HRWB 222 - Disaster Prep with Thomas K4SWL and Josh K7OSH
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Today in the workbench disaster prep with Thomas k 4SWL and josh k 7 osh。 Stay tuned.

Welcome to the workbench on your host George K. J. Six view. This episode of the ham radio workbench is brought you by flex radio, the leaders and high performance, softer defying radios offering each of transfer s amplifiers and other radio accessories. Check them out IT flex radio outcome and by digging, offering the world's largest election of electronic components and outstanding customer service. Start your next project with dig key that come.

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a thing and you're worried about feature creep, then we are the wrong podcast for you have radio workbench showing you a dozen other things that you should add since twenty sixteen.

Welcome to the huberty workbench pod casters by weekly deep dive on technical topics of interest to the radio amateur. Well, on today show we're doing a follow up to episode two twenty one, which is all about the hurricane disaster on the east coast, where Thomas gave us a great update about what's been going on there in all of the chAllenges involved with that.

And when we thought about doing that show, we we figured we would get an update from Thomas and then we would have a round table about the various kinds of things that each one of us would do to prepare for an emergency. And of course, as usual, we blew through three hours of topic. Number one, we actually never got to the big round table of ideas.

So we thought, well, we would just follow up in this episode with discussion about what is an emergency and what is radios role in that and what specific things with each of us do, both radio related and non radio related to prepare. So with that in mind, today on the show we have a Thomas back on high. Thomas.

hey, how is going on?

George is going great. God, that you're doing. All right. We'll get a big update the minute here. We also have a special guest and that's a josh k seven. O, S, H. And you might recall josh a was on our show about the field day this year, and josh a was in charge of field day.

So I thought, well, who Better than to get him on? Because he has spent a lot of time thinking about this start of thing and working with our club and making us more prepared emergencies. So josh is joining us. Hi, josh.

Hey, thanks for having me back, and i'm very excited for this topic. IT is one that is near and dear to my heart.

and we've been talking for quite a while about doing a show on the topic. And all of a sudden the opportunity popped up here. So i'm glad you could make IT back on. And we also have inspired E, X, L, K, hello, ovens.

good after evening, noon, all from the frigid north.

And h, also mark in six. M. T. S, from the frigid central coast.

Oh my god. SHE is down in the fifties here. Very high, man. And I am terrified at how cold is going to get up. I going to survive.

You might put long pants on. Somehow I thought that was going.

everybody.

oh, doing great, doing great. Well, if this is the first time you've joined us listening to the pond cast, we're really happy that you're here. We have over two hundred and twenty episodes in our back catalogue.

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Brand master talk group, three, one, zero, seven, five or all. Start node five, five, nine, one, five. So that's a little bit of the set up. And like I said on today, they show we're going to focus really around disaster and emergency kind of preparation, and that's a prety big topic. There's lots of things that we can we can really focus in on there. But you, I think to give this this discussion a little bit of structure, what I think we will do is, first of i'll get to update Thomas from you about what's been happening and then we will kind of go into the detail about what's the disaster, how does radio fit in and what our various ideas are for how we're individually preparing for that. So what's been happening in north .

CarOlina, a so all the recovery efforts have they're still pretty much full swing is changed a bit um here in central bank and county. Uh, conditions have been proved quite a lot in swan to know is specifically where I live. It's going to be months.

If not, I have to see maybe a year or two before some of the damaged area in our town is fixed. It's the river really caused a lot of damage。 The waters, again, IT was a one and one thousand year rain event. So IT was unprecedented uh what happened here? And completely wiped out neighborhoods and businesses.

And so many we realized now just so many that we we are we're being into local businesses and so many got wiped away ah that we were that we patronize very regularly um up here um on my sort of mountain road that I live on here at our neighborhood. We've the conditions here been improving. Um I think I was last on the show, you know we had e grass.

Um we um we were able to make IT in the town. Our road was open IT was not for a long time. Uh we had a bridge washed out.

Our robust crumbling had been compromised on both sides in a very steep and curvy part um was kind of uh chAllenging to leave and come back home. Uh, since then, the kentucky department of transportation has been here and they've been working steadily for probably two weeks and have improved. The road is still not up to A D O T standard, probably a department of transportation standard. Uh, it's not paved, it's uh dirt, but it's packed and it's mostly too lane now going down the road which is huge because I have i've probably mentioned before the show that um so my super rue, which would be the car I would been using to go up and down the road, was smashed by not one but two trees IT had survived the bear attack IT had survived being um we ended um but the second tree really got IT and that was totally and they carded IT off this last week.

Um I have uh my valvo c forty which is really kind of it's pretty of rod like it's got good ground clearance and stuff, but um I couldn't get IT out of my driveway because we had a massive, massive dip that was formed by the waters that came down the mountain and um over the covert uh at the end of my driveway and IT basically wiped out and made a huge dip there between the payment of our road and my gravel driveway so um that IT required my truck down the hill and the road was kind of about the width of the truck um so IT was you know as a three quarter time truck and um venice most because he driving these big things and and drives these big things, you you don't you feel IT doesn't feel like a car. You feel like you're taking up a lot of space. And when I was single lane twice I had to once I had to back IT down the hill down the steepen curvy park um trying to keep IT in that one lane with crumbling road on both sides then another time I had to back IT up the hill and forever drive for the same reason because multiple cars and sometimes IT was like skid steers and step I think that we're coming up and I had to do IT and is it's really scary.

There's no garden, there's no nothing. And if you fall off, if you onna go down fifty feet so IT was a little IT was a little touch and go now it's two lanes so like I can take any vehicle down and also we this week were able to um neighbor was able to come and help me uh fill in the bottom of our driveway so that I can actually get our car out now which is really nice. Um they're still like a massive amount of debris clean up on our road and that's going to be taking place for a long time.

Just all the foreign tree a brush. We're concerned like a real concern right now are forest fires because we have so many hycy tories come down. And since that storm, we've only had one day of like mild rain in a month.

And it's today is one month from when the storm head and we've only had one day of moderate has been super, super dry. And when you have a bunch of leaves are starting to they're starting to break down um it's a real fire hazard and we have, like I said, that to live at the end of a two my long road. That's our only point of egress and uh, you know so we we get concerned about forest fires and we've luckily we've never had one, fortunately, here in and this part of western north CarOlina, but we're aware that I could happen.

And so we kind of keep that in mind. Uh, so probably pretty soon we'll have fire bans on things like that. Um the um so the rose are getting more clear. Um i'm less worried when I go into town that I like run over nails and thinks that have come off houses that have floated across the road and things like that.

There's a sentence you never thought you'd have to ever say.

I know it's true. It's true. It's it's I mean, it's really a it's emotionally taxing to drive into areas you haven't driven before and realized how badly IT hit that area.

IT really is. We went to a local grocery store that we like to uh that we've gone to for ages. We a small grocery store.

We've have known the people that work there forever. They're like family and um five people, five employees lost their houses that work at the grocery store. right?

Mean this is this is the way IT is and um you know the road to you know to kind of uh fix up the areas going to take a long time for that. Um you there's just a lot of people of of out of work right now. This is of course like our big tourist season um here in western north CarOlina and and is very much a tour space economy.

And uh this is where probably people make a half of all of their income for the entire year. And of course, uh, nothing's happening here. We're actively discouraging uh tourists from coming uh, because one of the really big issues uh, that we're dealing with and we'll deal with for a long time are the number of bridges that we're washed out.

And one really large bridges is one of those bridges, you know, the bridges that you cross every day and you don't even realize it's a bridge because it's just so B Y so built up IT just feels like a part of the road. Um we had one of those on highway seventy um in swanton oh sort of between sone ano and east ash fill. And that bridge uh was completely compromised uh from and I saw the video from IT was just unbelievable to see the amount of water and the amount of water energy that was just like flowing through that area and breaking apart the bridge and houses crushing against IT everything that thing needs repairing. And so IT basically blocked off one of the really big arteries of traffic that that are in the area.

I don't know the one that was in your area, but I did see a video on youtube of a bunch of folks in north CarOlina watching a bridge just get overtaken by the river and swept on down that very well could .

bit the one um this one did this particular bridge to get a lot of um IT was someone was video taking a video of what IT happened probably .

fifty to one hundred years yeah .

and IT was IT was and so like that I mean, how long they take to replace the bridge like that? So you know, for a lot of us living here, the things we're looking at now, like the man, the initial part probably that I talked about a lot in the last episode, just kind of like um the very beginning, more likes survive things uh and it's all about e grass and making sure you can get into town to your supplies and people get medical attention, all that stuff uh building communications infrastructure, all those things. After a couple weeks that starts to um more than two like the new Normal um where uh you know these things that things are the way they used to be and now it's we're trying to get back on our feet where people are trying to go back to work if they can.

Ah my daughters hopefully next week we will go back to school we which is at the community college uh because they are deal and role, they do uh their uh high school classes at the community college and we were on the impression that they're be going there in person october twenty eight but um the president of the college made IT really clear that it's going to be online, possibly the rest of the year because right now ash will only got a water restoration and most of ash fill just in the past week and that water is not potable. So um they have bring in water everywhere they're going like at the hospital this next door to the community college, they have to bring in all their water. And um so it's just because you know in the others places is not.

You can know a family can't you know they're not the boil water at the hospital or at the community college. So a lot of these places that you rely on there just are not going to be working like Normal. But internet services are coming back um electric um you know the utilities have been restored.

My we went for about exactly two and a half weeks without uh a great connection here on our road um that's been restored. Um we still have no wired internet of any sort. That'll be a long time yet before, uh, that's done.

You said you have power now.

Yes, we did .

have power earlier. You are. The speculation was like, I don't see this happening before the end of the year.

And you know what? This is the thing about the thing i've learned that I think people who been through this would understand, and is that there are a lot of up and downs, and you get really bad news followed by a really good news. And this is like this wave that keeps going over and over. So, you know, this particular case of the power, we went to a community meeting and we had on the way to the community meeting. And this is probably when I talk about the last time we ran into .

a of the first person .

that we met in a truck, they've actually worked for the power company. So IT wasn't just like another person that was coming out, like from a different state or a different country to work on our road. This was actually someone that was a representative of the power company.

And one of the neighbors asked, hey, i'm on the way to the community meeting right now. Can you give us any indication when you know we may have power restoration up here? And he just looked at them and said, um, you should be happy if you get IT before Christmas.

And so he brought that nice to neighbors. Od, we were all kind of bomb about IT, but we were like, okay, where to get through this? We will figure that out. You know we started planning for I think IT was like the next day of the day after we saw some line man come up that worked for um a company out of inDiana and they uh they came up and we were having yet another community meeting cases were every other day and we invited them to come over and he agreed to do IT which was brave of him and but we are all really nice and we said, so um we are appear working on this do you agree with the other person's assessment that this is gonna take until Christmas and he looked at us and he said, ah we're not leaving until it's done and we're like, really and he said, yeah I mean, we should have IT completely restored within .

two days wow so yeah.

he is pride that the best meeting he's ever been to because currently just say around, wow.

everybody was so happy. And but the thing is the thing that can get you later on, as you realize, people for two days have been planning to be two and a half months without power, you know. And so like they make changes in their lives in that time, they bought things, they, uh, got extra fuel.

They were doing all these things to kind of prepare for that, only to find out that, boom, you know, hey, it's being fixed right now and that's that's how IT works with. But I think this is like one of the really big takeaway for me is just the nature of like this. You can't control what's gonna happen each day and that can be in a good way, in a bad way.

Help just arrives. Like, literally one day I was thinking, okay, I Better get the chain on, start working on some stuff here at the house, and then literally, the national garden ize of my house, like in A A big resupply vehicle and like four guys all Carrying chainsaws. And I was like, awesome. But that in sunday you will get something, you know, really bad news and they may, they may like when they're working on your road, which is an awesome thing.

Uh, you know, we had someone on the road that that needed to catch a flight and SHE super concern because the the crews can just show up and they may block the road for two hours, you know, because they're working on things when they tear apart the road at, then rebuild IT again. And you know, that's one of the things you just can't plan for. you.

Well, you can only plan for IT by just assume ming, I may need a really long time to get from point a to point b and in fact, earlier today I was a chatting with mark over, uh, you know, just a text message. I ask a question and and I said, hey, i'm get ready to head out the door to take my daughter to shakespeare class see, they're going to take me forty minutes or maybe two hours to get there not sure which, but you just have to accept whatever IT is because that's just the way that's the new Normal. So that's kind of been the theme is the new Normal.

Now one really big thing that change since this is this is just how so funny how things happen and again, another kind of like you think you're doing one thing and then like in a moment that change IT and it's just the nature of this. And I think part of IT is how you know communications Normal fluid communications are disrupted uh, with a disaster but um who was IT uh two mornings ago or three mornings ago? I can't remember IT was this past week um I had talked on the show about starting up a community radio network to go above and beyond ham radio, which we have been using during the toughest part of the emergency when there was no other communications here.

And I distributed hts to some of the neighbors, talked them how to use them, blocked him down and we had regular nets that we were using for passing emergency traffic. Um the neighbors all love the radios big time and they're like, we want this all the time, but we we don't have the time to study for a name eure radio license. It's in practical to ask somebody that's even trying to figure out how to restart their business to go study for an amar radios license, right? And so we looked at, and I talked with you, George, about looking.

We tried F, R, S, just not good enough, uh, to go up and down road because because we have one thousand foot elevation change. I wanted a system where we could potentially a radio solution, where we could potentially install a repeat. And so that takes us to G M R S.

And then um the P L rms system. Is that right? And I think that I could not. Is the lay on mobile business? You probably know that .

accurate that I don't know, but it's part ninety land mobile radio .

commercial customers.

No no, no part ninety regular commercial. You know, like i'm a tow truck company, ended the toe truck radio and I get A I get my own coordinated frequency for my business.

business lessons, right? Yes.

yes. And so it's a business license. And I after the show, i'd really been talking about this and then George was kind enough to hop online with me one day and we talked for probably an hour about the process of doing what, first of all G M R S or um business license and then the process of getting the business license because really IT had a slight edge over G M R S H for a few reasons.

And so h George checked me up with a company, really company with really good customer service, by the way, uh, for doing the frequency coordination and got the pricing. I figured out everything. I started filling out the application that morning. I think this was maybe wednesday morning.

Um I literally filled out the application and I was going to go to George and say, help me look through this, make sure i'm doing IT all correctly because I was going to submit this and then submit like I four hundred dollars or something to get the process going. Um I then thought I need to reach out to my local fire department first because, you know what, they're kind of connected to our community. They're right here.

The fire department has been such an incredibly important emergency communication center during all of this that I just want there like maybe a little bit of a blessing telling what we're doing a neighbors that all bought into IT but say, hey, we want to make sure you're linked up if you want to be or do you have strong opinion about this? And there's an amateur dio Operator that has been working at our main part department and wants to know on. And so I thought i'm just going to hop on the repeater and cv air, you know, because I had no way to directly contact him and then I was planning, if I don't hear from him, that was going to drive to the desired department, well hoped on the repeater and sent out his call.

He did not come back. But dk two D M G, who is the fellow that like was the demand net control for the mount itur repeat in to g um he was the the main that control for the first like ten days of the disaster and did a fantastic job. He has been interviewed, all kinds of things, and a super nice guy and he came back me said, hey, Thomas h into into d mg here.

I'm in the area today. Uh, would you like to meet up and I said, sure. And so we exchange just text. We guard text numbers and contacted them and we agreed to meet up at another han's house that's just down the road like formal down the road for me um and for E D X um dan who has been a really instrumental local ham that did just a time a groundwork for us like he was amazing um on the emergence communication side and dan wanted to meet him too because of course he had worked with him on the repeater a whole lunch and I was like, this is great.

This is like this community of people in the income situation that I got to know, uh, during this whole mess and thought to be great to see these guys in person i'd met done before, met ad before, but not down and and dan said, oh yeah i've also invited the repeat owner in to G E. Who's going to come over to Randy and like, that's fantastic. That's the repeater owner too.

