This is an update of some of our activities for the month of October, 2024. (Originally published on anarchistrrl.blackblogs.org on Nov. 7, 2024)
A demo was held at an Anarchist book fair where we made voice contact with a comrade about 950 miles (~1529 KM) away on the 20 meter band.
We have been joined by new comrades from Australia, northern Europe, the East coast, Southeast, upper-Midwest, and West coast of the so-called “United States”. Among these comrades are people connected with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. We are forming plans to share knowledge and resources in the near future.
Archive.org was hacked and came back online 12 days later. 31M user accounts and hashed passwords were stolen. This was a pretty considerable disruption to many online activities, including the ability to archive news articles, political commentary, and to fact check claims about – among many other things – Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.
And while this didn’t happen in October, obviously most of us woke up yesterday morning to find that Donald Trump had been elected to be the next president of the so-called “United States”. Whether you voted or not, and regardless of your feelings about the opposition, now is yet again – and still, as always – the time to prepare, and to protect and uplift one another.
Use Signal, use Tor. Build community, grow food, train up, get comms. We protect us.
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
As another powerful hurricane approaches Florida, many mutual aid organizations are doubtless bracing for impact and poised to help residents recover in the aftermath.
It is predicted that Hurricane Milton will make landfall in as little as a few hours from this post.
Given the rather large role that radio continues to play throughout recovery from Hurricane Helene, some might be interested in listening to the Hurricane Watch Net on the 20 and 40 meter bands.
The Net will Activate Tuesday at 5:00 PM EDT (2100 UTC) on 14.325.00 MHz (USB) and 7.268.00 MHz (LSB)
If you do not have an HF or shortwave radio, you can tune in via a web SDR.
If you do have an HF transceiver and you are not in an affected area, it is important that we LISTEN for information that could be useful to mutual aid disaster relief and recovery efforts.
Florida also has an interesting statewide linked repeater system called SARnet, which also has a Broadcastify stream.
We post this information in the sincere hope that it will be useful for those affected by these hurricanes, and at least educational for those who are not directly impacted.
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of September, 2024.
This month started off uneventful, but it sure didn’t end that way.
At the top of many peoples’ minds right now are of course the people impacted by Hurricane Helene. Rather than try to write something to try and jam this situation into a ham-radio-shaped narrative, we’ll just re-post some links to mutual aid disaster relief efforts you can donate to and/or get involved with however you can, as well as some interesting stories we’ve seen come up in our feeds.
AI6YR as always, has been posting a lot of great information on the hurricane and recovery efforts.
We have witnessed, both on HF and web SDR, folks in affected areas relaying traffic for loved ones through radio operators who in areas that were not hit and still have electricity and working phones.
Screenshot of an Instagram post from Meshtastic. It says: We wish to express our deepest sympathies for everyone impacted by Hurricane Helene. Our hearts go out to all those affected , and we hope for the well-being of everyone during this difficult time. <br> To our community, we ask that you refrain from responding to posts about the situation with comments like “this is why you need Meshtastic.” While we understand the value of our platform, these types of comments can come across as opportunistic and may not be helpful at this moment. <br> Instead, let’s focus on supporting those in need right now. There will be a time to educate others about Meshtastic, but for now, compassion and direct support are most important. Thank you for your understanding. –Meshtastic
IF this event has motivated you to prepare for disasters by getting into ham radio and/or other autonomous communications technology and techniques, that’s cool. Here are a few things to check out.
The Baofeng UV-9R seems like a nice and cheap handheld radio. It’s waterproof and charges via USB-C, which are both good and useful features. You can find it on that site where everybody buys all their shit. Once you get the radio, program it with FRS, GMRS and MURS frequencies.
Go to hamstudy.org to study for the ham radio license exams. It’s free. They really have made much simpler what used to be a pretty daunting bureaucratic process.
If you’d like to study with a book, do that. There are a lot of good ones out there. Your local library probably has one.
Take a look at our zine. It’s not a study guide, but it’s got a lot of information in there if your just curious what ham radio is all about.
Contact us! Seriously. We like talking about this stuff and we want to help anarchists get on the air.
