Executive Order: Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions

White House Press Release ^ | 7/6/12 | White House

[Myrddin]

Amateur radio has been a source of fun for a long time. I spent much time doing packet radio software development in the mid-80's. That became a solid foundation for doing the same work professionally for HP and UNISYS (CCI) when they needed UNIX kernel work done.

I've had even more fun doing things with mesh networking (OLSR) as infrastructure for my embedded systems work. That is something we should be cultivating as a means of providing data connectivity between the average folks should the government attempt to seize control. Think of it in terms of an emergency 146.52 simplex network, but tilted to keep the computer users inside a community connected in spite of loss of connection to higher tier internet backbones. Even resurrection of the old NETROM stuff would be valuable inside a community in an emergency services context.

[Myrddin]

It was still happening in the 1976 to 1980 time frame when I was on 2m fairly frequently. I upgraded to Extra after moving to Idaho, but I'm rarely on the air anymore. My gear is still in boxes after the move from San Diego to Idaho. I'm working on a contract in San Diego, so the gear is completely inaccessible.

[JRandomFreeper]

Nyquist theorem keeps the bandwidth low on mesh.

/johnny

[Puckster]

I’m in Florida now and I’ll probably enroll in the local Ham Club due to the need for emergency preparedness....as one can imagine.

[JRandomFreeper]

Give me a few months and I'd be building tetrodes and superhet receivers. ;)

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

/johnny

[Raven6]

I know of a guy that worked just about the entire world using a 20-something MHz clock oscillator from an old computer... Built the entire unit into a little Bayer aspirin tin (about 1"x1.5"x.25"). Had a little tiny insulated (from the case) terminals for the antenna, ground, key, and power. Inspired by his little xmitter, I built one myself and managed to get a QSO from 45 miles away using nothing more than a correct length of zip cord laying on the radio room floor. Talk about tiny QRP... And it all came from a "junk box." Wonderful things, those junk boxes...

I have all the stuff up in the radio room to take a step back in time to the early Marconi designs... Every so often I have to just build something old school. It is sad that so many people today do not even know what a crystal set radio is or how it works. A properly built rig with the 250uH coil with about 12 equally spaced taps can be used with a 12 position switch and a 365pF variable capacitor to pick up everything from from the bottom of the AM broadcast band (560KHz) all the way up through 6MHz in the shortwave band. All with no batteries or use of house current... That's real radio building... And it's fun!

[JRandomFreeper]

They don't even sell those little aspirin tins anymore do they?

I build my altoids 6-meter rig in the late '90s.

Direct wiring and ground soldered to a blank copper circuit board.

You learn to make things tight up there to stay within legal limits on things. I did have access to a spec. an. then.

Life is fun sometimes. ;)

/johnny

[Myrddin]

ARES and RACES are good starting places. The county emergency services office is uaedul too. My wife and I added Animal Rescue Reserve in San Diego. She was a dispatcher for the San Diego Sheriff:s Office as well. Very handy to be authorized access to LEO radio and ham bands concurrently.

[Myrddin]

Mesh is packet radio with constantly updated IP routing between hosts. TCP takes care of the end to end. Bandwidth isn’t a big concern. A reliable, ubiquitous wireless network is the aim. Run with 802.11b for lowest common denominator interoperability at 2.4 GHz. Cross city backbones on 5 GHz. The Freifunk network in Germany has been very successful. I think they opted for AODV instead of OLSR to reduce over the air traffic. OLSR is preferred when low latency is critical and using bandwidth to keep routing tables fresh is not an issue. It doesn’t scale well to very large networks.

[dixiechick2000]

Thank you! I thought it was strange that the site had gone dark...or nonexistent...in such a small time frame.

[dixiechick2000]

Thank you! I couldn’t access it after I read it the first time, and closed that window, last night.

[dixiechick2000]

Thank you! As I said,

“I’m not an attorney, so some of this stuff doesn’t make sense to me. However, I would put nothing past this administration.”

I hope you are right in that the Feds can’t reassign any commercial stations.

[Puckster]

Thanks sir....I’ll keep that in mind and ask within the club....I know they are involved with local rf activities also.

[Errant]

They don’t know anything about America-America, history, economics or the constitution but they are experts in this area of totaltarianism. However, these clowns could never make trains run on time even if Dear Reader issues an EO about it. They’ll starve you to death, too, so be prepared!

You are sooooo right!! Better get prepared and stay that way!

[grey_whiskers]

My bleary-eyed, early morning misinformed guess is that they're expecting an EMP from Iran.

Dipsticks.

g_w

[Eye of Unk]

Obama has given marching orders to his still loyal MSM managers to hype up the fear of Iran EMP attacks.

Meanwhile a possible scenario may be that a Moslem infiltrator in the military has procured several EMP bombs which will be “uacoounted for”.

Several very small scale EMP attacks may occur, but not from orders coming from Iran. And the MSM will go on a blood frenzy couple with a city or two that loses its electronics some even permanently.

I doubt Iran will or could launch an EMP device against America, the only way to do it successfully would be for them to smuggle a high altitude launch vehicle say hidden in a tanker and lobbed into a high enough altitude to affect CONUS.

[crosshairs]

This ghetto communist Muslim traitor is intent on fomenting a civil war in this country.

And he mustn't be allowed to escape.

[Tzimisce]

We’re going to vote him out of office. Quit trying to gin up violence - makes you come across as a leftist nut.

I'm not trying to gin up violence. I'm asking a serious question: who's going to stop him from taking over our free speech?

The Supreme Court said that the FCC has NO jurisdiction over the internet but the FCC took it anyway.

The Constitution says that the Senate get to approve all of his cabinet - but he ignored them last Jan. When he first took office, he appointed "Czars" without Senate approval.

You're looking at someone who doesn't care about the Constitution. Free Speech is now on the cutting board.

What is the conservative plan?

[In Maryland]

"Shutting down the ‘net will also shut down the leftwing blogs and Web sites.

I think the FBI pulling the plug on correcting the bad DNS resolution by the supposed "virus" and this executive order are related.

Obama has shown the FBI has the technology to redirect web traffic as it wishes, and he has just issued an executive order to make it possible for them to do that. They can easily misdirect http requests for conservative web sites to a "big brother" site that will keep a tally of evil conservatives.

Very Stalinesque ...

[GOPJ]

Freedom’s not easy or free. We just keep fighting the forces of darkness where ever we encounter them. The left will constantly try to take away freedom because it’s who they are... we will continue to stand up to them because it’s who we are... We’re not going to have a total win - either are they. You, Tzimisce are on the right side - you care about the right issues. You’re involved in a long and honorable battle... I have no idea what else I can say to you... my position is that violence of any kind hurts us and our ability to fight them. There may come a time when that’s the only answer, but that time isn’t now. I was concerned you were taking that position now... or encouraging others to - which would be a tactical error. I was wrong - that’s NOT what you were doing...