So four guys and I thought this would be great. And so I went down and met up with them and we were waiting or ed and Randy to show up. And, uh, I was talking about about the situation is like, what do you recommend of talk to him about our community radio? He agreed that business business license probably has a little advantage over G M, R S.

And the other. systems. And I said, you know, I know someone who I know will let us put a repeater at her place. And it's pretty ideally located for our road and possibly for like the a bigger part of the valley.

You so I could actually expanded to include even worse households and I said, but we have to go through the whole process of getting the repeater in ba ba law um and then uh already shows up the repeater owner of the mountain itur repeater and this guy, let me tell you, he has the most rock stable perfect installation of a repeatedly that you could ever have IT was running on emergency power for IT may still be today for all I know because it's all mount Mitchell and is very, very unacceptable ble and and the things just never is down. It's it's so well done. Audience awesome. And he he maintains IT and has since, I think the early eighties.

the one that being live stream.

right? That's correct. Yes, IT has a huge, huge, huge footprint um in this area um because that is on is on a summit that is near the tallest h summit east of the mississippi. So IT really does have a really nice White footprint. So danni saying they were talking about IT and then Randy e shows up and i'd never got him before and um and said, so I do what do you just make a small talk?

What do you hearing want to know are doing today and he said, well, i'm gonna check out things because i'm about to install lag M R S repeater and I said, where are you installing IT and he said on a mountain right up here and I said, will they cover this whole area like this value here and he said easily and I was like, okay, what is looking each other like for me? Because I know that that repeater will be, uh, it'll easily hit everybody so I like, okay, we're going to go G M R S then because IT just makes more sense and pass there's another repeater in ashville to and some others that people could use. So um we decided to go the G M R S around which meant that then I have been purchasing a few G M R S radio to find out one that I could kind of standardize on.

So if people need to help with, at least I can tell them, hey um if you have this radio, I can show you how to use IT very easily. I am also going to set up a hopefully our local fire department, some classes like every other week ah, to kind of let people know here. Here's how you can become a part of this.

Here, how you can get your license. Here's one of the radio you can get. And the great thing about these G M R S radios is there's some very affordable ones.

And i'd actually mentioned this on my blog. I think two days ago and IT, we've been gotten a couple of offers from some of my readers saying, hey, I want to send you G M R S radios. If you get people in neighbor od, they can afford them or something.

Uh, so there's just so, you know, so that all just took a big turn. I think it's going to work out. I think it's going work out just fine.

We do have some topography we have to work with here, and repeater really will make that work. And where he is putting his repeater and IT should easily cover our entire value over here. So yeah, i'm looking forward that, but that's sort of the state things.

That's where we are. We're getting used to the new Normal. Things won't be Normal for a while, but we still have a lot of administrative overhead.

Everybody does. Everybody on my right right now dealing with their insurance company, adjustors contractors and female, female has done a fantastic job. Uh, there's a lot of this information about theme theyve been incredible. We have a fema center that's four miles from here.

I can go to and ask any questions and they are great and um they're going to try to fema kind of comes in though after your insurance company has um told you what they're gonna. Um I no longer as of last I think I think when I was on the show last, I still had a tree on the house and we had a tree on the rino house. Those have been removed now um which is a big thing and yes.

that's so casually. Yeah I just had a tree on my house last .

time we talked. My daughters were like after we had to remove their like it's so nice because the tree was actually over their bedroom, kind of more over their bedroom and IT wasn't threatened.

The house the house was but we have a metal roof and they said it's just so nice not to hear IT like squeaking against the house all the time when the wind blows and I thought, okay, okay, so my daughters are gonna have P T S D from all this, i'm afraid but um but he was, uh it's again, uh the overarching thing though is the community has been freaking amazing. It's been so great. There's such a good feel.

We are now in a position where we are volunteering, you know, to try to do things for the community. You know we're finding the time to do that. Um my daughter today or uh ah they're going to start filling other forms to volunteer world central kitchen, which has been a fantastic organization. I love them um in town and uh yeah it's just a lot of good things lot of good things happening but a long road to hoo yet so since .

you mentioned world tension al kitchen on the lash, we mentioned three different organizations that people should consider donating to. And a lot of times when there is a disaster, there's a response immediately from people. But a week, two weeks, a months later, two months later, people still really need stuff and and the donations turkle off. So just to be clear, that sounds to me like even though things are getting Better, there's still a lot of work to be done. And there's probably I am assuming and create me, i'm wrong here that there's probably still a need for people to donate to some of these organizations .

to help things. One absolutely. And um there been some you here in national, i've got a lot of people have asked me about local places.

Uh here they donate are specific as and you we have a wonderful graph cop I love at ashfield. They're great. They have done a lot of a uh emergency response and helping people.

We have man of food bank care that's really good. Um they are there great and Normal times and they're fantastic during disasters. Um world central kitchen for being one of the larger organizations that works in a lot of different areas and across the world by goi. Man, they're here for the long run. We just went by there today and you know for us now to go to the grocery store or to go to the grocery store that has like say, fresh meat that we can buy.

Um it's still pretty much uh thirty five, forty minute drive one way to get there because our local grocery stores are all gone on that have those things um and they may have we do have a few grocery stores with like some limited meat selection stuff but not very much not yet um so world's central kitchen I know uh, early on we were they were bringing supply. We will get some of those h products brought up to us from town. Now they have a central location in swanne and it's become this incredible community hub all around IT, uh, where people can go there.

Um there's like it's kind of wim aco because it's this area too, like we had last week and this there's a woman that had a booth fair called the booth ferry and he would give gluten free hugs and compliments and SHE play some more with you and things like that. They're like, right there is just the best kind of as my daughters would save vibe there IT just feels so good and so we go there on occasion and my the way I do IT um you know we will go there and get like a meal, like lunch or dinner or something if it's helping us make our day more productive. Um like we don't have to go out and go get something and then I just drop them money.

Like I was going to a restaurant and donated to him because got a little donation thing there. And uh because I think that they are gonna needed for a quite long time. We don't need them in terms of like being are only source of food, but there are still lots of people who do because in in around that area within oh gosh, within one hundred meters of that area, there are about seventy houses that are no longer there.

Um the spot where they're Operating out of a pretzel shop, uh the place that may have a very impressed some awesome shop called blind pretzel um that we've gone to before. Um they were just high enough on ground that they were not affected. Um they were affected waterways, SE and powerful SE. But uh world central kitchen is able to move in there and use their facilities to kind of do this and just it's just wonderful so get to see the best in humanity in all this too.

They've got a fascinating story so you can find youtube videos on them in whose anger, who's the the guy that started IT really wanted to give back to the world you and so most of their Operations are in um conflict as you know. It's like on the edge of a war zone, you know to feed the people whose houses have been destroyed and all that sort of stuff soap. It's cool to see them you know helping here too, where it's very much needed.

So so it's a fantastic organization to donate to. The other two you mentioned was united way of ashfall, which is local, right? So that's probably a good one too, right?

Yes, IT is united way of ash fill man of food bank is another really good one. Another one called beloved at ash fill is a great one. Um there's um also I think is crisis response international.

They came in really early. I think it's cri right. Um they came in pretty early and did a lot and a lot of neighbor ods around here um as well.

But uh but i've got you know I have to say that the food thing is a really big deal and world central kitchen, I will forever be a donor of theirs and they're going to go on our regular list of doing to nations um and I can tell you that they came in early too. They were here very early and they are here for the long run, which is nice. They modified their hours.

They don't do necessarily. I notice that, that next week, they are not going to have breakfast, lunch and dinner or something. But they are going to still have light from twelve o'clock to seven P M.

They are going to be serving food. So and always the friendly as people and the food is actually really good because are kind of getting a lot of you know a restaurant employees are out of work to come work there. And fantastic that is.

placed links in the show notes to retention, al kitchen and C, R, I donate. Thanks for all stennis.

In all, at the end, we had last time ahead.

yeah. And I want to to say that I really appreciate you guys put in those recommendations out there uh because there is so many uh less than authentic um things you can find. It's hard to know where to who's doing the most good and you so to have those legitimate um you know places you can donate, really make a differences is excEllent.

Yes, what sounds .

like things are not where they need to be, but they're kind of moving in the right direction only. So that's that's really, really good to hear. And so we wish ed the best. I know in the last couple of weeks too, after after henan, you start to hear about the next hurricane next i'm thinking like, man, I sure hope those don't arrive with that be awful on top of the new all the other stuff that um that everybody he's going on through. So thankfully, those arent, those didn't materialize in that area.

Yes, it's very worthy. It's very worthy. And there's a lot of misinformation about IT. You know people on social media would show like these plots of hurricanes coming through this area. And I was not you know media are all to try to rush in and say, no, no, no but it's it's scary when you live here and you to think, oh gosh, we can really get something like that again um you know it's it's scary stuff. So that's one of the other things is trying to really kind of follow up and make sure that you're getting authentic information because during a disaster um rumor, especially first when communications is really destruct, the rumor gets gets out of hand very, very quickly.

So A I can get around the world three times before the truth guinan put his shoes on yeah to get out the door or something along those lines it's dream.

Yeah dream.

So um let's shift gears little bit towards, uh, the topic of what would we do to prepare for an emergency and before we dive into the favorite screwdriver that you would want to Carry with you during a disaster.

always important.

always important. I think you would be useful to define what do we really mean. We say the word emergency or disaster, you know, whatever. So so maybe we should define what we're really talking about here. And I mean, from practical point view, what kind of problems would do really be running into um so a josh, maybe you want to kick us off with that. Like what what sort of things to come to your mind that, that are likely disaster kind of situations that we may .

find ourselves in so well. What i'd like to do is I like to look at the ninety percent. I like to look at the ninety percent of what's onna happen around you and to you.

I mean, if you want to prefer for the zombie polypes, you can do that. But that's more of a hobby than actual preparedness uh so starting with things like job loss. That's a disaster that threatens your home, that threatens your food, that threatens a uh your shelter um and so saving, being smart, budgeting, these are all disaster things.

It's not fun. It's not sexy. No one enjoys IT but start basic um and the nice thing is is if you start there, your other press will build on that so you can start going you start storing up food for things like that and that Carries over the other things um so going from there.

For us, for me, we have uh, a lot of ice storms, we have forest fires, we have things like that. and. By starting with what you're going to actually get, it'll help you figure out what where to go next. So like when .

I moved from california to organ, I discovered this thing called weather that don't have that in california. Heard of IT. yeah. If I read about IT somewhere, so so coming up here, IT wasn't like IT wasn't like canada weather to get that on the table right away, but he was not california weather either.

And and so the notion that there actually would be even ice on the roads, so you didn't really want to leave your houses a couple days as a thing know, or that the power might go out or that the internet might go out, or you any of these inconveniences, none of which are a big disaster. It's like nothing like what Thomas in his community, what you guys are are are going through at all. They're really inconveniences.

But it's it's the ninety percent. So so you I think when you said ninety percent, that kind of speaks to me because it's like OK. Those are the things that I I can prepare for the ten percent, it'll never happen. But I could certainly think about that ninety percent.

yes. So it's really important to look around you. I mean, can look at for me. When I moved my slightly rural area, I talk to the community.

One of my greatest sources has been going and talking, going to have a firehouse, meet ups and things like that a going in, hey, you know what have you had to deal with? You know what have you um what have we experienced in? So for us it's ice on the roads. Um it's um our water systems atrocious and we lose water two or three times a year where you just get a boy, we get a boil water notice because the pipe broke somewhere um and electricity being out. And so it's important to be able to plan for those things.

the inhabited what sort of things come to your mind when you think about a disaster?

Um so first off, I wanted pay a sobbing thought to what josh a said and it's can get response actually what happens if you lose your job to to a disaster like holy crap okay, so let's put that aside. What affects me, where I live is know there's A A concern about floods, wildfires and what happens if the power goes out in the middle winter is not abNormal. Or I live in southern Alberta, which is very different than even in two hours.

North here refers to see negative forty degrees for two, three weeks on end in the winter, but typically is pretty mild. It's you know zero degrees for rent height minus ten fawn height is not awful. Market shivering at the thought of what that means as a california.

The question is, first he goes negative .

what he goes market muted with whatever he said a second ago but um you know but if we are to lose power in the middle, one of those negative forty snaps like holy crap, what you do about that, right? So those are the big three on my mind. Fortunately, after a twelve years of living where I do, i've only experienced A A power failure that lasted longer than five minutes once. That's really good for great stability.

That's very good. So when I lived in san haz, we would have power loss probably two or three times a year, somewhere between a couple of hours and in some cases, at a couple of days. And IT was not due to any legit reason in my mind.

It's because the power company decided that we would be safer with no power rather than having power in a place that they ever maintained. So they just decided to shoot off the power. And IT really was irritating to say the least.

So even when there isn't a disaster, there could be like two hundred miles away. But they were like, you know, we're shut off the stuff ah the juice because we don't want to have a fire because we don't maintain our wires anyway. Mark ababa, you what what about in the in the cushy central coast of california?

Yes so um to add what you were say before I go to my own, the other thing you guys have to deal with up in the bay areas, snipers taking out your substations.

Well, actually put we I remember snipers that we had guys with shovels going through the fiber.

for sure yep well yeah so there was a sniper who was shooting at the the substation on eighty five south, I am sorry, one to one south of eight five, you know, that big substation out there by sanditon. Sa, yeah yeah. There few years ago there was a snipe er that was trying to take that out um and then there was also the fiber one where a somebody got into a mental cover, one of the little vaults on the ground and they didn't just cut the fiber. They cut the fiber twice like a few feet away from each other.

Because if you just cut the fiber that can be spliced, like they cut the fiber on both sides of the coil of of the of the slack coil that was in there, which means that you, like they IT was they knew what they were doing. Is the point right? Like they were intentionally trying to cause havoc with the internet.

And boy Hardy did they succeed? These events are on the internet and go find out I remember the details or whatever. Ah, okay, so I live in california still.

We have what is IT. Our four seasons are flood, fire, earthquake and riot. I think those are like the four seasons we have every year. Luckily, ride has not been happening much lately, but we do get fires all the time and we get the occasional earthquake um not nearly as often as the fires, which I guess is good. But the problem with earthquakes is that you don't know when they're going to come.

You can't pretty m there is no quote and quote earthquake season like there is with fire right when fire season comes around, you know to get prepared and and have all your stuff topped off. That is not the case with earthquakes. And with with both fires are libeled to kick you out of your home and and send you one hundred miles away, right? So you need to be able to uh have the bug out bag ready to go for all that stuff.

Um the earthquakes are possible to do that, but that's much less likely. The more likely case with the earthquake is that you're going to lose services uh between power, water um gas if you use IT. There's a lot of gas uh in california um like natural gas um your gas stations, like petrol stations near you maybe out may run out of things. Um your grocery stores are not going to be able not necessarily going to be able to open up and sell you things and to right. So like those kinds of issues from an earthquake, that's what we've always had to that's what we've always thought about when doing earthquake prepared this in california.

So I think it's it's safe to say that um an emergency can come in a lot of forms IT. IT could be something just an innocence or IT could be a real life threatened disaster. So I think that is the backdrop um we should spend a little bit of time then talking about um how does .

radio kind of fit in .

you know so so the conventional wisdom is hams are you know public service minded people for the most part and when disaster strikes, hams want to help out. I mean, that's kind of part of what we do. That's for one hundred years that's been part of being licensed radio amateurs to be available to help in the case of an emergency.

And I guess i've heard a lot to talk you know on youtube and events. And so worth about the role of amateur dio these days. And is this still useful? Is that absolute?

What form as at taking is at changing and all that sort of stuff? So i'd spite worth the mom, which is to touch on that. So mark, ana, you had some thoughts down down this single yeah .

um I try not to talk about this too much because I do believe this is a very unpopular opinion but i've had the unpopular opinion for a while so I put my finger .

on the beat button here on the beat butter no.

I don't I don't think i'm not going to be swearing anything like that. But that helms have outgrown their usefulness in public service of large scale events. And let me explain what I mean by that.

