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hey everybody josh amateradio callsign ki 6naz do you have a radio communications plan for an emergency situation have you thought about what is the worst possible situation that could happen related to comms i have it is an emp or an electromagnetic pulse i've done a live stream on the topic but i thought i would put together a kit that is inexpensive but covers many bases following a pace plan that we talked about on another live stream and this is it this is my tactical trash can and i'm going to talk about it today on the ham radio crash course thanks for watching [Music] now why would you want to have a trash can full of electronics well it's to protect from an electromagnetic pulse or emp put simply an emp is like a central transmitter hypothetically that transmits a short duration but massive amounts of power and that power covers all the frequencies all the frequencies pretty much and anything that gets picked up anything that can pick up that power power lines can hurt the power generation facility the power plants your phone the intent on your phone can pick up that power fry your phone ham radios designed to pick up frequencies they get fried they get shorted out they're done it basically will fry via this massive amount of power they're put out anything that can receive that power so the only way to protect from it is to hide your electronics in something that's basically a faraday cage electrically sealed box type unit that frequencies could not get into it basically created a null zone that anything inside of the faraday cage could not be harmed by things like emp or just relative interference problem with a faraday cage is anything that's transmitting inside of it also can't get out unless there's a pass-through and if there's a pass-through that means things can get back in and then you're back to frying your electronics today i'm going to walk through what i put in this kit and why there are some off-roads that you can take to change up your own kit if you're following along in this process this build up of an emp kit at home and please if you like these kind of videos give me a thumbs up hit subscribe hit that notification bell because i live stream every saturday 5 p.m pacific standard time without further ado let's check out this kit all right so the core of this whole thing centers around this barren's aluminum what is this six gallon trash can the reason why i went with the barons is this lid here seals on really tight it's got a really tight press fit you got to lean into it a bit and then it's got this handle that as an extra kind of clamping force on top of the can and that's what you want going back to the idea concept of a faraday cage you want an electrically connected box or vessel that you put your stuff inside underneath the lid of this is a seal that is designed specifically to remove any holes or open seams that could allow emp radiation or energy to fly into this box and cause damage also it increases the attenuation value of the actual kit i'll post the links for all this stuff and there's a lot to cover in the description so please check that out so an important thing to understand is if this doesn't have to be specifically a man-made emp or a naturally occurring emp the sun puts out emps like a coronal mass ejection large enough amount you can actually cause damage to electronics with certain cmes but the thing that kind of everybody worries about or thinks about or preps about is an emp related to a high altitude thermonuclear explosion a nuclear bomb set off in high altitude creates an emp wave if you will from the center explosion point and that explosion acts just like i talked about in the beginning of the video it is a super wide banded wave of destruction that if it hits your electronics or anything that can radiate power like an antenna or a power line it will go back into where the electronics are and fry them again that's why we need a little bit of security things to keep in mind while we're going through this kit you can assume that if there is a bad enough emp and i'm treating it like pretty bad emp time why prepare for a light dose right you want to prepare for the worst case in preparing for an emp i assume that everything like continental u.s everything has some kind of massive damage and where there would be pockets of network communication like the internet i'm assuming most of it's gone i'm going so far to also assume that things we take for granted like gps might also be gone why well a lot of emps could potentially affect satellites sure they're shielded hopefully from radiation like that because they are outside of the atmosphere where the sun's radiation could harm them but given a certain range i'm guessing that a lot of satellites could be taken out by an emp so first thing we're going to talk about the lid the lid in this case is just the lid that the trashcan comes with obviously it has a modification on it this is an mfj antenna mount specifically one that is for like a pole or some kind of mirror if you're on like a semi truck this is basically a cb mount if you notice the thread type and you notice that's not a standard so239 and there's a reason for that i have an antenna couple of tenons that i'm packing for this specific reason that will work off of this while it's sitting on the can yeah so this is just an extra bit of stability the handle is really not strong enough so i did a little pop rivet on the outer edge here and that allows it to just hold it a little firmly top bag one of my first antennas that we're going to be walking through and this is a pace plan that i will be talking about as we go the first antenna is an ed fong j pole much recommended by by many people well loved i like it too it's a great hiking antenna and then i've got two radials that i constructed out of 18 gauge wire silicone coated wire which is really nice for using as radials because you're gonna have to pull it in and out and i 3d printed two wire winders for this and this works pretty well next 18 feet of rg8x this is from abr industries which is generally the coax i use this is what they sell at hro which generally means that's the coax i buy one of the first items in our paste plan this is our alternate item i assume that primary comms is going to be voice whether it's going to be fm using vhf uhf radios or hf using single sideband but it's going to be voice so i'm going to have a mic in my hand or a radio in my hand and talking that way but an alternate mode of communication one that i hope will be usable to really depend on other people who survives whose radio equipment can live through an emp is going to be digital so i will be bringing my rad my portable raspberry pi solution which is still the raspberry pi 4 this is the four gig model not the new one that just came out and i'm using that anodized aluminum case that i talked about in another video actually multiple videos and i'll post that link in the card so you can check it out if you're interested in your own raspberry pi solution the advantage of the raspberry pi is that with this i can do both hf digital and i can also do vhf uhf packet so this adds redundancy to whatever solution it is i'm trying to run which is extremely handy again not only are we trying to hit all of our pace points we're also trying to build