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Are you referring to Armadillo Net, and some others?  I've read about them and know about them intellectually.


But how feasible is such a thing during a SHTF situation?  I assume this sort of thing can run on solar almost indefinitely.  But, i also assume there's still guys who go around and do routing (<-- this world should've been 'routine' but i'm leaving it because reasons) maintenance as well.


I realize it's pretty variable, but how many towers are we talking about for a thousand mile link?

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Last I heard we were forbidden to use encryption in the Amateur service.

What has changed?

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The problem with these threads in this here arfham forum is that we all talk around the obvious, relatively easy, but illegal solutions to the short range, secure comm's requirement. Let's break this down and summarize...

The legal answer is, as stated above, an encrypted business band radio on a business band frequency. "They" will know you are active, but not know what your are saying. You get good power output on frequencies that have good performance in various environments. Ranges will be in the single digit miles easily. BUT...they are expensive, require licensing, and getting said radios programmed involves a) expensive software, b) illegal software or c) paying someone to do it for you. This places a difficult logistics burden on the average prepper type.

The second best legal answer is a Motorola DTR series radio (the older ones go for less than $100 on fleabay). These are tough to detect using scanners (but not undetectable), and while not encrypted there is currently no hobbyist or commercial solution for intercepting their communications. But at 1W and at 900MHz their performance is pretty much limited to 1 mile. And someone with a similar radio could brute force their way onto your channel settings, so change them often.

The unsaid almost-always-illegal option is to get a TYT MD-380 with the MotoTRBO waveform and set up a MotoTRBO channel with advanced encryption. The radio is type accepted for FCC Part 90 use, i.e. you could use it in the same manner as the "legal answer" above with the right licensing. However you know most people who go this route are going to not bother with licensing and simply program it to use one or more Part 90 or Part 95 (FRS, GMRS, MURS) frequencies illegally. But it's simple, cheap, with free software available.

If you go the DTR (legal) or TYT (illegal) route, you are still faced with the often daunting logistics associated with ensuring all radios are programmed correctly. Since most people are complete radio-dolts (hams excepted, of course--well, most hams ), you have to organize this so that the people who have radios need only as much training as one needs for operating a toaster. On/off, channel selection, volume knob, and push-to-talk. There are really only two ways to do this that work reliably:

a) The Radio Depot Model: one person is the radio guru and is the smart person responsible for programming all radios, maintaining all radios, and disbursing all radios. That way they are all programmed the same and interoperable.

b) The BYOD (bring your own device) Model: one person is the radio guru as above, but in this case people who want to play have to bring the guru an appropriate radio and the guru programs it to be the same as everyone else's and hands it back.

This is also the only way to ensure control over secure information such as channel assignments, encryption keys, etc. Because once you start emailing that shit, or posting it to your "private" FB site, or whatever, it's sure to get out.

If money is no object you can get expensive radios (including the newer DTR stuff from Motorola) that allows over-the-air (OTA) programming and OTA disablement of individual radios in order to ease the problem of key management and compromise. But, again, that is beyond the ken and budget of the average prepper, and even the average ham.

BREAK

As for the "talk 1000 miles" problem there are two scenarios and thus two different solutions:

Scenario 1--SHTF, internet and commo only down inside the affected area. The solution for this is commercial satphone or sat communicator. Most people who have figured this out are buying either the Garmin inReach or the SPOT devices. Easy day, text with your friends, colleagues, business associates, family or whoever. They get the messages in their email inboxes or on their cellphones, you get it on your inReach or SPOT. No fuss, no muss, no training, they are basically text-only satellite cellphones. Or move up to a real handheld satphone.

Scenario 2--TEOTWAWKI, nothing left, no sat's, no GPS, just giant, mutant spiders. The solution for this is HF radio. It's complex stuff. You won't figure it out unless you become a ham and practice the art and science. In this case you can't be a Kung Fu master without going to the dojo. The problem is, of course, that there are damn few who go to that dojo and get the belt, so you won't have many people to talk to unless the people you want to talk to go to the dojo with you.