Back in the nineties, in my day in one thousand nine hundred and ninety four, here in california, and lisa spoke california, we had what we call the forty one fires. There was a fire that started up moral bay and progressed all the way down the cellular. A ridge came up with the name of the ridge anyway and IT burned everything in its path.

Um I have friends uh who had a house out there and uh I came and visited their house several years later they had rebuilt and everything else but they had the giant metal sculpture looking thing hanging up on the wall on their front porch. I was just kind of this neat splodge of metal and I asked them what that was and he just got this huge smile on her face and she's like, can you guess? And I couldn't.

And he explained to me that when they came back to their house after the fire, the car was completely gone, except for the engine block that had melted and fAllen into the rocks under deef. A car like her aluminum engine. B nothing .

because .

of this fire, right? And so they kept on to that. They held onto that as kind of a reminder of you know where they live and and the dangers of all of that fun stuff anyway. So back in ninety four .

the you .

know we have this huge thing and those fires took out the two big um uh radio sites in the area. Test, test her peak, request a peak. And a lot of the county comes and city comes and what not? We're on those peaks.

And so they lost repeated, they lost their communications. But we have had repeatedly in lots of different places. And so not just on those, on those top hill tops, this high hill tops.

So we were useful in passing communications for red cross, for hospitals, for police, for fire. I was stationed with a vie engine for several hours the night that I was happening, and their radios could only do simplicity. So we had repeatedly on other hill tops that were still alive.

And so we were able to provide communications for the fire department, right? And they were actually like government organizations. And that was great. And I got super excited about about this because i've been a handful about two years at that point.

Fast forward to two thousand five, we had an earthquake in uh kind of in the northern part of our county up your passion robots and IT topped some buildings up in uh in passo there was a couple of brick buildings up there that collapsed and and killed a few people. Uh in the building and ham's got called out for that one because there were um there were some communications problems in the past robots area but much less, significantly less. The cellular network was spotty and the radio network that they had built was still there, like they had rebuilt the radio network after the money for fire and that thing was robust as A F .

as four told um and and .

so like in two thousand and five, we had the earthquake and most of the things were still up and running and we call ourselves out and we helped out for like an hour to and then all of the the agencies were like, thank you very much. Go home now um you know we got we ve got IT now all their comes were back up and ever since then, any time we've had a like a county White power outage or we've had we haven't had any major earthquake since then. But like all .

the networks.

all the commercial networks and the public safety networks, our robust enough to survive moderate, moderate events where we live, right the level of the event that IT would take to take out those systems, in my opinion, is to the level where we himes are outclass in our ability to provide communications to those serve agencies. And like the two thousand five event, kind of got me thinking about that.

And now i've seen where my self, my cell phone works and where IT doesn't work in in all of that fun just like IT has gotten nothing but Better and the power delivery has gotten Better. The internet delivery is Better. The phone network has always been fantastic.

Um but I just kind of of the opinion that kay, let's go back and take a look at the hurricanes in porter rio as an example right? Porter rio got absolutely devastated. The entire island was without power for I don't know if he was weeks or months but I was a long damn time. And hammer radio got together a bunch fifty volunteers with a unch of equipment, and we sent them down there. and.

There's a term I want to use but where a family shows so I can't but um the words start with charity and fox drought and IT was just not good, right? The hands that went down, some of them were were good, but there were others that were causing more load than they were helping. They didn't know what they do, that what they were doing.

They went into the situation, assuming ing that they were the saviors and that they were going to be the only solution to all of the problems. And they ended up becoming a problem themselves. And so kind of that progression of of disasters and seeing amazing radio serving in those situations has made me skeptical of large scale and calm services that we can provide. And I usually keep my voice shot about this, or my, my, my mouth shut about this, because this is an unpopular opinion. And honestly, if those relationships with those served and a served agencies that gets us access to a lot of hill tops and gets us access to a lot of radio rooms and towers and what not, and I don't want to go around causing a fuss and you know get all of that taken away, especially since I assume the vast majority of the hobby disagrees with me.

So can the question ah um so I don't actually completely disagree with you. What's your viewpoint on more of the non commercial levels? So as far as hams just talking to hams and the local popular kind of like how Thomas, how to do in reaching out works in a kind of do, do you still feel that's very relevant and critical things like that?

So that is actually the next progression. So thank you very much for the for the same way I have I did when I formed this opinion. I did say that like I do think cm radio was still useful on the small and medium scale, right and um in communities in a in a community environment, not necessarily served agency environment.

But for me talking to my neighbors and this is where the other piece of privilege came into this whole thought process that Thomas the experience has uh smacked me upside the head about. I have only been considering all of this, given an urban or suburban context, because that is the only context I have ever known. I grew up in silicon valley. I live in sanluis, a bis pa, which is, you know, there are few hundred thousand people in this county into me.

That is a tiny, tiny town, right my town has forty thousand people in IT um and that is small to me whether Thomas lives in a community with less than one hundred like on on your street and you know in times like this that is your community and so watching Thomas and reading his reports and listening to you tell your story has made me realized that a lot of my unpopular opinion um really is centered around an urban and suburban viewpoint and um I I I just need acknowledged that and and start looking at other opinions right? Representation matters here. Let's go get some rural representation into this and so my my opinion ist changing is what i'm trying to say.

I still feel that way about the large scale events and trying to help serve serve agencies um but I am finding much more and more valid useful IT in the local community environment like what Thomas has been dealing with right? And IT doesn't necessarily have to be ham radio. If you got all your everybody, your community on hammer radio, that would be great because that gives us all kinds of other things long range H F communications, blood blot of blood um but G M R S or F S or uh commercial band repeater systems, our simplex systems registered thank private systems like that within a given community, I think is our new areas I am going reject again.

I actually work and have worked for about the last twelve years or so for one the largest corporations in the cell phone community. I'm not going to adopt my cell anymore than that. And two thoughts listening to you talk.

Uh the first is um three thoughts. The first is it's going to differ the capabilities of the official response. People, fire, police.

Anything like that is actually going to differ from community to community. Some have put effort into hardening their communications. Some of them rely on nothing but cell phones, even though they're a huge city.

Well, speaking to that fact, um potent almost lost its entire cell network about three or four years ago. We had a really bad ice storm inches and on inches of ice on the road. And we could we lost power city wide.

We almost could not get prop in tanks to the cell sites in time to get their generators refilled because we were without power for, I think, as four, five days, we were twelve hours from running out of power to almost every single cell tower. Important, I thought a little bit. They got some much trucks out there.

They were able to get propane cks out and reveal everything disco trucks for um I can see which Carriers um so uh as appropriate right now. So um IT IT is robust and IT is getting even more robust, particularly with things like A T mobile and space sex and satellite texting and things like that. I think that is going to be a nail in ham radio as far as official support.

Um so IT is there. IT can IT has its weaknesses. The other part is is if we want ham radio to be there for both official and a hobby wise, we have to make sure our equipment, our repeaters, our radios are more robust and have more power for longer than the cell towers do, which means you need about two weeks of power if you want out last by a week.

So I get a couple of comments when I throw on time of this is I would sort of turn to absorb what you guys you're saying. Um I think just your point about its kind of situation was very true. So I think making a blanket observation step statements is is dangerous because it's not these things aren't univerSally true for every situation in every location.

So if if you're just kind of labor, the point if you and in an urban area, maybe the infrastructures is more harden. If you're in a rural al area, maybe not. So I mean, those are just different scenario. So there's no one right answer or a point of view because they're different situations.

Um I think the other thing that I I would come in on sins since I moved apartment, i've had the opportunity to be in a few meeting there in there with various different radio clubs who are supporting different government organizations. And uh there's a desire on the part of some government organizations to augment what they do with backup resources. Some of these are like municipalities and some of these are hospitals at Sarah.

And they actually in this area um have been reaching out to the amateur radio community for help and guidance because they don't really know what to do. They don't have like radio people necessarily on staff, so they're actually looking for help. I think if you're in los santos and in new york, there's a building full of people to do this.

But when you get to amid size that you d like even like partners they don't necessarily have. There's like one guy you know who knows about this sort of thing. It's not a big team of people and they're more open to getting help, but they don't necessarily know what to ask for.

And we as amateurs aren't necessarily very well organized to provided on a sustainable, reliable commercial basis either. So I think you know we have we have some work to do on that side as well. But one thing that I noticed, I think that .

really I want to point that I thought that is the key concern that I have is that we use which want to be able to show up with uh, the organization like there of yeah right we used to just be able to show up with an H. T. And we'd be able to add value.

And I don't think that's the case anymore. And so now we need we need to be more organized. We need to have be differently organized, right? I don't want to talk crap about my local areas group, but they've all been around for decades.

And we've been all around since that nineties era that I was talking about nineteen because that's what I was in IT. I'm sure it's to been around a lot longer than that. But you know the three, two thousands era, all of that. And I just think the way that we've done IT in the past is not the way we need to be doing IT going forward and how much. So I know what the answer is on how we should be doing .

to going forward, but I think you've really hit a key points that is, radio used to be very integral to our lives. You want to talk some overseas. You paid out the long distance, picked up the radio.

You know handy talkies were a lot more common back in the days. Um we don't use them up as a whole day to day. And training is such a big part. Practicing is such a big part of disaster prepared. This is not like the nineties anymore, where y two k coming to buy three pilots of freezed dried food but did your bunker filled with concrete and you're good to go for the next whatever um it's that was that's terrible. It's a terrible idea.

So let me let me .

in practice.

let me add to what you guys are saying. I agree and I disagree, so let me explain. So there a couple scenario that i've encountered. One scenario I encountered was the desire for a set of hospitals to be able to have voice communications when the internet in the cell phone system goes down.

And the solution that they that appeals to them is actually FM voice that would have enough coverage footprint to be able to talk to their various hospitals in the region. And that is exactly the old fashion solution that they would love to see. okay.

So don't jump to the conclusion that just because IT was the thirty year old of solution that is thus bad because there is value in that. okay. So maybe not everywhere know maybe if you find your local fire chief, you could probably are less about your cute little radio system because they have a first net they've got, you know, their own hardened public safety system in bubba.

But the hospital certainly doesn't. So it's situated in that old FM repeatedly solution may be the perfect thing for some situations. Another thing I would mention is perhaps to your points k about do something different.

What a lot of the the the served agencies that i've seen in this area react to, but they didn't know to ask for IT, is data infrastructure. So what appeals to them and what? Like your point, josh, if if you talk to someone today, like what do you really want? The first thing I want is my phone to work.

The second thing I want is my laptop to work because everything i'm going to do is going be texting and emAiling and stuff like that. And so having data infrastructure in many situations is more important than invoice in for structure in general. So I think like when I look at some of the areas, groups around here, the cities that they're working with, the thing that the cities really like their ears, you stand up when they say, I can get you a IP connection from here to there.

They're very interested in that. And so I think that's why the whole arden thing is really blossomed because that is kind of a infrastructure play. It's a private in network.

And you had me until you said arden, my problem, my concern that I don't think amateur ninety seven of the right rule set to .

be doing that in OK. Let me, let me clarify the the, the artists can be used at under part ninety seven amateur rules and frequencies. You can also read in part ninety five or whatever that I think is.

Part ninety five is like the commercial version of commercial wifi. My point is fifteen five. okay.

So my main point, my main point is that the value that we bring to the party is that we were the AV guy in high school. okay? We know, we know how to strip a wire. We know how to duck tape something. We know how to configure piece of software.

Where were the guys with the with the you, the pockets full of screwdrivers and and IT? May be the screwdriver you need is a FM or Peter for some situations, or could be you need a point to point back all at, you know, five bigger hurts to get your data from here to there, or could just be need to understand how to make these laptops work or or whatever. My point is, is that we sort of become the, the, the useful nerds that know how to handle a screwdriver and that's a super valuable asset.

And and so I think um IT may be that that we we when we showed to the to the disaster with our handy talking and the guys like I don't need that, what I really need to, someone installed some software. Okay, fine. I mean, so we should really embrace that kind of bigger sort of role in the right situation. So events, i'm curious to know what your thoughts are down those lines.

I've often said that the strength of a ham who has done um a lot of contesting, so my preparation notice do a lot of phone contesting, especially so that you can pick the voices out of nothing is out of come in handy when you got competing signals on FM. Um I often said that our strength is the ability to get a message regardless of the format of the protocol from point a to point b. So let's unm packed out a bit.

Is that over packet radio? Is that over, uh, a wifi point to point you see we understand how to put up in an tani and get a transmitter and receiver working. It's Frankly almost in consequently what kind of gear we plugged into that antenna be at A F M radio, be at a data mode of, uh, with a radio built in whatever, whatever, right?

So the the one piece that we haven't touched on with all of this is in back to march point about relevance and all. I'll join in on that big wage as a guy who canada is largest natural response in twenty thirteen, a handbrake response to the natural disaster is the one thing we are poor at, relatively poor at. okay.

So i'm sorry i'm going i'm going to a piss off a bunch of people here because i'm giving a generalization against. Okay, but that's okay. It's my turn to say i'm sorry, is a canadian, all right.

Um and the one thing we don't do enough of, i'm not to say we fail to do but that we don't do enough of is work with served agencies to understand their requirements. So the project manager in me says I can deliver anything to Georgeous point about being the screwdriver A V nd um but I need to know what to deliver. So why don't we have a discussion during Normal times? And let's talk about capabilities. Let's talk about what your needs might be and then build a shared services plan or a memorandum of understanding or whatever you want to call the document to say these are the services we can deliver. These are what you can call upon us for.

So I think you we're ort of bouncing back and forth on a notion to which is um there's kind of one mode of Operation, which is I have a personal or a group of people who are going to be working with a third agency and they're going to be official and there are going to be trained and there's going to be some m and there's going to be some structure, infrastructure and expectation of service rendered, which is all fine.

But then there's also the ad hoc, you know oh, there's a problem. We're just going to jump in and try to help. Now sometimes that's not possible because the people who need the help don't want you because you're not trained and that's understandable.

But there's other times when no ham rady was a big self healing network. In other words, when the resilience in ability of amar radio is is the you know thousands and thousands of people with thousands and thousands and thousands of radios who can like set up up anywhere. And and if a half of them don't work as okay because half of them will.

So you know, it's kind of A H swarm mentality. IT was. But the point is that as an individual, if your stuff is ready and you could provide some help, and that's also a useful thing.

And depending on your situation, arb could could be the case. I think we do need more a, by the way, more organized groups of people who are trained and and connected with with some organization to be able to help. I think that's that's very helpful.

And a lot of times i've seen when sometimes an agency goes to a club and said, hey, would you guys like to help us? The club leadership is usually like, yeah, we would love to but you turn around to OK who wants to volunteer to help people like i'm happy to volunteer to help if I don't have to do anything. I mean, it's the usual volunteer mentality of like I don't have time for itself because either I am busy, I ve got a family, i've got stuff to do or I just can't be bothered.

So people often don't volunteered to put in time and effort because they just they're busy with other stuff is not their job. You so which is kind of so there's this is a gap of a perception. Tell us what what do you .

think yeah there's I think the first while there are lot of things here to impact because um I I was listening to what mark was saying, what all of you were saying but what mark was saying specifically, he's kind of him such a different position than we are you know in terms of being uh, in a pretty a place with some harden systems pretty robust, have dealt with some a pretty devastating things in the past and all the systems are in place so that they don't fail as often.

And here in rural areas even you know ash bill is not a small town. It's it's a fairly large city. One of the larger cities in north care align is growing.

Want to know I just outside of IT as a smaller town is not even a fully incorporated uh city or anything um but like when the stuff hits, our networks are way more fragile. In fact our uh our net r internet uh connection here has been copper uh for two miles down to a box that didn't has fiber in IT. But it's basically copper up a right because no one wanted to invest in IT.

And when we've had I think that was two years ago, we had um uh some kind of storm of them that not to a tree down, they break our copper line. Uh they patched IT and then instead of even putting up A A new pole or anything where the old pole was, they just tied and into a tree and that was our line I was our connection to the internet. So the systems were already fragile ah to begin with and um I do think though in a way IT had a Better prepared.

