paragraph contains a secret message, literally "THIS IS A SECRET MESSAGE". Here is how I did it.
I first encrypted that with a Playfair using the key "COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN":
C O M U N
I A T B R
E K D W F
G H L P Q
S V X Y Z
TH IS IS AS EC RE TM ES SA GE
al ec ec iv gi if mx gc vi ei
Then I inserted those letters as the second letter of every word at the beginning of every sentence or phrase:
Can you encrypt in a way that isn't noticeable? Almost certainly you can. Wecan easily come up with several examples of this, actual practical exercises or examples from history. Best practices dictate that the encryption shouldn't look like encryption. Scanning this you wouldn't think it contains any kind of secret information. Little do you know that it actually does. I've actually hidden a message here. Ignoring it because it seems normal would be the normal reaction, with the proviso that I don't admit to there being a hidden message. Figuring out that a message contains a hidden message if it's about common every day activity is a much tougher prospect. After you clear that hurdle which is a significant one, smart as you are, extra work is still required to figure out what specific encryption might have been applied. Again, scrambled letters sent by themselves would be obvious as encryption. Overlaying that encryption in unrelated text can be effective, hiding the information in what is known as a Null Cipher can prevent it from being noticed in the first place. Were you to do this it would be indistinguishable from a random missive. Pity that the examples usually used like the PERSHING SAILS message are very poorly done.
Decryption would reverse that: Finding the significant letters in the text, setting up your Playfair square, and decrypting them using that.
Definitely checkout meshtastic and meshcore. The barriers to entry compared to vhf and ham are smaller and you can get up and running easily! Obviously it doesn't have the same range and coverage as other options but it's still a great option!
I've thought about this too, and I've heard Meshtastic setups can be great for local communication. The licensing hurdle for ham radio keeps me from diving in, but I might give Meshtastic a try since you can self-host nodes pretty easily.
Don't let the licensing thing keep you from diving in to ham radio. The tests are relatively easy except for the Extra test, and even that one is pretty reasonable if you study.
It allows you to experiment with so many different possibilities, and to learn what radio can and can not do, that it's worth it.
If you're worried about people knowing your real name and address because it's publicly searchable, then simply don't use your FCC assigned callsign online. I don't.
If you're worried about the government knowing it, guess what? They already know it.
Why would I even remotely give a shit if it was screened in a situation where all communication is listened in on? Such a situation would imply that I have much bigger and much more immediate threats to deal with.
Yea. I probably don’t need to add that. The paranoia hit before I hit send. Just looking for a way to reach family 1.9 miles away. That’s right in the edge of whether a walkie would work. Walking is always first plan.
Line of sight is king. As long as a mountain isn't in the way/one of you isn't in a valley, have both ends get antennas up into the air and you'll be plenty good.
if you're only 2 miles apart i'd get 2 of these, one for each house and mount it to the roof some where, this should easily cover 2 miles if they're on your roof, especially if you both have 2 story houses
Anti-screening: develop and train/use code now. Don't need Enigma Machines, just substitute simple words for other words. An example:
Intended message:
PROGRESS SLOW BUT SPIRITS GOOD. TRUCK LOST WHEEL NEAR INDEPENDENCE BUT REPAIRED. CHILDREN HEALTHY. FORAGE PLENTIFUL AND RIVER WATER GOOD. SIX TOTAL TRAVEL WITH US. HOPE TO REACH CALIFORNIA BEFORE SNOW.
Rewritten message:
FRODO'S PROGRESS SLOW BUT SPIRITS GOOD. HORSE LOST SHOE BUT REPAIRED. HOBBITS HEALTHY. LEMBAS PLENTIFUL AND ELVEN WATER GOOD. SIX OF THE FELLOWSHIP STILL TRAVEL WITH THE RING-BEARER. HOPE TO REACH MORDOR BEFORE SNOW.
Make everyone think you're broadcasting a bedtime story, hide messages in it. Build the dictionary now, pass a copy to everyone you care about.
The point is security through obscurity. Yes, someone can figure out that you're not talking about Middle Earth, but they don't know what it does mean. So they are left with two options:
Find the origin point of the signal (way beyond the average prepper's capacity to do, or to avoid while still communicating); or
Try and parse meaning without a dictionary.
Unless you accidentally say something stupid like "When we get to Isengard we're gonna see Pike's Place and the Space Needle!," nobody is ever going to break a dictionary code because nobody really cares enough. Skynet is gonna see your prepper homestead from space long before it bothers triangulating a HAM radio signal.
Find the origin point of the signal (way beyond the average prepper's capacity to do
I hate to break this too you, but it's not as difficult as you think.
Every year the local ham radio club participates in what is known as "Jamboree On The Air". There are a number of amateur radio activities available for the kids every year. We have HF stations, VHF/UHF station, a digital station, a Morse code station where they send their initials over the air to another station (this is the one I run).
But the relevant activity is a fox hunt. Using direction finding techniques, the kids have to find a transmitter hidden in the somewhere in the scout camp. For fun, it's actually inside a stuffed toy fox.
We give the kids locked-down Baofeng UV-5Rs with tape measure/pvc pipe Yagis, and they have to find a hidden transmitter. We literally teach the principles of direction finding to kids, some as young as grade schoolers, using maybe $30 worth of equipment, and they invariably find the transmitter.
No, but plenty of people are going to want to communicate with family and friends.
A radio is a very simple device that doesn't rely on infrastructure like cell towers or the internet to work, and small battery powered handheld radios are actually pretty likely to survive any kind of EMP or massive solar flare event that takes down the telephone/internet systems, and the power grid.
They are also perfect for relatively short range (few hundred yards to perhaps a mile or so) communication. That's not "outside world" communication, that's "communicating with your local family/group/whatever" range.
Whatever you communicate is going to be intercepted by someone. Period. If you're not military/government there's very little you can do to prevent anyone from knowing what you're communicating, and that's OK because, trust me on this, you're not important enough for anyone to care what you're trying to communicate.
I'm pretty sure I can prevent anyone from knowing what I'm communicating. See my posts here using both numeric and alphabetic one-time pads. This is a 100+ year old technology that can be implemented using pen, paper, and d10 or alphabetic dice. It's even $5 wrench proof.
Maybe that's true that I'm not important enough. Maybe it's not. We'll never know until someone opens up the box and observes the cat.
You're not important enough for anyone to care, neither am I, and neither is the vast majority of the population. This is a nonissue whether you use secret squirrel technology or not. Have fun playing spy, though.
You just said you won't show any. I swear, you and every other pretender on social media have the same exact spiel. The fact of the matter is there's no way for you to verify who you are to anyone here, and you play on that. Because of it you can easily try to fool anyone about anything. The key word is try. No one is buying it here.
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u/Ryan_e3p Salt & Prepper 5d ago
HF, UHF*, VHF, the various Meshes (Meshtastic, Meshcore).
*the best part is when you get to drink from the firehose. (really hope that isn't too obscure)