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The privacy tones on those radios don't keep people from hearing you -- they keep your radio from breaking squelch unless the other station has the same privacy tone set that you do. It's the opposite of privacy, more like wearing blinders vs an invisibility cloak if you will. If you turn the tones off you hear every signal.

If you use a DMR radio on simplex you can make private calls to another radio, not exactly in the spirit of amateur radio or exactly legal but it's really easy. Even a DMR group call on a simplex channel would be missed by nearly any non-governmental agency. Some one would have to be scanning the relatively large band with a radio capable of decoding the mode you are using. I have never personally scanned the 70cm band looking for simplex DMR signals and I'm a pretty active ham. NXDN and P25 are picked up by common scanners.

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Hey Photo, doing well.

Found a license-free digital frequency-hopping radio that sounds fairly difficult to intercept: Motorola DTR600. But pricey.

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Let me throw this out here. What is the most cost effective and mobile method of communicating with someone 1,000 miles away if internet and cell comms have gotten buggered? Doesn't have to be voice if there's a tech I'm not familiar with..

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Iridium based satellite messaging.

If we are imagining a scenario where the satellites have gone quiet, HF CW, as posted above.  With the caveat if you’ve reached that point I don’t think legality matters much.

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The Alinco DJ-G29T 220/900 radio was tailor made for this application.

At this point I think anyone serious about intercepting comms would go the SDR route. As noted, scanners have too many holes in coverage.

Realistically, though, if you're running handhelds you're already talking about coverage of just a few square miles, and the odds someone is running any kind of useful interception operation in that small of an area outside of planned riots and the like is slim to none.

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Email from MTCRadio:



figure someone here may be interested...not an affiliate link-would love to have a few sets myself though!

https://www.mtcradio.com/search.php?search_query=Protalk&x=22&y=16

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Handhelds can be helped quite a lot with a better antenna-and just about ANYTHING is better than a rubber-ducky. Those folding tape type antennas are pretty effective on a handheld..

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CW is inferior to digital modes any more, IMO. Yes, there are some shit-hot fist-pounders out there that can do amazing things with morse code on weak signal conditions, but the error correction built in to the decoders in digital software means being able to decode messages that are below the noise floor. My KX3 is so good that if I can see it on a panadaptor, it will pretty much decode it guaranteed.

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I don't disagree.  But...  if we're talking true SHTF, it might be best to pick the mode that relies least on equipment.  CW is simplest and can be produced with minimal gear.  Unlike digital modes.

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Someday I want to be able to bang out cw with a key strapped to my knee while driving, that is quite hard with digital modes. It's also more burdensome to drag a laptop out for field ops. Sure there are lots of solutions, you could use a pi and a phone or tablet but that more stuff to take that uses batteries that need to be charged.

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BTW, if you decide to get a ham license, the D-star digital mode in (Icom radios like ID-51) is legal on ham bands but an average Joe with a fancy scanner, won't be able to listen to your comms.
Also, very few people have radios for the 220 Mhz ham band. Just saying.....

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I'm not sure it really meets the OP's needs simply because it absolutely requires everyone who wants to talk to have a license and really should have everyone listening be licensed.

Couldn't you setup a DMR talk group then use hot spots? That way the local repeaters aren't in use and you can use very low power on the radios to limit the broadcast range. It's not "secure" since if someone is in range and listening they could theoretically listen in, but you've eliminated a lot of potential listeners.

Of course, the catch is that the internet must be up and you can't stray too far from your hot spot. Since you can interface them with a cell phone and battery pack a group could just stick one in a backpack if there wasn't a car handy. You could even use stubby antennas to further compromise your range since you only need enough reach to get to and from the hot spot. Heck, put different hot spots on different frequencies to even further limit the potential access for outsiders.

I'm not a hot spot or DMR user so please, tear this idea apart and show me the holes. It's just something that I've had in the back of my head as an idea for a few months. I've held off buying both a DMR and hot spot because I feel like both are still changing rapidly and coming down in price, but the time may be coming.