It's almost like this thing of lower expectations. When you have lower expectations and you're used to fragile systems, you're actually Better prepared when things happen. Uh, so we on our road, even though we were disconnected from the world for uh quite a few days for I mean, you can argue us for two weeks just because the robe is so precious for a lot of people.

Um we did pretty well because we were prepared here. We kind of anticipate and think about those things happening. We are used to our power going out. Um it's gone out six times this year since we had our solar a system put in our house and I noticed that only because like the atomic keep track of IT and um and we've had guests in our real house when that happened each and every time and twice twice as they were checking in, there was no power in the house. So we're used to things like that happening here in downtown ashville.

People in a lot where shape because they didn't have the tools, they uh of some of them didn't have the skills and a lot of them just I was like this level of complacency where they were so used to things just always working and bouncing right back. But when they didn't, they didn't know what quite what to do. And for them IT was power was one thing, but also water. They're used to having water even if the power was out, they're still have water. But this this storm was so devastating that IT knocked out our water, which no one would have ever thought would happen.

I don't think anybody guess that like literally all three of our main um water facilities where IT would be knocked out, our reservoir and everything and our treatment facilities so that kind of throw everybody for a loop to the point that ash el couldn't get fresh water even trucked in from as two days because their fresh water supply that they use as an emergency backup was wiped out with flood. Well wow, right. So um I think and I think about amazon radio and how I kind of came in as this thing.

And I was thinking probably along the lines of you market one point I was like, you know how relevant are you know, areas we're doing? All these, you know, who were talking enough never been involved in an iris club. I have been involved in plenty of nets in my time. H, F and V, H, F, U, H, F.

That's which is really something everybody should do at some point if not not if only just to understand how traffic s handled because that was the one thing amateur radio were really amateur Operators were really good at doing as handling traffic, uh, possibly Better than even some public service places where you may have a professional. The other end managing traffic. But here like people could like say i've gotten go grab dinner. Can someone else take over that control and they would do IT and um because they are used to doing this. So there's like a skill there above and beyond being what i've always called pilcher boy, which is back in my days when I was in school, you always had that one person that knew how in your classroom how to fix the film um the film trip device to watch the films in .

class you know the teacher .

the project .

is to think I don't get any of .

these references guys but you know the uh I do think that there is a skill set there. There's also uh I spoke with a fema guy who actually well actually he may not be female. He was actually part of a searching rescue group ah that was in our area and um he came his that team came to one of our community meetings that we had and I was talking about you know the radio infrastructure we were putting in uh during the emergency and just in our valley and he kind of thought me later he said i'm actually the communications guy, you know, for our search and rescue people and I was asking him some specifics about their radios and stuff just kind of talk to him a little bit how he was waiting because there was was a big long line of vehicles blocking the road and I realized that he knew a lot about their system but i'm not even sure he knew what frequency is.

Most of the channels were on and on the radios because it's so channelized, it's so key into what they doing that they um a lot of them, it's just it's like another tool that you're using. And as long as the tool works, they're great. If something breaks, they get another tool. H to replace IT.

And I do you think that's where amateur radio can really um you know amar radio Operators, you have a skill set that useful in these situations but IT was I think you know here at least IT did not turn out to be one of those things where we were not wanted or needed in fact, um. Is still very much in Operation in a lot of areas here. Even though we're more along, we're out of some of that initial recovery phase and are part of the county.

There's still this need a new for communications here that amazon dio filled. So IT is I think there is a big divide between rural areas and urban urban areas. And I think that was differences between different urban areas. And like you were saying, josh, you know just the differences um you know between different areas where different communities that put more resources in time and to building out their infrastructure.

Our county calm system is run by a bunch hams that are very good at what they do. And we have an incredibly robust system around here. So like, you're right and that's part of the privilege that I was talking about that i'm realizing I have right is the I have lived in this area where we've got such great communications and you know that's that's all i've ever really known and so watching your situation is kind of snapped me out of that um with regards to my unpopular opinion.

So I though I didn't want to add one thing to what what George was saying earlier about how weep hams are the evy nerds and therefore we should be getting involved in things like setting up data networks and being able to do voice communications with you know FM repeated and what not. My only response to that is in communities, you you're setting up a commercial repeater, and Thomas, setting up A G M R S. repeater.

And I would i've considered putting up A G M R S. Repeater in my area as well, although I know we've had to get some right, not him, right. And we're talking about setting up data networks.

And part ninety seven rules are problematic for data networks because we're not allowed to do in cypher. And so many of our network protocols default to encysted. And and making sure that that's not happening isn't really feasible.

And so systems like Cooper tinos arc net, which my cell has given presentations on, I think he gave a presentation on a bay net or back on ah not long ago. It's it's a giant you know no infrastructure or very little infrastructure mesh wifi network with directional antennas and went on is very similar to arden except that is not auto configure. It's managed um but that's all on part fifteen.

And by the way, I did confirm it's part fifteen to two forty seven is where all the wifi stuff is. So IT is part fifteen um but that's all in part fifteen. And so at that point, we hams are just nerds, which is good.

We're skilled nerds and we're very handy, but we don't have to limit IT to the nerd who have taken the test for amateur dio, right? It's a different group. Now IT becomes orthodontal with a lot of overlap. What orthogonal and that we can get all kinds of different nerds involved in that um to to do those kinds of volunteers and what not. So like there's very little that I don't want say very little, all the things that we're coming up with are not part ninety seven specific disagree.

So I I think many things are, but like this example of the want to hook up the hospitals together, that's that's an immature radio project that's not going to be a commercial channels. Um could be could be, but it's not and not because they can organize themselves to do do do IT properly um and if they did, they have to go get commercial funding and IT would be so expensive that never do IT, and we have the infrastructure around.

So so in a situation, so many cases, you're correct. I believe I could be the pot of nerds that, you know, like i'm a nearby guy. Well, we really need you. I mean, regardless of what frequency the thing is on, right? yes. So I think IT just depends on on the situation where some infrastructure and some Operating stuff happens to be up the ham radio ally, and sometimes it's not so and that's .

that's the perfect example, sorry, time as someone a mind. It's the perfect example of needing to assess what your disasters are going to be there. So my company actually built out a first net network in this town. There is going to be no need for art in ham radio just in this town because IT is so hardened and so backed up and none of the emergency services are ever GTA get to need. But that's one town you really got ta look at what does your area need.

So with us, uh, being rural, the fire chief and some of our club members have actually talk about putting an art in network in all of the uh, fire stations, uh going up the gorge because they have no backup data network. And so just to have something there where they can take a cell phone connected to the wifi and try and text each other call apps, they're things you can do through garden that allows you to do stuff like that. It's is something we've been in talks with.

So joe Sunny, you said two things that I was surprised you're second comment seemed out of place at the first. And the first thing you said was because of this first net infrastructure, everything is so harden that you don't need anything. By the way.

we'd like to have a backup. So it's not not that it's a different not in my first alert is not in or the first network is not in my town. That is a different time in a different state OK.

I was comparing, contrasting that time will never need IT. My town has nothing like that. I and so we are preparing because we have nothing like that. Um so again, I just really boils down to assessing your emergency uh and what you need. And I just want to say the difference of an occurrence being an inconvenience and a disaster is your level of prepared .

ness you know with Thomas.

so much of his disaster um while bad was almost in inconvenience because you had the food, you had the water, you had been on a stationary bike. And so when you needed to make ten miles, you could and even bring back hundred pounds a dog food or you know IT is I actually .

I never like trained for that specifically. Um IT was just kind of aside benefit of of this thing i'd done. But you're right I I didn't suffer too much because of that.

Yeah so by the way, does this mean you're going to start shopping for an eighty leader backpack? So if you really need to Carry a bunch of stuff .

that I suggested, a smaller dog, but that's .

just my approach.

Put a lot of diet IT boils down .

to how prepared you are. So if you picture yourself as one of those people, that's if you're like, alright, disasters sers gonna happen. I'm going to grab my ht. I'm going to be the one to go help. Then bygone, you Better be out at your local community, whatever in our case areas is really plugging in with all the local fire departments and other very active around here.

You you Better be even if it's just for a year or something, you're Better to be going on volunteering and practicing because if you show up and don't know it's going on and you don't know how to program a random repeat india A H T um you know IT without using cheaper, you are useless and sometimes during the way. So if you don't have a training for IT and if you're not practicing for IT, you know if you want to be the person that's on the radio can like you're saying with contesting, contesting is great practice. And so if you're not, they are doing the practice. When an emergency comes around, you're going to be lost, you're going to be confused and you're going to be worthless.

yes. So I uh so first of all, like I think that as I said earlier, everyone should if you're a ham ready Operator, you you should be obligated even if you if you live in an area that doesn't have a repeater that has a regular net that check into one of the hf nets or something, you need to get used to just the format, how traffic is handled, having in that control and understanding that role.

And maybe even if you can do this locally and um don't look at me because actually haven't done this, but actually Operate a full on net control for a regular net. So you're used to that. Now I can do that control in a pinch, but we can but i've never actually officially done this for a club.

Anything I will I want to add one more thing to that whole amateur radio role just so we can can beat IT to that. Um the one thing that I learned in this is that when a disaster happens, you do have kind of like a lot of pieces that come together and they don't come together very perfectly. Um there is a government response that your families, your search, rescue, your local state, federal governments, provincial governments and whatever you know, depending on where you are in the world, there's this government response.

IT comes in with own infrastructure, its own way of doing things. And we found that is it's pretty long effective. I mean, they really do get out a lot of places, but what makes the disaster response um so complete is a lot of the private groups uh in s organza non profits individuals that kind of come in and do their own thing. Nature radios s role is actually bridging those two things. And that's what we found here.

So like on our repeater, uh, there was some by station at the fire department and at all of these different centers, these centers where emergency response was um you situated there would be amateur dio Operator, they are nearby to communicate and so we would get you know kind of like IT was this connection to get government resources sometimes that would go through the amateur radio network um and vice versa. You know they wouldn't to know things and they could go back through the amateur dio in network to reach out to people because the tunnel, you know you don't know when like fema comes in and um even share of departments from different counties and and police departments from all over north CarOlina and other states come in here to help. They're not on the same networks everybody else is on, you don't know them.

But amateur radio actually did bridge that gap fairly effectively. IT was actually communications link between those two things. And I think that's really good part of the role for that.

But to your point, josh, what we are saying, I I totally agree. I think that you you can't there are two people down our road uh that um are going to call them out at all. But one of them, an active amateur AI Operator has a license.

This valid is in the same radio community. The other one is kind of an overlander guy who had a beefing ht um and play neither neither one of them had ever a relief and programmed their radios. So they didn't even know the local repeater frequencies or anything and what disaster happens.

That's not when you want to start doing that, especially with a belphin. You do not want to be doing that, that right because they're complicated. They're not easy to to use. And uh, you can and think this is one of the things with people that can call themselves propper is that they they feel like if they just get all the tools together, they'll be fine and they can skip all the skill. But you got both tools and skilled to kind of make the thing .

work and play are playing as as a prepared individual yeah and ah .

so these are all these are all kind of practical things you you just need to think through before the disaster hits. You want to think through all this.

I want to jump in the roque a comment on the propose actually, uh, I didn't think I was going to be able to bring this up in the natural and the conversation. So how many jars .

of vegetables are you canning and putting in the bunker?

Uh, so, uh, no comment uh actually my wife hates scanning and daring things. So it's not an interpret because it's not something sustainable. But for us, um anyway, prepping is actually a fairly new thing overall. And in the nineties and particular was is in its infancy and had very much that mindset of buy the stuff, put IT in the corner of your garage during your bunker and then just let IT abroad for whenever the emergency comes.

Um and the nice thing is, is over the years, it's kind of matured into more the disasters prepared this mindset in the into the training because they realized that you know as of these little disasters happen, oh, I don't wanted eat freeze dried food for three days oh, water started in plastic for two years, tastes bad yeah and so it's because it's in its infancy. IT had kind of a hiccups and growing pains and it's starting to approach something uh in the serious community um uh something much more reasonable and sustainable, which is is nice to see um if I can take a quick step back. I actually want to disagree with George on something.

Not all hams are tech AV guys. I mean I I am but I have family members who they just wanted something that they could you somewhat reliably reach out to other family members if communications went down and they have no interest in using that ht beyond a basic push to talk. Um and so I think it's OK for them to be that way.

And it's important, as you are preparing for your disaster, to identify what you want and what you need out of something. So all you want to do is be able to reach out and talk to family, make sure you have the repeaters programmed maybe a little manual on how to program your radio um but don't expect to do more than that. You know for us AV tech guys that want to go out and help, we just need to make sure that we're doing the things and getting connected to where we can and know how be prepared to a different level of expectation.

So let me comment on your comment. So I was being overly I was doing a mark, which is the overnight general. So so my mistake.

Um so I I think there's in a way there's kind of two ham radio roles. There's the technical role and then there's the non technical role, which is we Normally think of as being the Operator. But IT could be the organizer.

IT could be the the you know the other the soft skill side of things that people are really good at. If you're not good at either one of those things, you probably shouldn't be there. I mean, I don't know if you can't do something either technical or like organization or communications while I Operating then like I don't know what else you would be doing in that situation.

honestly. You know IT could be what you're really good at is like you're an electric and you may not be the best radio guy, but by guide know electric stuff. And that super valuable, right? I started to put that in the in the technical bucket as well.

So the technical knowledge could be radio IT could be networking IT IT could be like how to rent a bodza. I mean that could be other skills that are super valuable. Um like like I learned that when we're building repeatedly that i'm pretty good at building the radio stuff, but i'm not very good at like the mechanical construction of the facility.

And we had club members who were like construction guys who knew a little bit about radio but when they knew construction well thank gunness for that because I didn't know that stuff. And together we ve got a lot of stuff done. So IT is like a kind of a smaller part of skill.

So I appreciate the correction. It's not just you know the evy early skills that we we all like, but it's the other stuff too. So I I want to wrap this segment here because I feel the urge to have a shopping show coming on.

I mean, we're getting closer to Christmas and and i've already had a couple of people email me like once the holiday shopping show gona happen. And it's not this one. This in IT, this is the disaster prep shopping show.

So so what I want to do is take a break. And when we come back in the the second half of the show here, we're going to do around table discussion about the things that we individually think would be really useful to have in case of emergency. So but that will be right back.

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So as we kick off the round table to talk about preparing individually for various emergency disaster situations, the way we're going to do this is to talk a bit about the kind of things that we Normally think about in preparing as amar radio Operators. And then i'd like to get everybody y's perspective on what kind of radio and non radio stuff are you doing. So vince, let's start with you. And since you've been participating in these kind of activities a fair bit and you're very well organized, let's start. And what are the obvious things that, that we all know that we should be preparing for but don't always do that?

Have you ever noticed that the people who everybody says they're very well prepared never feel that they're very well prepared, George, have you ever noticed that?

And the people that feel very prepared generally .

are not yeah and so it's kind of funny like that, right? So everybody should know to keep your handy talky batteries at a good state of church. I'm not gona go down the path of to keep them fully church to half church.

I mean, that's all a battery chemistry discussion. That's not what this is about, but know that your batteries are in good shape because you've been maintaining them and checking them lately, that you've got access easy access to some basics tools, flashlights, first ID kit, food, extra dry socks. Do not underestimate the value of having extra paris of dry socks available is nothing makes you miserable faster than wet feet no matter what you're dealing with.

Know what your back up power source is and know that IT has been regularly ly maintained, preferably by yourself going back to that A V G screwdriver discussion generator for whatever that is right um from a personal stamp ant know where your medications are, your your identification documents um know where your computing your portable computing years. Where's your laptop, where's the charger and maybe you have one of them great big as uh USB battery banks that can recharge a laptop twice because those things are invaluable. I I know in my everyday Carry, which is my backpack.