In other news: On September 17 and 18, thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of handy-talkies exploded simultaneously in an Israeli attack. As of September 22, several people had died including 2 children, and thousands were injured. We’ll leave exact numbers to the journalists, as there are likely to be fluctuations and discrepancies in reporting.
Initial suspicions were that the Israeli government somehow remotely caused the batteries in these devices to explode. This is quite obviously not what happened. The devices were intercepted by the Israeli government at some point en route to Lebanon and were filled with explosives.
The Israeli government has been committing war crimes and genocide before this attack (and before October 7, 2023), and now the mind is boggled even further by people who still believe this kind of behavior is justified.
Just to be clear: No borders. No nations. Nobody gets an ethnostate. Period.
Should you worry about this type of supply-chain attack?
Short answer: No, probably not.
Longer answer: No, probably not. But you can probably open up your radio with a screwdriver to check on that sort of thing. But basically, no.
As for what we’ve been up to:
winterizing our antennas
a little bit of POTA
voice contact between comrades from the East coast to the Midwest
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of August, 2024.
More experimenting with steel 17 foot telescopic whip antennas. Findings: using an antenna like this from a car works, but it’s not as nice as playing radio out in nature.
Heavy work on a 100Ah solar generator this month. Nearly finished. A full writeup is in the works.
While the million dollars in ransom they paid to the hackers is “mostly” covered by insurance, everything about that story is so frustrating when you consider that that’s one year’s dues for nearly 17,000 people. Maybe this is what insurance is for, but people pay their dues to that organization and trust that the ARRL knows what they’re doing when they set up server networks and lobby the federal government on the behalf of radio operators.
It’s pretty unfortunate that this group is the only thing standing in the way of the FCC just selling off yet more of our (everyone’s) RF spectrum to private corporations, but that’s pretty much what we’ve got. This time it’s the 902-928 MHz band, which is an ISM band used not only by licensed amateurs, but by scientific and medical workers, as well as un-licensed amateurs such as LoRa (and) Meshtastic users. https://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-urges-protecting-the-amateur-radio-902-928-mhz-band
If you care to, and you can bring yourself to navigate the criminally byzantine FCC website, there is a way to submit your opinion about this problem if you follow the link above.
If that’s not your style, you can fire up your Meshtastic node, message your friends, and occupy the band! Do it while it’s legal, I guess.
This is an update on some of our activities for the month of July, 2024.
It’s hot as fuck outside, and the engineers are overworked.
CW studies continue.
Experiments with 17-foot telescopic whip antennas continue.
One of us is building a 12v DC refrigerator and a large backup battery box. Writeups with images will follow, assuming these projects ever get finished.
The biggest communications-related story this month is obviously the massive Crowdstrike failure. A faulty update on July 19th caused the largest IT outage in history.
While the popular takeaway from this story is that tech workers should not deploy on Fridays – a take which implies that blame rests solely on one person or a small team – we think the larger lesson here is that modern Capitalist industrial infrastructure is an albatross. It’s large, unwieldy, and contains many single points of failure. Too much rests upon the shoulders of too few people.
And no, ham radio is not the answer to this, but it could be part of a solution. If telephone and Internet systems had blacked out, even on a local level, it would be important to have a backup. Whether that’s a blister pack FRS radio or a full blown HF base station or anything between, that set of skills and equipment could be part of an ad-hoc communications infrastructure with no possibility of this type of cascading failure for everyone who uses it.
It should be noted that while the Crowdstrike outage seems to have impacted “consumer” level communications much less than commercial, industrial and government systems – the issue of corporate consolidation of local mass media has been quite the can of worms for a long time and does have a major impact on local communities.
To be honest, it would be easy to point to this incident and say “See? This is why you need to get into ham radio, or solar power, or canning vegetables…etc.” But the truth is that most of this stuff works for most people, most of the time. So we don’t really want to sound alarmist. But it’s also true that we started to see the cracks in these systems years ago and they’re getting bigger with climate change, the housing crisis, and massive wealth disparity. The bigger these cracks get, the more people are going to fall through (as hundreds of millions already have), and the more we’ll need to rely on ourselves and each other when we fall through these cracks.