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For one thing, if you use the amateur DMR networks like Brandmiester, all of your voice traffic in decoded form would be streaming online at the Hoseline or similar for anyone to tune into.  You could go through all the work in setting up a totally private server to handle the web side of things and lock it down, but at that point you're still requiring the internet/cell phone backbone to make it all work.

If that's the case, why not just eliminate the extra hardware and just use your phones to communicate.

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If I ever needed to become difficult to monitor in a tactical situation I would pick an obscure digital format.  Motorola legacy VSELP comes to mind.  VSELP preceded P25 and was a proprietary modulation.  It never had a scanner and older astro sabers that have VSELP are cheaper due to their lack of P25.

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There's got to be only a handful of 2670s w VSELP out there by now. In liu of actual encryption im willing to bet my OPFOR isn't carrying one. It sounds a lot like P25 over the air,  I'm guessing someone would spend a while trying to figure out why they weren't getting a P25 decode before they figured out what I was doing.

You'd be more likely to meet someone with a VSELP radio and even then they'd need to be able to program it.  There's enough barriers in that process to make it extremely complex and irritating to monitor it without ever encrypting anything.

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Seems an appropriate, current thread for this:

I seem to be collecting HT's at an alarming rate these days - just got in two Wouxun KG-UV8E Tribands. There is a Scramble mode, with 8 groups available (1-8). With both Radios set to a group, comms are clear, but my UV5x3 just hears something like 'Charlie Brown's Teacher' - anyone know what technology is behind it? Is it encryption? Thx.

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Sounds like simple inversion scrambling - the audio frequency spectrum gets flipped then reversed at the receiver. It's not very secure, there are some people who can just copy it by ear, or it's easy to unscramble. Any digital mode would be more secure IMO.

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... clip...

BREAK

As for the "talk 1000 miles" problem there are two scenarios and thus two different solutions:

Scenario 1--SHTF, internet and commo only down inside the affected area. The solution for this is commercial satphone or sat communicator. Most people who have figured this out are buying either the Garmin inReach or the SPOT devices. Easy day, text with your friends, colleagues, business associates, family or whoever. They get the messages in their email inboxes or on their cellphones, you get it on your inReach or SPOT. No fuss, no muss, no training, they are basically text-only satellite cellphones. Or move up to a real handheld satphone.

Scenario 2--TEOTWAWKI, nothing left, no sat's, no GPS, just giant, mutant spiders. The solution for this is HF radio. It's complex stuff. You won't figure it out unless you become a ham and practice the art and science. In this case you can't be a Kung Fu master without going to the dojo. The problem is, of course, that there are damn few who go to that dojo and get the belt, so you won't have many people to talk to unless the people you want to talk to go to the dojo with you.

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There's some truth there.

If you're going to transmit on an open freq, now would be a good time to write and print some authentication tables.  Someone hearing your transmissions is bad, but someone using them to manipulate your efforts is worse.


"Northgate this is Roving-1, there's a red pickup truck approaching your position, they live in the neighborhood, let them pass."

"Roving-1 authenticate tango victor."

"Roving-1 authenticates golf."

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Question for ham radio - would authentication be legal?

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Trade you comms for food.

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Question for ham radio - would authentication be legal?

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The professional here is just drinking BRC and reading...

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What is "BRC"?

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Question for ham radio - would authentication be legal?

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Legal Ham Encryption?

First, let me start off by saying that I've never used DMR. I've been on the NXDN train, but I have heard of stories where people in Ukraine would use DMR radios with the clocks purposely set wrong on thier radios.

From what I understand, the clocks on DMR radios must be set exactly the same to get the multiplexed channels to line up properly.

Apparently if you don't know what the time they set the radios to its quite difficult to listen in on a DMR conversation.

As far as I know as long as you are using DMR on the ham band there is nothing that says you can't just have it configured in a non standard way.

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There's no way to adjust the slot periods on DMR radios. It's a standard 27 ms per slot with 3 ms of sync between. In the case of DMR specifically, the repeater is the reference for syncing time slots.