For those of you have met me, you've seen with my backpack um I Carry eight ten thousand million empower U S B A P D battery bank and in its size of a decca curds it'll church my phone a few times so that's okay, right? All of those things. That's table stakes.

If you don't have those, you're not anywhere near ready. If you come out to my event or you come out to my disaster and i'm not talking about the lack of organization in my basement, um you're not going to be super useful to meet without those things. I may turn you away even though I urgently need people or I may pare you up with somebody who is much Better prepared than you, because I really need the bodies out there for safety.

So anyway, thank you for coming to my tid talk. Those are at the basics. Those are tables kes.

Just to get in the game. No, IT strikes me as kind of funny that those things that you mention there to me, seems so obvious. Everybody listening to the show, if you said a homework assignment, make a list of what you should do, they would write down that list of things. I think the problem is probably half the people listening to this haven't done those things.

So what what's at all? The action of the problem with common sense is that isn't too terribly common.

But yes, exactly. You know, we all kind of get complacent. One thing I was in there, by the way, I have want to double le on your backpack point. Do you put all that stuff in your backpack?

I put some of that stuff in my backpack. The, uh, medications, the I D, the, uh, the charging gear for my laptop, the USB battery bank, multi two and a flashlight. Yes, all of those things are in my edc.

So I think this is one thing that maybe people might do, even if they would have all their basic stuff. And that is that it's somewhere like, where's your laptop power adapter? So maybe here's an example.

Maybe for your laptop in an emergency, you should have a second one, one that you leave at your desk where the computer lives, and another one in your car or in your backpack. Because when you're dash out the door and you take your laptop, did you remember to take the power doctor? Do you you want a twelve o power adapter to go with your laptop, not just one hundred and twenty four power doctor? So I think you know even though that's the obviously st keeping that stuff organized and together I think is is a valuable exercising and of itself the .

I think as well say I think to events that that list uh like you said, George IT peels kind of basic but there are many people who don't do that um and i'm glad you asked him about what was in a edc because um you also have to think about like when disasters or events like this happened.

Where are you gonna be if you your house like you got all the resources of your house um if you try to someone asked me, uh like two days after the storm came through or something, they said, well, why did you guys just evacuate? And the truth is, before and IT comes through, sometimes you feel like you're gonna prepared at your house. And if you drive three hours to a hotel and then the storm views off and actually causes more damage, and you're stuck in a hotel without power and water somewhere with only what you have in your backpack, you know um but in my my uh backpack, my E D C, I Carry A A lot of the same things.

And I do Carry a power pd tight power supply because it's so nice to be able to recharge your phone for directions, to recharge your a laptop, whatever you need. And you have to think about that when you're out about, do I have water? Do I have a little bit of food to have some things you don't have to have a full blow out kind of go back um because most of us can't Carry around a full go bag plus our regular bag that we need for like laptop and all those things, you know. So Carrying around what you kind of those things is, is very important. And then not ignoring, like you say, keeping everything in good repair. I think IT takes a lot of discipline because if you have a generator and you planned to use a generator, you Better get disciplined about starting that thing up and and making sure IT works and making sure you get good fuel in IT that doesn't have water in IT or anything like sad that you're running IT you know how to run IT you know how to start IT um you know how to do that and you take your house offline sometimes to plug in the generator, make sure you know how to do everything you know you have to have to get to emotions .

and figure out what appliances work. There are a certain planes that won't run on a generator, right? And the last thing you want to be doing in the middle, an ice storm, is trying to figure out how to plug in your generator for the first time.

Yes, let me give you another example of bad prepared ness. This is something you do not want to do. Uh Georgeous talking about rolling blackout through cells formia.

Ah my parents had to deal with a roling blackout and uh, they were without power for several days. And actually this might have been when the tree limb fell on their power feed. Anyway, they were without power for several days. And my dad had a three thousand honda generator, a really good generator, um but he had no ability to start, get up and get things connected so he called me and said, hey, can you drive up here and set this up for us? And i'm like thinking about who else lives up there that I could call and whatever else and I could forget IT i'm just gna get in the car and go. I ended up having to drive three and a half hours to hook up a generator, get to know, get IT running, run a long extinction court into the house, plug into um my mom's oxygen concentration or my dead sea, pop the uh lift chairs because they both needed those and the refrigerator right like those are all the most habs um and my dad had the equipment but not the ability to get IT up and running when needed and sure, you have a plan for that.

I would also argue that um and there's that list then scared that you you want to take a hard look at investing in the best quality that you can comfortable ly afford in those key things that you have there.

For example, with the generator, you said that your folks had a handle generator, and that's probably a really good thing if they hadn't been using at a whole lot, because those little small honda generators are some of the most reliable ones. You can buy really cheap generators now, very, very cheap ones. But if you start reading reviews and you read, uh, anyone who's use this for a while after seventy, eighty hours, they may not Operate that well after that know they deliberate well up front, but not not over time.

I inherited that honda and it's been sitting on my book porch since my dad died a three years ago and I haven't exercised IT wants. So on the on the list of things that are obvious and everybody should be doing right, that one is is in my category of, no, i'm not doing that. I know I should be, but I haven't.

That story ended way Better than I was expected. I was expecting something about red neck plugging in now, let to back feet through the house without turning off the main break ers in the house. And I was expecting something like that.

Yeah, he knows enough electronics did not do that good.

You're talking about bags and how much you can Carry on your back. Um it's okay to have it's good to have different uh bags for different things. So for example, we have in our car a winter kit.

It's a doubled bag and that has coats and jackets and food and water and, you know, warmers and anything you would need in an emergency in the winter. And then we have a summer bag. Winter bag comes out.

Summer bag goes in. Totally different stuff and IT fit them, not total different, about fifty present different um and so we don't have to Carry everything on our backeds. There is you know you never know when going to break down and is no storm.

And just like that, we are in the back tok segment of the show.

Yes, I would like to point out that vince was the guy that created the backtalk segment of our just not just so .

I .

said just IT used to be dm r that came up every episode.

Now it's in I am going to point out. Uh, so as you all know um i'm not the guy to spend three hundred dollars on a pack but i'm going to tell the story of somebody who does and they are not here on the screen in front of me themselves IT was very no not to defend themselves IT was very enlightening when carlo felix canine Oscar lima explained to me that spending what seems to vent to be an insane amount of money or a lot of money on a bag really pays off in its durability, especially when you're rocking with IT every single day. And that's not something I think .

you're tell I what you .

think you know I just did tell the story and that was IT IT is that simple? Um when Carlos was deployed, he was frequent. He said, you know, the crap that they gave me for deployment wouldn't last three weeks so I bought my own o and I use that for quite some time.

So there was A A big eye opener for me. I had never thought of old using a bag every fricking day. I grew up my backpack, and I take up with me five or six days week.

But he doesn't have to survive. Uh, the outback of australia or the sands of afghanistan or whatever is not getting dumped in rivers is not getting beat up. So you have to be comfortable with your spend and the quality you are getting for that spend to head mark.

Yeah, this is attention not related to what we're talking about at ham exposition. Carlos came up to me and slammed his H. T. Down on the table and says, this is the only icon in the world that is drop tested to eighteen thousand feet.

Yes, yes.

And he's got the video to p.

he's got the video to prove IT too. Yeah.

I may have the number wrong, but yeah, that basically he dropped IT while he was jumping and IT went down that entire way. He found that he picked IT up. And the damn thing works not as I think to have like a little bit of a scratch, but IT was purely cosmetic.

And so that's that's something else that in my edc there are two handy talky at any time, usually is of the act seven. I have two of them. And yes, they now have names Lucy in linus for that .

in the .

last episode.

Exactly have vin Caroli is one of my favorites and um and share the the d seventy four usually comes long with me because I want to have a prs capability despite what kate M R D says about a prs. And so you know that's another discussion for another time. So there's always two radios with me.

I used Carry just one. When I got to the, I got to the floods eleven years ago, I quickly discovered I needed to in a hurry. Now I had three at that time, so now why.

why did you? Why did you need to?

Um, I needed to listen to three different freezes. At the same time, we were running a local talk about frequency around the eoc. We were running a frequency about the town. Then we were running a frequency for the wider provincial backbone net, and I needed to be able to hear all three them at the same time as the lead. So the net control people, of course, we're just focusing on one frequency at a time.

The extra onus two is, if one poop s out, at least you have one. So there is one ticket. Yeah exactly.

And then also you end up you could end up giving up to somebody else any other ham uh or somebody that needs, if for no other reason to listen or something like that. And on the comes um and I would say that like a really big thing for me and I don't know if you guys of peaches or not, but um I was lucky like uh most of the ht I was distributing who has having been using them all.

My daughters had two hts, my wife had one, I had one um and then we had like another set of the the same of the different type. Um you know when you charge a battery and you have IT ready and we did before the storm came um because that was one of the first things I did was like charge H T batteries. Have those things going, uh, have my shack battery going.

Even though we had a big battery system for the whole house, I still just didn't know what would happen. Um but like you have to really kind of use those batteries and use the radios and make sure that you know that you've got some life left in the battery because if you charge IT and put your pack packs in two years later, you pull IT out, expect to get a lot of performance out of that. Um you know and those battery packs just if they're not use a lot and you're not using a but they just the lunch evd is not wonderful on on a lot of those ht back battery packs, especially if you're going with the the cheaper products.

I think that those they're just not as high quality and the last as long. So that's something just like you're generator. You need to like exercise that you need to make sure that it's working and you get some good lunch. Vary on IT.

you know there, please do not underestimate the value that rehearsing regularly ly gives you. Pharmacy said earlier, get on the net handle traffic b net control. Yes, I want you to figuratively pop your pants out of nervousness at the thought of being a net .

control in a large .

net somewhere and not literally yeah that that is why I said figuratively I want you to go and start your generator four times a year and let a run for five minutes um I would actually .

like to add that event support if you've got ta close you by that is doing a vent support. My college club w six P H Z, you've d ve heard me talk about IT a lot. We did an event every year when I was there called the wildflower triathlon IT. Was you in fifteen thousand of your closest friends at a lake in um in just southern monitary county and IT was this huge half iron man triathlon. People came from all over the world to attend.

And we were the communications we would a pass communications back and fourth between um eight stations we had uh I one of my big things was that I had a motorcycle that had A P R S capability so they would send me out with a lead cyclist and I would follow the lead cyclist around so that not only that control but also the announcers could see on a map, my icon move around the map and they knew where the lead cyclists were at all the time and I could call back into that control and tell them who is in the lead and when the lead change happened and all that kind of fun stuff. And that event that we did every year prepared me more than anything else for, uh, running a net or participating in a net, right? Whenever the emergency communications happened, I knew exactly what the protocol was because we used IT in that situation. So if you've got a local parade or A A run or anything like that where the ham radio Operators get called out, go attend, not only are you helping your community and you're getting visibility into the hobby, but that is one of the best times to be able to practice what is like to run on a controlled nep.

Yeah indeed. Well, so George, we've been talking about those things that we think that everybody y's doing, but we have some sneaking suspicions that there's not.

That's right. So and so what I think i'd like to do is safe way into what are you guys doing besides the obvious I mean, everything you just ticked off their event in the rest of you is I think we all are to one degree and we're doing that stuff should be. But what are some other things there maybe a little bit more novel um in the radio world that each one of you guys are doing, Joshua in epic and you first since you're one of our guest of honor here. So h what do you do in yourself in the radio world to prepare.

uh, in the radio world? So I actually am switching over my main radio. I had an ftd x uh one a one and uh, i'm actually I just sold that shipped IT off and h, i'm getting a flex sixty four hundred.

And why is that interesting in emergency prep? This is a really good example of why you should use your radios to figure out what they can handle. Turns out the issue is a power hog on stand, but IT draws three .

to five ams, oh.

I have a look. I had a couple hundred and so let acid and we had a power out knows like great i'm going to go out to the my shack and I discovered two things. My shack is cold um I did not enjoy that.

The second thing is after sitting shivering for an hour, all sudden my my solar system, you lights up and goes, hey, you're about to run out of battery. It's like i'll have been on this an hour. I have there's a lot of power back there.

Power came back on later. I started running tests and things like that. You know which battery is bad and I wasn't the battery. This radio just sucks power and so um talking to some people that you might know on here that you know like flex, turns out flag is a little bit Better on the power draw. And I can Operate remotely which means I can take one of the cat six cables that i've run between my office shopper and the house and I can mount heads remotely or i'm also working on putting my wifi on battery back up, uh, and so I can wirelessly connect and Operate from the to my house. Well.

yeah, that's two power savings right there. I mean, you've cut back on your shack consumption and your shock heating everything there exactly well.

And particularly because out here, one of the big things we deal with is, uh, power loss. I mean, ice comes out, trees comes down, there goes or paralyzes. Uh, and for some reason, our water as well. Anyway, you know.

I really like the second half of that. I mean, the first part about the power consumption is very valuable, but the second part is something that people don't generally think about, which is in an emergency. Where am I gonna be? And how comfortable is that gonna be? And what can I do to make IT more tolerable? So IT, lets say you had your shackles set up with your new batteries and your new radio and everything is groovy.

And then you go out there and it's like, you know, this is all great, but it's very cold. So i'm not saying out here completely missed the whole opportunity to do IT, right? And so I love the fact that you can have figured out will wait a minute. I need to be remote this thing if by remote, it's just to be in the house, not in the in the shop or the shack or ever is a very valuable learning that a lot of people party .

don't think about oh yeah yeah and i'd hadn't thought about either and I went into several new issues of um you know Operating in the shack. One is is when powers out and the temperatures aren't quite in the negatives but they're down near zero. Turns out the family would prefer me with and around to them .

if you know the reason for warmth.

right uh you don't know how long that power out is just gonna be. And so, sure, I could hook up my second body, you know, big boy heater out here and warmed up, but am I gna need that propels ah you know you you have to think about, you know conservation and not knowing what's happening. So I would say that the biggest radio thing going on, if it's okay with you because i'm actually pretty proud of what i'm putting together right now. Can I talk about a non radio thing .

you can in the next round? So this round radio later, the next round will will be other stuff that's not radio. So hang onto that thought.

So that's my radio OK.

Vince, what about you? What are you doing to .

prepare a so a bit of a blended story. Recently, I took delivery of a new to me vehicle, and I wanted to correct my mobile installation from my last one. So my last one was two batteries in a diesel pickup truck, and all of my accessories ran off those batteries, including my radios.

Two vehicles ago, in a small diesel geta, I had an exili battery that was only church when the key was on, and that was the first superior solution because I wouldn't dream the vehicle battery running my radio, running my accessory. So with this new to me, it's a twenty twenty three f one fifty. It's hybrid called the eco boost.

And with that heads, very cool. It's very quiet around town because IT runs mostly on electric is very interesting um with that I have a small battery under the backbench. It's an eighteen amp hour battery.

So you're thinking to yourself, well you can't Operate one hundred watts on eighteen and power for very long. No other I plan to I built this thing to speak. I built this mobile station to speak.

I can run my radios for empty, empty hours, whatever that math works out to whatever power levels. Um but the charging circuit is not alive unless the truck is live. So there's some relay control for that trickle church circuit that keeps the battery happy.

There's really control for all of the accessories i've added in like the churching port for my cell phone. The GPS gets up on the dash because i'm too cheap to pay ten dollars a month to forward for their navigation services as a subscription. Homeboy doesn't do subscriptions uh, for my dash cameras ah for my solus booster, for all of those things.

They're under really control of an accessory, a circuit and the the truck presented some unique chAllenges with respect to mounting antenna is an aluminum body vehicle. So I had to plan very carefully at a mount antenna. Yes, that means the porcupine has fewer quills on IT. I'm still a little bit myth about that. There's only six on IT now .

instead of nine. But less him sexy.

I'm less ham sexy. You know that happens as you get older, mark, you'll have to get used to that one day. H, so all of that for me is is prep to ensure that, uh, my mobile station is as power efficient as IT can be. Now you can Better to ask every single uh accessory in there is wired with power poles, even my dash camp.