The apocalypse is here. It’s just not equally distributed. ~Margaret Killjoy
So what can you do? Short of setting up a separate “air-gapped” Windows computer in case this sort of thing ever happens again, it may be more worth while to learn how to use other systems such as Linux. Maybe set up a flash drive with different operating systems on it ready to install in case of a prolonged outage or outright destruction of your primary operating system, or just in case some other kind of bullshit happens to your computer and you can’t afford Windows. And it should probably go without saying: Back up your shit!
(and have a backup power source as well as lights and fans…and a water filter…and fix your bike…and grow food…and have a potluck…)
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of June, 2024.
Field Day was June 22-23. Some of us helped with organizational duties, made contacts, and helped troubleshoot antenna problems at our various clubs’ Field Day locations.
We have noticed an increase of local Meshtastic activity, although there seems to be a dearth of actual conversations happening. It’s cool that people are excited about expanding the network, and using nodes as beacons is cool, but do y’all maybe wanna…talk to each other?
One of us did a POTA with the 17′ telescopic whip. Despite forgetting to bring the NanoVNA to check the SWR, the fully extended whip with four 16 foot radials was perfect for the 20 meter phone portion. The SWR bridge built into most HF radios does come in handy, as it turns out.
The ARRL’s Logbook of the World is back up, after an apparent cyberattack caused it to shut down for several weeks. LotW is now working through an intense backlog of QSOs. Some have questioned whether the cyberattack may have originated with a disgruntled employee, or whether the long outage may be being used as a prelude to rebuild LotW from the ground up and start charging money for its use. Such questions are fueled by longstanding complaints of a lack of transparency and recent dues increases coinciding with cutbacks to member services.
We question if such a large online system for verifying ham radio contacts – the albatross that is Logbook of the World – should be centralized in the first place. Doubtless we are not the first to think of this, and someone is likely working on a decentralized alternative as we speak.
This is an update of some of our activities from the month of May, 2024.
First, we hope that everyone had a happy May Day filled with whatever pleases you. For us, it was very nice to see that someone ran a special event station for International Workers’ Day during the first week of May.
We also welcomed a new comrade this month. They are a longtime community organizer from the Pacific Northwest who is passionate about radio as a community tool for building connections and emergency response networks. They are currently learning Morse code and scheming about the next antenna build.
At least two of us have acquired – or will soon acquire – a 17 foot stainless steel telescopic whip antenna. This is a very versatile piece of equipment which can be used in many configurations. Fully-extended, such an antenna is resonant down to the 20 meter band, and can be shortened to be resonant up to the 6 meter band. However, there are many supplementary pieces of equipment that can be DIYed from basic hardware store material such as PVC pipe and copper wire. Air core inductors for bottom- or top-loading the antenna, clip-lead wire extensions, and transformers could all be used to extend the useful bandwidth of the antenna down to the lower bands from 30 and 40 meters down to 80, 160, and conceivably even lower if the radio equipment supports it.
This one piece of equipment could be used to build modular portable kits akin to commercial alternatives provided by Chameleon Antennas and Wolf River Coils, but with more versatility, creative potential, and at much lower cost. We look forward to writing about our experiences with this in the future.
The Lilygo T-TWR Plus seems to have potential as a lower cost Bluetooth packet TNC for APRS, as well as having some other potential for experimentation. We’ll relay anything of interest after the unit arrives.
One member’s direct drive 3D printer upgrade should make printing weatherproof parts easier and more reliable. Thoughts and prayers as always for the fickle 3D printing process.
Earlier this month, from May 10 – 13, the Earth was struck by the most powerful solar storm since 1989. This event caused radio blackouts on the HF bands, as well as disruption to the GPS network.
GPS disruptions forced farmers to halt planting for the entire day, as large-scale automated agricultural equipment relies on GPS for navigation.
Aurorae were visible in the Northern Hemisphere as far south as the Yucatán Peninsula, and as far north in the Southern Hemisphere as Queensland, Australia.
In comparison to the legendary Carrington Event superstorm of 1859, the solar storms of May 2024 were only about half as strong as the minimum estimated strength of -800 nT, and about 23% as strong as the maximum estimated strength of -1750 nT. The May 2024 solar storms reached a peak Dst index of −412 nT at 03:00 UTC on 11 May.
Please note that none of us are sun scientists or whatever. Here’s a video from Tamitha Skov, who understands this stuff way better than we do.
This is an update on some of our activities for the month of April, 2024. Hopefully everyone had a nice May Day! 🏴
Two comrades had a QSO on 20m SSB one evening. Distance approximately 600 miles.
RST
Antenna
Power
Station A
5-5
EFHW inverted-vee
20w
Station B
5-8
Random wire sloper
100w
Two more comrades had a QSO on 40m SSB one evening. Distance approximately 1500 miles.
RST
Antenna
Power
Station A
2-2
EFHW inverted-vee
100w
Station B
5-5
shortened EFHW
100w
One comrade made their first HF contact on 10 meter SSB phone, at a distance of over 2,000 miles at 100 watts.
One of us upgraded from Technician to General class license. They and a few others are studying for the Extra exam.
It’s definitely antenna season! One person has built a shortened end-fed halfwave and another is working on a 20 meter dipole.
A few air-core variable capacitors have been obtained for cheap from a hamfest. These are useful for building manual LC antenna tuners, crystal radio receivers, and probably a lot of other stuff.
We now have a PeerTube channel! There’s nothing interesting on there quite yet, but plans are percolating. In case you’re not familiar, PeerTube is a decentralized and federated video hosting platform. Think of it as the Fediverse alternative to YouTube.
A power supply upgrade has allowed one of us to finally make use of a cheap (~$75) 100 watt HF linear amplifier. While it does not appear possible to use digital modes with the amp, it has made SSB phone contacts significantly easier than in the past when limited to 20 watts. These PA-100 amps can be found on eBay from several different sellers. Some 50 watt kits can also be found for less money. Voice contact was made with Slovenia on 20 meters using this amp. Distance approximately 5,000 miles.
This is an update of some of our activities in the month of March, 2024.
Two new comrades have joined us this month! One from Appalachia, and another from the DC Metro area.
One was actually heard hunting POTA on 20 meters, after which we decided to connect over IP. Turns out he’s a long standing IWW member.
The other is a new ham with an interest in queer liberation and providing emergency communication support to the queer community.
We made use of webSDRs to remotely troubleshoot line-of-sight antenna setups.
One of us began construction of a portable 2 element Yagi antenna for the 10 meter band.
We experimented with multiple digital voice modes over both RF and IP, including DMR, YSF, Echolink, and M17.
Our comrades in the Midwest have constructed one fully functioning solar-powered Meshtastic node, and several portable nodes have been obtained by comrades there. Training and practice will commence when weather and schedules allow.
License exam study books have been scanned into digital formats for distribution throughout our networks.
This is an update of some of our activities in the month of February, 2024.
Did an introductory video-conference presentation about ham radio to a group of comrades in the Northeast.
Two of us worked together remotely to get set up using CAT control and JS8call on one of our stations. CAT control works. However, the contact failed due to suspected coax problems. It was too cold outside to check. It was also suspected that one of the rigs suffered internal damage due to high SWR, but the problem appears to have been solved by a factory reset.
A second attempt was made a couple weeks later, this time using a Linux command line tool called minimodem which is a general purpose audio FSK modem capable of sending at very low bit rates, which, in theory should allow for a message to cut through very high noise levels. Experiments with very low audio (not RF) between two computers in the same building yielded promising results. We set our radios to VOX control and let it rip. No joy. One of the antennas was simply not radiating. The endfed random wire antenna that is proving to be problematic will likely be replaced with a soe form of multiband resonant dipole when the ice melts. Minimodem may get its own post in the future. There’s something to be said for such a simple and flexible command line utility, as opposed to more complex GUI applications such as FLDigi and JS8Call.
Solar powered Meshtastic modules have been ordered and should arrive soon. One Meshtastic device was given to a comrade who lives just beyond line of sight. Arrangements will be made to install the device on a mast, and attempt experimental contact when both parties have time. They are hopeful, as the mesh network is expanding in their localities and contact should be possible through at least two hops.
None of us have been affected by the AT&T outage. Although, it does serve as a stark reminder that whether due to disaster, malice, or sheer incompetence, governments and private corporations cannot always be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure.