So I didn't have twelve als in the back seat, so I ran a twelve vote line from the um from the engine compartment into the back seat area and its under really control and IT terminates with a power pole and on the output of that relate control is a power distribution trip. On the output of that power distribution trip is a powerful that connects to a little widget that drops the voltage from twelve to five to power my review dash camp, everything is on powerful. What does that mean? Well, that means I can take that big fifty empower battery project that I built up, what? Three years? I don't know.

And I can drop IT into the back, see the truck and wire IT directly in if I need a capacity. So IT was all thought out with the city and mobility and uh, as smart as I could be consuming power while the truck was off. So that's that's my kind of preparation. Peace in the last month that has been a huge project.

So one thing I love about the modularity thing is, is if you look to the future as things like battery technology becomes less and less expensive and you can get Better quality batteries and higher energy density, you could say, well, i'm going to go buy a new whatever battery and drop IT into augment the system or swap out a pizza without like disturbing the whole upset up of the you've got yeah.

this was this .

was close to twenty hours of of labor to plan and install the whole thing to josh.

Does your battery charger, uh, have the time to auto shut off? I I have a similar set up in my truck and that saved me once or twice where I forgot that to left my radio on and I ve had set to cut the circuit after. I think it's three hours.

No, IT does not. And if that battery, if that exceler battery goes flat, it's gonna charge at seventy appears until IT happy again. It's an eighteen amp hour battery. So you know, being a glasses match battery, you know, four hours will top at them.

Very nice .

mark .

up at you. What radio related preparation, what are you doing?

Well, so it's actually kind of similar to what events uh, just described. Ed, what i'm doing mine in my shack um all of this came about because I had fall into my possession through mechanisms that I will not talk about publicly. Uh several battery packs that are thirty six volts dc at fifty five empowering.

all right.

So and I think there are eleven s or p or five p or seven p something along those line, but um a whole bunch of the the sells these are not lifting my and false fate. These are lithium on uh and each one of these packs has its own a bms installed in IT already um thirty six volts is not completely unheard of, but it's not nearly as common as twelve, twenty four or forty eight a nominal.

So I had a little bit of a chAllenge dealing with the fact that thirty, thirty six goals, and I considered to taking the packs apart and just using the cells and building my own packs. But these packs are are really well built, very study, very resilient. They came out of a situation where they were going to be seeing some pretty abusive a use.

And so I kind of don't want to take a model that I want to keep them in the packs that they are in. So I have six of them, six of these two kilo water hour battery packs. So you know the potential for an awful a lot of power here. Um and i've been designing with our battery friend myself, who's a local ham and a good friend of mine, um we've been designing how to use these in a ham shack um and IT boils down to getting at least one current limited power supply.

Um you and your power supply has to be current limited to the the maximum charge current of any one battery because of all of your other batteries fail and get taken off the line, you don't want the power supply to send any more than one batteries were the church current. But anyway, power supply and then you don't want to just stick the batteries in parallel either. So power supply into diodes to isolate each of the batteries and then diodes into the batteries themself elves.

And then again, on the other side, you want to use diodes to merge the batteries to combine their output again. So you got parcival diode battery, another dial into your bus, into your thirty six old bus and unfortunately you're suffering two diovolaccio rops um like in always running power. But um the good news is with these being thirty six old packs, the half of volt of a dio voltage drop is less impact for than IT would be at a twelve old system um yeah so anyway um and the the charge rating on these things is about ten apps um go hi josh so .

what voltage are you end up? You what's your end game for what you're using? Are you inverting IT to one twenty? Are you going na bucket down to uh twelve votes or what's what's your n game to use thirty six votes?

Yes and yes um so at the end of the day, you a um a quota thirty six old bus just like a twelve old bus that's actually um you know thirty six old is actually somewhere between forty one and forty two and down to thirty I think is the is the levels to shut off of these bm s so you have a nominal power range of between forty two and thirty that you have to be able to deal with.

And there are many fewer of them, but there are a peer sign wave A C inverters that will run off of a quote of thirty six old input, you know a wide volt drink input. And similarly I found a sixty amp dc to dc converter. Uh that'll take um the thirty six vote range in an output twelve als out.

Unfortunately I think that excuse me, literally twelve votes, not thirteen point eight. So that's going to be something that I have to deal with that or find some other solution for. But yes, so the idea is going to be power supply, dial splitters, batteries, dial mixers into a thirty six boat bus.

And then from that thirty six boat bus i'm going to be um powering a peer sine wave. I have a two killed ma peer sign wave in version and the sixty amp um uh dc to dc converted to run all my thirteen point eight stuff. Uh and right now i'm only planning on using that in my shack in my office um and I don't need a lot of instantaneous power, but adding battery packs for me was literally free or the cost of another couple of diodes because I got the packs for free. And you can with the diodes in there, you can just add more like there is no reason not to add more. Um yeah amErica .

and listening to this and i'm turn between us this frees and beer freezing puppy um a little .

bit of both because I didn't have to buy all of the other right. Like the diodes are basically free, but the inverter and the ah the dc to dc converter. And of course, if I find out that IT is really twelve votes and I can't adjust IT to thirteen point thirteen point eight, then I may be going down like free like puppy out to find a solution for that. They do have the new holiday product .

will come out yeah thirty six four conversion yeah exactly .

actually that would actually be really easy to do, but i'm not going to be doing that right. Um and then the other beautiful thing about this is that the way this is designed, I can add more power supplies as well.

So if I need more power than the thirty six old ten amp actually IT will be like forty one volt ten and power supply can provide uh then I can take three of them and put IT on one power supply, and three of a month put IT on the other power supply, or do two, two and two or all of the way down to one power supply for every battery because the power supplies are current limited at the charge rate of one battery. Um you know, I I can add as much instantaneous power as I need to by adding more power supplies to the system. The other cool thing is that I can do the same thing with a solar charger.

So what my eventual goal is, and I have not purchased to this yet because this is a much larger investment. My eventual goal is to put some solar panels on the roof, my shop, and run them down to a charge controller and P, P, T, controller, and dial mix them into the batteries as well. So at that point, I can do a system that monitors the voltage of the bus.

And when the bus voltage drops too low, IT turns on the ac power supplies, right? So the goal being that if the solar is enough to provide my power needs, then the batteries will Carry me through the night, and then the solar will charge a backup in the day. And as long as the solar produces enough for my battery needs, I am completely upgrade. But if it's a dark day or or a high consumption loader, whatever IT is and my battery start getting down too low, then IT says, all right, I need A C power and IT turns on the ac power to fill up the batteries again um or get him up to a certain threshold or however I want to program that and then turn them off again and let the power let the solar compensate .

I don't know it's dark days in california.

Yeah you know .

less bright .

today. Last one of that way, we do get overcast. Um we actually we do in in real talk, we do get what we call a marine layer which is basically fog from the ocean and that will come in and socks and the solar does basically nothing whenever we ve .

got a marine layout. I have an a tengiz al question for you and your batteries there. With that kind of battery, do you have to do an eventing? I know it's not like a sealed acid that requires IT, but no is those are all no vent.

They are sealed. They are sealed. There is no vent. Uh, furthermore, if you like, the total top of charge voltage for the pack would be two. Think like forty two and I have faults whatever IT is. If I run IT at forty volts or forty one volts, I do not bring IT all the way up the top of charge.

I will lose some of that two kilo one hour capacity like maybe five to ten percent of IT, but I will increase its cycle life dramatically. So the cycle life will go up by almost ten times at that point. Uh, like you know Normally get about three hundred, you might kit two thousand out of IT two thousand cycles. And so IT IT and also the lower the having more batteries means I am drawing less current and charging less current. And IT overall just treats the batteries a lot more gently, and that will increase the cycle life on IT as well. So eventually, the goal is to have all of my network rack, all of my radio rack and some emergency lighting in my shop powered from this and then i'm also going to run a thirty six vote dc line back into the house and then put a switcher um in there to run some emergency lighting dc lighting in the house as well that we can turn on and off. So by the way.

for for what it's worth, what you're doing is not unlike what's done in a lot of public safety radio systems. So what you'll see sometimes in a radio evaulate, if there's a lot of equipment, let's say you've got four rax full of stuff for one organization IT. Let's say it's all like a twelve vote gear instead of running all the stuff on twelve o power supply, what they'll do is have like a forty eight vote battery bank and then distribute forty eight votes dc across all the rax. Because the the the cable size for forty eight volts versus toll volts is a big different .

of the exactly.

It's a lot less copper and it's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to run. So they will have like a forty ly distribute forty eight votes across all the acts and then do what you mentioned, dc to dc converters to go from forty eight down to twelve or twenty four to run the run the radios, mainly because of the amount of big cable. You can avoid doing IT that way. So so maybe that's .

actually forty eight bold systems are incredibly common in telcos. exactly. Actually, the entire tell com industry runs off for forty eight old dc. yeah.

So maybe backing into this little bit, it's like, well, I could be a pretty cool thing because that way they are actual wiring for reasonable high a current capacity could be more modest than if you're running a road twelve .

old system yeah which is which is why I was planning on running dc wires back to the house instead of an ac wires back to the house uh and because we have that higher voltage, it'll be lower current draw for the same amount of power. Um um I am reasonably confident doing that and I would feel much more comfortable doing that. They are trying to run A C through micon do IT next to all of my low voltage signal stuff and risk you know just like crossing the wired the streams or whatever right like for some reason running ac back just gives me the iky. So I am much more comfortable doing D C.

And that. So I will tell you this, mark, um I think the idea of running in into the house makes a lot of sense, uh, in a lot of ways. Also, they keep in mind that um it's pretty affordable and easy to have, like a point of use, dc powered things in your house.

So like in our house before we had our whole house solar system, um we had solar that powered the fridge and freezer and then also one lamp in our living room. And I realized that like for us a lot a lot of times when we were hanging out, we didn't realize that the power had had gone out because that lamp was going and that was like the main lamp that we use like in our living room area. You watching T V or doing something and um that that made a really big difference in the kitchen, which is another place where you really need lighting in an emergency because if you're preparing food in doing things, you just need to see there.

Those is a place you need to see. Um we ended up getting like these little puck lights that uh there were L D that we put underneath the cabinet and just stuck under there and they ran on triple play batteries that we could keep and we had uh in loop batteries that we kept for those and we would keep them all charged up, keep him anything and they would go for a really long time like you more than you would need for your power adage, unless you forgot to turn them off and you need to turn them off. The lamp thing was such a big deal that actually like at my um parents house um is still there today.

I forfeit my was at four half amp hour leaving my infested battery um and I converted uh an existing large lamp in the living room m into a dc lamp with a dc bulb uh running on that and IT floats the battery all the time. So when the power goes out, my parents had even forgotten. I did this because this is when my mom was so alive, like last year.

Sometime I remember her saying the power was out the other day. But the worst thing was that lap stayed on and and IT was strategically so that they could see how to get around the house. Is that kind of really worked well.

So keep in mind that there are things like that you can do that may be less troublesome than trying to figure a way to run A D, C. Line into a certain part of your house. So.

so actually, I was gonna point out that I already have. But the lighting in our living room and TV room, it's a kind of one giant long room. Cindy had me insult this years ago. Um it's kind of this oak rail it's like one foot below the ceiling and it's got a little bit of of a David in like the close to the wall where the oak sticks up and covers IT and there's a strip of elite lights, their warm little lights that likes up the entire wall.

IT goes from wall to wall like you know edge to edge and um that all runs off of twelve S D C and IT goes down the power goes down the wall into a wall switch where I put couple of demers, one for the left half and one for the right half. So we can actually dim the different rooms in our in our in that area separately. And thankfully, those demers are relatively quiet. Their cheap demers and I was not expecting much, but they actually are relatively quiet, but I that all of that is currently running off of the twelve vote power supply that kind of talked under the neath the couch in the TV room.

My intention is just leave that twelve l power supply there, but disconnected and then contact in the D C to D C converter uh and run this into that ah the reason I don't want to do point of use for that is that it's more batteries to maintain yeah ah and and yes, I know there is a bunch of self contained stuff that you can just kind of plug IT in and all that fun stuff. I I am so lazy like i've already mentioned about my three kilo a generator I inherited from my dad that IT has not exercised once since I got here. Um I used to try and do this kind of battery backup system, but I did IT with, uh, deep cycle batteries that you can get for cheap from costco.

Oh, did you know that those things need maintenance? Yeah yeah. Like you have to top those off and make sure that they don't dry out. Um I didn't know that and I have gone through so many of those batteries before I figure red that out.

So has a liberal return policy.

Well, yeah, yeah. I should have done that, but I never did. The thing I really like about these batteries is that if I undercharged them just a little bit, they will be basically maintenance free for many years. And that really appeals to me.

So okay, so i'm that's prety cool. Uh, Thomas, how about you what that that you haven't been thinking about this very much lately? But maybe for a question, are you preparing anything concerning you're in the middle of this, but what do you think?

yeah. So I I I think that having done through this so recently, IT actually does helping think about what to do Better even next time because there's definitely room for improvement. For one thing, I need Better organization, a lot of my spare thing spare you.

So like I even though we would have several h of the same brand, I didn't keep all of the charges um in one place because then we need to really one charger most of the time and I could just swap out the of them in there and and swap out each an individual ht. And I realized that like I had to go out to our out building that we keep store things in and go take three boxes and try to find them. And then I swear to you, like during an emergency or basically any time you need these things, all of those wallboard ds and uh uh you know all the different bases that you put your uh H E, and they all look the same.

It's so like I like something they're trying to squat and and look at and see what the name is on the power supply. Try to figure if I was a vertex or Z, U or icon or something, can wood and I would want that something can be Better organized from now on is going to be in boxes or in like IT live, nothing else, in a box with um a nice weather type, a box with um one of those um packs those that sort of packs the absorb moisture. Uh because we do have like some human days here um in the big weather proof box along with bags that actually uh keep each one of the hd systems so that I can described those and go next time something else .

those on those descant paco, quick. Yes, they sell the silica beds in one gallon paint cans and so you can yeah so you can give them food grade or not. I got mine a decade ago for like thirty five bucks.

You buy little muslim bags, there's just little cloth bags and you fill them and then you just tied off and put IT where you want to to. And then after they absorb, you take IT, and you stick IT either in a dehydrator or in your van, and IT redo them. And that way you can make whatever size bags you want, as big as you want, as small as you want.

I had no idea. Yeah yeah. Actually.

I think I yeah I have a gallons and right back .

up there kitch kitch put some in the vel open so you know.

you come down to feel day. I'll send you home with them.

The um the OK deal um that I could see T S S like what is this substance I swear just don't eat IT like they say don't to eat this so don't do IT um so you know it's it's kind of funny, but our local ri has A A huge bucket full of little deskin packs and they're like take as many as you want. Uh, we want to recycle these, you know, with people using them.

So whenever I really need them, I can even grab a whole bunch of those and thrown in because they have like an unlimited amount they get in their shoes and every all kinds of packages that they get there. That's one place to look for those, by the way. Um the ones I did get um I did buy on amazon and you can recharge them are what do you want to call IT by showing them in the microwave or you know dehydration them another way but but yeah, so I want to organized these things little bit Better.

The other thing i'm going to do uh is do proper V H F U H F radio installations in my cars. This is something i've never uh i've had in the past cars that I had a in the radios and and ah I think I you know you a new carl. I'll i'll install something and this is a weakness of mine is I feel like i'm a really crappy installer myself, but I want to do IT myself still.

And so I think this time i'm just going to say I will take you to um a local guy. I know who I think i'll do a really good job and I just pay him to do a proper in lation in the car because I think having a mobile radio is a really, really good asset. Um IT wouldn't have helped me much at the beginning of the disaster here because I was limited.

Most of us, we're limited using a tvs on the road or going by foot or maybe a mountain bike, uh, but that was all we had. In fact, the first three days you could even do any those things because they were just too many trees on the road we are trying to clear. But basically, um I would like to have a proper mobile system in each car and like vent said, have a separate battery that um that i'm running IT on. I like the idea of that um I think I think that um how i'd like to set that up, this mobile radio .

are putting on your bike.

oh, my bike, you know so that runs .

off of the t wheel. That's a really good point though.

Josh, glad you brought that. That was I completely forgot to make a note of this the entire time I was doing that twenty mile road trip bike through, like a foot of salt at times and mud on the road, I was thinking, why in the world don't I have like a little wireless headset for this thing or not wireless, but just like a headset like, because trying to like talk and grab IT on my left shoulder while is tied to the backpack and by the way, yeah just to bring a backpacks more time um I did have several ones to choose from and that day I picked the one that would have good capacity and like they could on my hip so that i'm hiking the bike and everything that would be comfortable.

And I think it's important to have more than one backpack option. There is some backpacks I love that I have that would have not been a good choice for that day at all. Ah so that worked out really well but um I you know uh I realized that i'd really needed like um I mean if nothing else, just like a portable speaker mike and I didn't even think to take IT with me and I had one for one of my radio um if you get .

one of those power assist e bikes, you could just cook IT into the battery there and and IT would help with the mud .

and but IT would IT made that trip to a lot of faster probably uh, for sure if I I could I could have charged that at the house for sure I could have done that. So something else that i'll have going into the next will be a um A G M R S radio here at the house that uh you know be a home base station like a fifty White one um that I can have knocked up because we will definitely be using G M R S in the neighborhood. And I think it's really important that you have those non hands on a really good system that they're used to using and everyone is how to communicate and they have a protocol for IT. Um you know so i'm i'm going to have that so that i'll be able to come to just communicate with people I want have to distribute amateur dios had ht and things out, everyone.

Um another thing is and I don't even know how to completely solve all this um georgian I were talking about IT and I think we talked about the last show that a lot of the um newer kind of like business, uh H T and D M R radio and things like that and all of these like a belfast and ted radio and what's the other red us and all these other companies, they have baty packs on those radio that you can do USB c recharging on, right? I don't i'm curious if there are some that fit like easy radios like the f six E R uh that can do that uh because I need spare batteries. One of the things that really like to do is lose um the charge mechanism are using now, which you have to do like a whole board because when i'm giving him to someone else, there are a lot of people on the road like if if I needed to distribute something to somebody else, especially there are lot of people on the road that uh would have a way to recharge A U S B C thing maybe in their car something but they can't do that if it's you know, out there like a one ten outlet plug. So that's something I want to look into.

So there were go head look for after markets.

Uh, so I don't know about the F T. Sixty, but I mentioned that in our previous episodes I found in any tone, uh, eight seven, eight, eight, six eight uh, and b to six six two that has a built USB charging point, uh right in the bottom.

So I picked up from your suggestion there, I picked up a couple of those ub c batteries for the any tone and they're great so that for the other radios, like the the japanese radios, it's kind of a half solution. For some of those radios, you can get a cable that has a USB, a connector on one end and a barrel connector on the other end with the right voltage. So for issue, I know for sure they make him because i've got like four of them. So you could go on amazon or ebay, whatever, in type E E USB charging cable and you'll get a little cable with a little charging, get get little pod in the middle. And if that works fine because those things take seven and a half olds, there are something like that to charge and and those cables are pretty cheap to .

like twill bucks quick PSA on the USB charging. Uh, most of the radios will only use USB a to USB see and see to see will often not work because they don't have the smart circuits in there to ask the battery pack or well, work for the voltage they need.

So the the P, D part of power delivery.

yes, if you .

don't understand what USB cpd means, USB c power delivery, please go up and read up on IT. I had a heck of an education on IT earlier this year when I bought that charm hundred, what uh U S B C P D kid and then discovered, oh no, I can't power all of my stuff with that. I need some special cables to do your research and else .

that that's that's .

a really a good suggestion because I was going to say the other thing that would be on my work bench would be trying to make my own, uh, cables if if nothing else that would run on uh you know twelve old D C. And IT would back down or I don't know what. And so having like a solution that I can use, that I can just order, I like that idea ah for something like this. So um that's something that I will do. The only other thing and that is I guess you say more radio related, uh not necessary gear wise but I am going to get more involved in some kind of m congress around here uh just to uh know the people uh because in situation like this, uh knowing your community around you, maybe your local community, your neighbor is really important, but also your radio community, just knowing who to contact, who they are recognized, call science when they're on the repeater, that sort of thing. I I want to be able to do that Better.

All right, very good. Um I think we got everybody but me at this point. So George, what are you doing? Mark.

I am so god, I like the work bench.

The funny thing is I have more non radio stuff on my list than I have radio stuff because I feel really relatively radio prepared. But I think the main thing is ah the perpetual reorganization of gear, things in a modular bags and all that, so that I can grab a radio set and go. I know Thomas, you often organize your stuff, so here's a radio and that radio has got these accessory reason.

It's kind of nicely organized. Just grab IT and go. So inching towards that one thing. I've noticed that if if you only have one radio and one antenna, you actually ahead of the game because you only have one thing to get.

And if you have a bunch of radios and accessory and antennas and batteries and what not, you think, man, this is great. I've arrived because i've got more radios than time. Well, when you need to grab on in a pinch, which one of the forty two things do you take? So so i'm kind of going through this process of figuring out what's the group of stuff in labelling IT accordingly.

So it's not like the black island bag. Please wait a minute. I have eighteen of those.

So that just means you need to buy more nylon bags in different colors. But tics .

model exactly tags. You need tags. King of Thomas, what you said about the charges. So one of the things that I did, I didn't think about to you mention that is I got a plastic storage tub and I put a big outlets trip in IT.

And I mean, big, this things got like a dozen outlets, plus USB ports in IT. And I didn't know what I would do with that. And that adda me, amit, to put that thing in this tub. And for most of my hts, I put the charger for the hp in the tub with the outlet strip. And I if I need to charge a radio, I just know some of the radio I use everyday, like my any tone, I have a charge on the desk.

But for the other, you know, heard of handy talkies that I used once in a blue moon, I put all the charges in this one box with the outlet trip, so that whenever I want to charge some stuff, I could just pull out that box, plugged out, out of strip in the wall and then plug in to whichever hts I need to charge and all of those adapters in that box, because otherwise I would never find them because they're spread all over the place. So I like your idea consoler dating that stuff a bit. So um I think that's kind of the the main thing, probably the closest other really radio related thing was the community radio system.

Um and there the only thing I would add is that in the process of shopping around, I bought a couple different radios to try out. And so i've got some spare radios, and so I I have a case that's got commercial, inexpensive of commercial two a radios programmed up on our channels for the community in the box with a charger. And so if something happens, the the whole goal is to get everybody in neighboring dev d radio, but invariably somebody won't or you need to spare whatever.

So i'm going to have a little neighborhood cash of radios. So rather than those things just dissipating, i'm going to hurt them together into one case with the with the charges and that it'll a little community case of radios that we could take to an event like a community parade, like we have halloween trigger treating coming up and they want to organize stuff around IT. So to be perfect to to try out the radios and that kind of a setting. So I didn't .

think about trick or treating a neighborhood.

I bet that's a really good spot. Uh yes, I know um you think IT would be good, but it's tilly and IT IT takes a while to go from house to house so yeah it's .

a bring bring the e bike.

exactly. So what I want to do, just to wrap up the discussion is, is do one at last, a round table on non radio related stuff. And since we're pushing the three hour mark are our chAllenge here is going to be to keep this short. Okay.

insert laugh here. We have right now done that.

No, so only an hour of them.

I have had dinner yet, guys. So we're going to keep this .

this difference between inconvenience .

and disaster.

this the disaster, very .

disappointed in you right now.

Get in line. Okay, josh. So just because of that, we're going to start with you. The bony finger of luck is pointing in your direction. So what non radio preparation thing are you doing?

So first off, I think we should open a new discord channel in our ever growing list of disaster preparedness. Um and Thomas, you and I should connect at some point because I got I got stuff for you um but for me personally um i've actually been working on a water system.

One of the things that we deal with at my location is our water system is old its sucks and it's horribly managed to the point where last winter, uh, I think we had we were sharply in our pitchforks and i'm pretty sure someone was warming up some tar for the local water company. IT was bad. Um and so at any point we can get a boil water notice which gets very, very old um we have three, seven and half gallon containers of water on hand for easy moving around that has come in handy multiple times.

I also have several fifty five gallon a barrels of water that have been sitting in my garage marinating. Um so and those are a pain to get out. Um I don't know if and also they taste bad. So I don't know if you've ever had water that has marinated in what used to be a soy sauce food grade barrel for .

two years oh wow.

yeah, it's bad. It's really a bad. I never .

thought I would run into non gluten free water.

Which is also a problem because my wife needs luton free.

Yeah, so sorry, this is not luton free.

No, it's not. So I have been redesigning a water system that is fulfill our needs. So what I have settled on and have half installed and am finishing soon, is a reverse moist system with A U.

V light filter. Reverse most systems about as close to dispute water as you can get, uh, which is just pure water. And the U. V. Filter kills anything organic that somehow made IT through the filter. Um this is hooked up to our main water line and if there are is a boil water notice, uh this will take care of everything and we can just turn IT on and not have to boil water coming out of this fact which takes care of boil water notices now um that doesn't take care of what happens if we have in the water like a month ago where they were putting in road signs and ordered right through our water main right outside our house, broke up in the morning. Suddenly no water wonder, I wish to say, was the first time that's happened.

Um so I am taking those fifty five gallon barrels which don't taste nearly as much as soy now that they've i've had a couple of years um and I am building a rack where one sits on top of the other so they feed down IT will be in our half basement cross space area I am hooking IT up to A A twelve O R V pump which will feed up underneath into our kitchen. Think where I will have a valve where I can lock out the house system, lock out the water system for the house, and turn the valve and twelve vote pump into our reverse mosy system. And we can take that marinated water, uh, in those barrels and basically make IT completely pure cleaned water without flavor, except the mineral stuff that the rivers source nosis sets back in the reversal mosy system and the uh uh R V water pump do take power.

So i'm also hooking up a small battery system that will just live down there. Um and we'll use IT every once in a while. So it's it's been quite the project .

that sounds like a really interesting project of I think that um people don't think enough about a water and water just like one of the most vital things that we need. And up here, like where I live, i've got I mean, in fact, we had a water issue. We just had so much water during the storm, but then and we live close enough to the top of the ridge line, i'm not so sure that we had any issues of contamination here because there's nothing above us is just widness.

But a lot of people uh, further downstream, I think they they always thought, well, you know we've got creek water that we can use um but like the greek water had Stephen at my fuel and things like that, you know and um you people to really should keep a store of water around. I think if you live on a well um and you don't have a whole house generator then you need to keep water just if no ea recent flush your toilets that is like the most important thing. Um I had many friends and ash fill who were taking five gallon buckets and going to any creeks that they could get access to to get water for that because, you know the other water that was in town was really potable drinking water that you are using for, you know drinking and other things, cooking and all that. So what what is what is a really big deal. And I think thinking through that, I think that, that will pay off, especially when you've got people that don't actively destroying your .

your water supply, right? Yeah now the people are supposed to yeah uh and there's nothing more toxic and disease written than flood waters. You know it's just bad.

It's i've definitely had a couple of generations and generations of realizing that, hey, what is important but if it's not convenient to get to um then it's just I don't want to deal with that you know even just bringing in the seven gallon plastic jugs from where we have stores, one of those okay, well, do I really want water? Has been sitting in plastic for that long, you know, or do I really want to spend the energy to boil water? Well, it's hard to boil water when the waters out.

Now i'm using my propt fuel and and things like that. So you know it's it's come like i've been saying the whole time is is whatever your preparations do, IT has to be in line with your life. IT has to be convenient and IT has to be something that is easy to use, otherwise, a IT IT really can affect your mental health, and mental health is just as important as your physical health, uh, and I don't think I get enough attention.

Said.

thank you. I am loving myself to one because I could go on on and on about some of stuff.

Okay, events, how about you? What's your? What's your non radio preparation?

I have two things, inspect and inventory. Whatever IT is, you have to be ready regularly and .

by inspect .

I mean exercise IT, start the generator, practice with your radio gear, know where your food stores are, how far beyond the best before they are, they and all of those things, right? So inspect and inventory regularly. Um and then you know from a personal standpoint, I make IT a point as i'm driving around the area I live in to try to take a different route that I Normally would frequently because this will give me some muscle memory on oh well if if the road is closed, as IT was for me eleven years ago, how do I get to where i'm going? Well, I know the backroads.

I never thought that is an emergency prepared this thing. I just like doing that because I like going on journeys. Well.

well, you, me too, journeys. But what IT does is that builds a mental map for you and reduces your reliability on G, P, S, which could see the shortest st through to the fastest through, or whatever, which is the one that everybody else is using.

Oh my god. yes.

So I make IT a point to take all those backroads and the roads less traveled as i'm going from point to point me. sure.

And can I jump on that actually, because this is something that we did, that i'm pretty proud, is we live in a city surrounded by bridges and rivers and creeks and things like that. So what we've actually done because we also have uh fire, forced fire um dangers. And so we actually mapped out different routes just using a physical map.

And then we went and drove them and figured out which ones were best for different areas. So if if something follow you, hey, forest fires coming from this direction, okay, which roads are going north? Well, this ones cut off already. Okay, well, we know we can get these two. Uh, and so yes, it's important to drive your escape routes.

So talking about driving your skate roads, a one of the other hazards here that I haven't talked about, um I live just a few miles from a nuclear power plant. We have sirens all around our area within know the certain radius of the power plant that when those things go off U G T fo and and I can't g tf o to the north because that takes us closer to the nuclear power plan, right? So I really only have one direction to escape my area and that is self and thankfully there are a few roads that goes self um but knowing the one that not highway one of one would probably be a good idea. So you know we've made IT a point of of being able to take all of those roads, knowing where they go and all let one stuff.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't really thought about what you guys are talking about to. I mean, that makes perfect sense but probably anticipating where the big traffics s going to be like a man one to one that's probably not your first choice. So yeah.

that also I think it's it's really smart too. Like josh, we are talking about IT like here uh so many of our bridge were out. And so in my head, like I I tried not to rely on um google maps and those things around the area, unless you just to know where traffic is um which by the way, there are not that accurate um after a disaster um because there's just so many factories going on IT doesn't really know where there are really traffic, James, where things he'll still send you down the wrong words in everything.

But like if you ve if you've gone those routes and you actually remember the names of some of the road as well， like try to remember because sometimes when you live somewhere, you don't pay attention to that stuff and anymore because it's kind of irrelevant because the time. But um being able to find those you like, oh, you know there's a bridge out here, but I can take this other road and that bridge is little higher. Maybe it's fine. Um IT saved us time because when I was on a bike, uh you know like you don't want to bike out a half a mile even extra if you don't have to you know um you want to to think that through so yeah, I love those. I love those ideas.

The the about having physical maps is you can mark them and so as you find information you can sticky IT highlighted notated he, this one's close, this ones washed out. You know, it's hard to do that on google maps.

Mark, anything else?

No, okay.

time i'm terrible.

I'm not a propper. All the things that you guys have said whenever ver I speak up and say, oh i'm doing that, it's speak i'm doing IT for other i'm a terrible rapper. I I lived through lua reata up in the bay area and I like, I know what we dealt with. They're in there. You would think that I would be Better at this, but i'm not.

Dm, sorry. So, you know, uh, Joshua d completely stole my thunder with his awesome modern ills tion thing. I was the water filtration, and I was to say, I was going to get a brita of filter, you know, no, now that is something that I I thought about little harder.

I here again, we where where this is all about your situation thing like where we're located. We have well water. We really have no one living above us um you know the rich line. So our water was cleaned the whole time. We have built in filtration on IT and we had the solar power for the water pump everything.

So we really didn't have to worry about any of that, but I still want um you know separate water filtration system that we can use if we need to um the um ths I that I actually definitely working on. One of them is to get more community names and locations I want to know, like of all the houses on our road, this is a great time. It's an easy time for me to go down and actually put names and numbers on everything because in the case of emergency, not only for wellness checks, but you just want to know who's there, how many households there are.

You get asked that question, a lid, how many households are on your road and you like, uh you start counting them and you'll miss them. So actually keeping a list and a contact list for people uh is really uh helpful um someone to do that down the rest the upper part of road. We've got that done completely and we have a spotty version of IT for the lower part of the road.

So we're going to to finish out that for this. Another thing is to get I want to get more five years in propane ank. I actually have like three, but I realized during this I didn't have to turn them a whole lot because we had nice, bright Sunny days.

And so I could use solar power to make my stove in the house if I wanted to. But I keep like a, like a common types serve outside for cooking when you know, I don't want to use my homework cricket for IT. And I like having an adapter to go on to, like a proper prepaying tank to use those, because this little bringing tanks are nice but last really long time.

And um those propane ank can just do so much more. They can help other people. Uh you know they can you know make a small heater, run a long time, a small prop in here or so I want to get like probably at least a couple of more of those um and have him here and other thing to go head. H.

I have something that's going to change your life.

Okay.

in induction hot plate.

Yeah, you know I was thinking about that. Tell me more. Have you been using this?

Um I have not, but our neighbors have. They found that their backup generator uh was not enough to run their forty amp induction stove hole the entire but they had a couple of induction hot plates back before they got the stove and they plugged them in and running him off of a little generator was awesome. And so i've done some googling dumb, some research.

People are using them with things like test the walls and different battery backup systems and things like that. So they never have to believe their kitchen. They just run IT off of a plug and you pulled out when you need IT and stay absolutely love them because they are going out and uh, cooking IT is actually on my list to grab before winter hits because cooking out in the garage when is, you know, fifteen degrees is not fun plus IT takes .

forever for things to heat up outside you. And when you're doing that, I like that idea. And you know, those induction plates were pretty because a lot of van lives and people. That's reason why there, I think there even popular right now as so many people can use those off of smaller battery systems. So they are incredibly efficient .

is part of the reason that they're so popular as because they they heat the hand directly, they don't heat something that conducts to the pan, right? Like just if turning electricity into firms is much more efficient with with an induction stove than IT is either a gas ve or a resist development yep.

And also if you have like a cast iron dutch ova, you still have an oven.

Yeah that's true. That's true. Um so the only other thing i'd say that i'm going to do, uh, where we're actually doing now in prep, we found that having the solar system and having the battery back up on the house, you kind of get to know the instant out of IT really, really quickly uh, when you have no grid power at all. And um we've actually decided that like IT was IT was so painless in a way we want to test that to see um how well IT works. Like if we have a cloudy day, if we have a rainy day or snowy day or something um where we have great power, we're not going to worry about great power going away. We're going to see you know do uh our own off grade thing, uh, where we're purposely taking IT off grade, which is easy to do uh, with this system, you can easily disconnect from the grid with at any time we want to write on my phone, I can just pick up my phone, turn on the air p press upgrade and we move upgrade. I would say that for people that don't have systems like this is not a lot of people do um practice turning off the power to your house um every so often and you're going to discover everything and that you realize that you're gonna miss and and you can fill in those gaps you know with areas of the house that there may be really dark and you need a little light, they're you going to figure that out 啊 so um yeah but going off intentionally is not a bad idea to tie that in with what events .

was saying with exercising your generator。 Yes, that's a great time to turn off power to your house because you're going to find that some appliances do not like generator power. You're going to find things don't work well. So you mind as well, when you're exercising your generator, find out what else works.

Solution, right?

Very good. All right. I think that's every ballot in at this point, right? Except me.

yes. Say how about orge.

how about me is actually i'm going to add something to your less Thomas for you to do so here in our community, in addition to doing the the radio system, we're doing a couple of the things in our emergency preparation committee. One is, is we're going to to have a text, a volunteer volunteer to be on the text system and then we can text messages to agree also just email list, I mean, that sort of simple and easy to do, right in cheap.

But the other thing is you mentioned the a list of neighbors. So we're doing the same thing where we have a list of all the neighbors. And what we're adding to the list is what skills and resources do they want to volunteer to make available. So for example, it's really nice to know that, that bobs a doctor or that sells is nurse or that you know friends of fireman, you know is like what what do you know how to do that's really good.

And like our electric, you know what's good to know? And then there's kind of also the resource part, which is who's got, like you said, chains, all right? Who's got a chainsaw, who's got a box for tools, who's got portable lighting, who's got you, whatever.

And a very important thing is, are you willing to be called to do something about IT? And I don't know what you call, but when we had a list here in the community that's a few years old and I would say, okay, bob's got a four wheel drive truck. Well, that's good to know, but does that mean I can call bob and say, bob, there's a tree on the road.

Would you please come over here because you volunteer on the list? Or is IT IT will know? I just want to let you know I get well, that's not useful unless you know so I want to know who i'm not asking for them to do something extraordinary.

But okay, if if you are A A nurse, are you if you could make IT, are you really to go to someone's house during the ice storm? If you could make IT there. So who's willing to help and and just be honest about IT, you know it's not we're going to shame you for not being on the list, maybe. But anyway, so that that's I think that's an important thing to stick on the on the neighborhood list.

That is really smart because you know what our very first community meeting we had, which was just almost you within day or two of the storm, that's one.

The very first thing we did was make a list of the skills that we had, the people, what house they lived in, the number of the house and everything and um and also people were saying, you know hey, i've got ta tracor i've got to track her to um and some of us kind of loosely knew uh who had wide um we knew and you know we knew who the mechanic was. We knew who the different people were. But we IT was kind of funny when we started putting the skills together.

We are saying we can handle a lot that 所以 yeah i've got like that we had a physical therapies。 We have a trauma s we have a you know physician's assistance, we have a machine, a machinist with a machine shop and all these other things on the road. We're like holy calman, we ve got all kinds of resources that period are like twenty two households. Um so uh, that's really good. And plus, I think it'd be really cool in your neighborhood to see your list and then see that your resource to have this that is a fully electric riding long more because i'm sure that would come in really handy.

Everybody in this neighbor has a riding long more this that's a that's a requirement. You can maybe not electric i'm kind of odd man out there. But yeah, so I bet .

none of them have an eighty meter whip.

That's right.

Even mind doesn't have an eighty meter IP yet. I get to work on that. You're right. So throw a couple of things list here.

My experience in sandoz and and potentially here as well, was that one of the minor annoyance when you lose your power is you can't open your garage. So a lot of times garage have the articulated doors in a garage door master whatever it's called. And when you lose power, you can always pull the rip cord and disengage the motor. And that's fine for putting IT down, but it's pretty hard to lift them back up. So a lot of time brings .

are there for a reason .

yeah .

you need to ride the stationary bicycle some more, thank you.

Or or tune big spring or whatever. So what I figured out was what I really needed wasn't inverter in a battery. And so um so I I took A A rigid tool case that's like a sort of a brief casey size box and I bolted in an inverter into that thing and put big powerful les on IT and so and put an extension cord in the box.

And so one of the things that i'm in a volunteer form, my neighbor od, is when you lose power, you need to get out your garage and you can open the door, give me a call, because I can come over with my case. I could in a battery, I could unplug your garage, european plug into the inverter and boot. There goes the door.

Now, the thing that I also learned was, in my case, for my garage door openers, I need a four hundred, what inverter, because the inverter that I had was two hundred. What I thought, all that's got to be plenty. Why I poked IT in .

and nothing happened. Oh my. So, you know, let's briefly talk because we don't put down red holes on the show about uh, wattage and inverters when they say four hundred watts that's what a car set as car stereo salesmen once referred to me as.

I ls, if lightning straight and you know it's it's the surge luggage yeah so H I take any of these uh, waters with a Green assault and and I got a seven point to kilowatt version on this hybrid truck of mine inverter stroke generator. It's it's an amazingly impressive piece of equipment, but there's no way I would load IT down to seven kilowatts. So i'd be load again to maybe five.

Well, to your point, once I figured out my two hundred what inverter was not going to cut the mustard, I started shopping around and I thought, oh, there's a two thousand one one that sounds good. So IT turns out the two thousand one version or does a fine job opening the garage door. And on the inverter, there's a there's I know it's four hundred watts is on the inverter. There's a display that tells you the voltage and all that well tells you how many wants is being pulled while its Operating. So that's how I know IT has to be at least four hundred watts.

So just cracking up at the image of George on his long Moore with his brief case battery. Just zoom down to the next town.

electric. George jonas electric mower.

i'm the most popular guy in neighborhood when I show up. So so that I think that's a to me, I think that's that's a really great idea. I do say so myself.

okay. The other thing that's kind of battery sh related is, you know we talk about having a USB battery packs and of course, it's good to have one to charge your phone. And I think we probably all have like ten of them.

I know I don't know anybody that doesn't have like a lot of them. And so I was shopping around for eleven and one one day, and I was trying to find something that was bigger than the the ones i've got like sort of the the the one battery to the ball and all battery. And I found one that i've used so much that I think it's a great product.

Unfortunately, IT is not cheap as you might imagine. You you can buy just to charge your cell phone. You can get a battery for twenty box, right? It's or less it's not a big deal.

And this thing was like closer to two hundred and that was one hundred, but it's an awesome battery. And why is that an awesome atterly? Well, inside there are eight, eighteen, six fifties as the core of the battery pack.

On the side of the battery pack is A U. S, B. A.

In two U. S, B, C. Okay, that's nice. No big deal. What what's the big deal? It's also got a five point five millimeter barrow connector on IT.

Now there's a lot of batteries that you can get that have twelve als out and they're either used for like jumping your car or for a sea pat machine, that sort of thing. And so there's quite a few, and it's twelve like twelve point zero votes out. This one is programmer.

So there's a LCD display on the battery. And if you turn on the battery port with the button on the top of the battery, you can go to the configuration screen for that that port, and you can slew the battery voltage up and down. So I don't know what IT goes part goes down to like four volts or something, but IT goes up to like twenty plus votes.

So I can set this thing for, you know fourteen volts to run my radio at full power at least I went run one hundred what radio with that. But the point is that is that, that has been super useful and also it's got a clear plastic case. So it's it's very appealing for us nerds to look inside and see what the parts are. That's an extra bonus. The amazon .

link of it's got a clear case. Okay, thanks.

Yeah, i'll put that in the show notes, but it's great. It's by company called sharpie S H A R G E E K. And it's the storm too.

So the spec is one hundred. What power bank? Twenty five thousand, six thousand and million hour or USB charger?

I've seen that before.

and they make two or three different models. But this is, I think, the bigger one of the bunch and the reason why this is the important one is all that USB stuff is useful. But the twelve old are programmed output is super duper useful.

Um the only thing that makes IT like one percent below perfect is that the barrel connector is three point or is sorry, five point five millimeter pin, i'm sorry, two point five millimeter pin, not a two point one millimeter pin because most of our gear that ninety percent of this stuff is two point one millimeter center pins. So I ordered some middle adaptability. They go from two point five to two point one millimeter to adapt IT.

And so I and ever run my seven of five with this thing, my station controller. I was shown a buddy yesterday, my station controller, and there's. Like four boards on the circuit boards on this piece of plywood.

And I use this on the twelve vo output to run the whole thing that worked great. So it's sort of become a universal handy little portable battery. So can't say enough good things about that one. Oh, and the USB c charging cable that's how IT is charged that comes with IT is yellow so you can find IT that pushed me over the edge. So anyway.

so that's my big to purple batteries in a yellow cable how .

colorful very it's it's stylish. You know what the world dress ham should be toting in their .

go kit in a shirky kind away?

exactly.

So had a real clear case for that.

Are you going .

to be here all week? Alright guys? So as we wrap IT up here or anything that we should have covered that we didn't.

I got like seven pages.

Okay, alright. I think I have big shown nuts to put to add to this episode.

That's just the outline series.

Make sure you include the web URL s or part numbers in your suggestions. And i'll put that in the shower nuts. So I think that's IT. So so with that, Thomas, and any parting comments.

no, just other than to thank everyone, people will send me to my kind messages and things are and I I just really appreciated um we're getting through this and i'm actually getting a lot of requests to talk to him, radio clubs and things and I took a bunch of notes uh to um so I could remember all this later because when you go through stuff, you kind of forget the early days already and so I started taking notes from like day one I was treating IT like a review so um i've got some ideas now of things i've learned along the way and happy to share that .

with whoever yes, let me know when you're ready. Yeah we're going to take our club. Is the first the top of your booking list?

Yeah, okay.

yeah. Then something .

fly out there for that too.

yeah. Well, john, you can pay for a strict catcher. I mean, isn't that the book of budget?

I can request IT .

of the board.

If only, if only I had more friends on the board, George, with elections coming up.

yeah, i'm afraid Thomas is enough to hope for himself.

There is a story here.

There is so vice, there is any parting thoughts.

Um, no parting thoughts. Great stimulating conversation. And boy boy, I gotta look into my savings account in case you wild fire stops my ability to work. That's incredibly sobering. Thought IT really is.

Yeah, there is the one of the number one disasters that can hit everybody. Yes.

mark about you.

Um I just found a wide voltage input D, C to D, C converter that i'll handle thirty to sixty volt input and will output thirteen point eight votes at one hundred amp.

Wow.

that sounds perfect. This is quite the D, C to D, C. So what .

would be .

is something you .

before.

yeah, it's on ebay.

You know what s on makes dc to dc converters. We use them at repeated sites, the bullet proof after okay.

i'll i'll check that one out. But yeah this one is on ebay from a seller dc power dash supply um and they look huge and B V anyway, no parting words. Um be safe out. T there be prepared be Better than I am and bigger humans already .

a john a youth party comments.

never underestimate your community. You know it's georgian and Thomas, you can have have A A lake up right now because your communities are very disaster prepared to minded so you can go to them be like i'm making a list of the things you have, tell me what you have and and you know that doesn't go over so well if you've never met your neighbors before.

So if you're just starting out with your community, go have a barbecue, go invite them over, spend time with them, get to know them. Those relationships are important. It's not going to go over well, if you just you know go out me like, hey, we all should work together.

Um you know if you don't have that relationship to build on, it's not going to go very far. So get to know your neighbors, build back community and don't just do IT with the I need them in a time of emergency. It's a very bad way to look at IT. Look at IT is building that community and just loving each other and IT makes a huge difference on on how things go.

It's that's such a i'm so glad you said that because, uh, the one thing that I kept thinking as I was out there working with my neighbors, clearing driveways, uh, helping with just all kinds of things, pulling carpet out of people's houses as well, you just all kinds of things um is that the whole idea that the of this like no like doing stay proper thing or you build a fortress for your family and you isolate yourself from the world because you are going to come after you um in the disaster that selfish, just like you're just gonna losing out on everything uh resources um it's it's an opportunity to share and behind a compassionate and build relationships and our road I can tell you now like is so much stronger because of this and I don't think it's it's gona change. You know it'll it'll stay this way. We know more people now and it's just so it's so nice so I completely agree with you, Joshua.

And and even if you did manage to bucker up, you can't know everything, you can't know how world and the pumping and the radio and you got ta work with each other. And one last thing is I just want to say Thomas h, from having been a disaster prepared ness enthusiast myself, from everything i've seen for listening to your a podcast and from going, uh, reading your blog post, you've done everything right, like you are the model example of how to prepare for and handle the disaster even if you didn't mean to from writing on your exercise bike, I I would have been your friend. I'm in shape, but I don't cardio I would have been your friend puffing know my eighteen um so but it's well done and yeah I I can't wait to here you speak on her Better to work club about all of you.

Thank you very much. Subtle plug i'd be having and putting up by one point eight.

All right. Well, thanks very much, everybody. And unfortunately, bringing up this topic was triggered by a really terrible events. But you know, it's what you do with that accounts.

And so hopefully, all of this information will be useful and people will take IT to heart and be prepared for the next bad thing that happens, but then they won't be so bad. So thank very much for staying the time, and we'll see you all in a couple of weeks. So from all of us at the humility work, spend .

seventy three.

you can. humans.