in some redundancy so that we don't run into problems where we lose one and we have nothing now first radio item i'm going to show you you have already seen this as well because i've reviewed it is the seacrane skyway single sideband and the reason i put this in is maybe it's just me thinking the worst possible instances of what could happen in a situation like an emp but how do you know that there won't be more emps how do you know that after the first one goes off you wait you know six hours pull all your radio equipment out and then it happens again well you don't so what would i do well i would put up a receiver an inexpensive receiver and start listening for information that i can get if after a couple minutes of scanning i don't hear anything i'm gonna put this back into my bucket and not potentially make my other radio equipment my transmitting radio gear vulnerable so this is like my scout this is my canary in the coal mine i'm going to use this to scan around with its real antenna for single sideband so i'll do the best i can with this to hear what i can am frequencies sm broadcast frequencies for whatever's going on with the disaster so that's kind of the step one is see what's out there and i'll be scanning with my c crane skywave single sideband the handy talky that i'll be carrying although i have another one the handy talkie that i'll be using probably the most is going to be my yaesu ft 2dr why not the ft3dr you say well this has been sitting around not getting much love so this is going to go in the emp kit and yeah i am actually keeping this all together i'm going to check the batteries occasionally keep them topped off although i have the ability to recharge them but this is going to be living in this case along with its battery and a double a battery caddy or tray that goes into this as well so i'll have the ability to charge this natively but also have the ability to keep it topped off with double a batteries if i need to so think about that again when you're making an emp kit this stuff's supposed to live in the box until you need to use it and ideally you might not be using it for that long kind of a temporary deployment kind of thing maybe a pota can maybe this is a pota can i don't know post in the comments what you think it's not just a tactical trash can it's a podican key point because i forgot to mention it the reason why i went with the ft 2dr over any of my other hts like i have a ton i could put one of them in there this does aprs and i will have multiple ways of doing aprs but this one this one's always a really good unit for that coupled with the edfang j pull it'll work fine for frs not gmrs in this case i'm just bringing the frs again you don't really know what you're going to encounter there's not a lot of space in here so i wanted something small this is the redavis rt45 i've done a review on these two i don't have a ton of frs radios but i do have these and what makes these special at least for why i'm packing them is they're usb chargeable if you put rechargeables in here but they're double a and that's going to make sense in a little bit but that is the battery the primary choice that i'll be carrying the next antenna item as you know i gotta have hf is going to be the chameleon mcom 3. and for this there's again multiple reasons this is really configurable in lots of different ways i can hoist this up high by using the metal metal connectors the carabiners here or i can string it down low and make it horizontal and do envis with this so i get a lot of versatility out of this this would be my second hf antenna that i would be packing in this kit this one lives inside the box because again thinking emp i don't know if the the match here the box could be affected by an emp if it was left outside so it's going in the can the way to think about this is if it's something electronic or something you think might get damaged from an emp it needs to go in the can and again it's going to be things that are going to be vital you think after a disaster so these are my thoughts this is going in the can now i'm going to give you a choose your own adventure solution here i have one item that can go in the can i haven't decided yet i'll actually let you guys decide or let me tell me what you think i have other solar panels but i thought it might be smart to have a second one specifically this uh goal zero what is this a seven watt charge control charge panel or 10 watt but part of the reason is because it's got this battery caddy and battery charging device this is the goal zero guide 10 plus it's the older unit they make newer models now but you can charge four double a batteries with this it takes a while but it will work with things like the tray for the ft 3dr the c-crane skywave and the frs radio so it gives a lot of utility so this would support those radio systems without needing to charge off of my primary solar panel i'm in southern california it makes a lot of sense to have solar since we have so many days of sunlight this makes sense but you may want to replace this with this this is my alinko dr-135 i think it's 60 watts or 65 watts 2 meter only vhf radio now i have the ft 2dr right and it's a perfect fit for this kind of kit but maybe instead of the extra a batteries you might want more power on vhf specifically or you want something devoted to vhf specifically that can interface with your raspberry pi for doing packet radio i live in an area southern california where we have a ton of packet radio and packet radio enthusiast while i would assume that the repeaters will go down if there's an emp i don't believe that we will go completely without packet radio though after the emergency i'm sure somebody might be able to get something up and running packet radio as i've talked about on other live streams is extremely valuable in an emergency situation because you're basically taking this radio hopscotching through other radios to make very long connections for exchanging data in this case messages through like something like a personal bulletin board system which is a major throwback to the 90s early 90s as far as what the internet looked like even before that but it would allow you to exchange information very easily and you'd quickly be able to set up an interconnected network of these packet radio devices so should this go in or the solar panel it really depends on what you think your needs are going to be i'll let you decide i think what i'm going to probably opt to do is just pull out the double a battery charger and keep that with the vhf uhf radio in the can the trouble is making it all fit so powering this whole box or at least some of it is going to be a bio no 9 amp hour battery you can add more batteries to this this one biono sent to me to check out i've been using biona for a really long time and they're pretty much the only batteries i use when i go out and i need an external battery for doing soda or parks on the air so that's definitely a good solution that's the why i went with that now 9 amp hours you're going to have to give it enough power and that's part of the problem with a with a box like this is you don't have a lot of space if you had a larger faraday cage or something like that you could put another panel in or you're just not that worried about a panel being damaged to be honest i don't know how damaged a panel could be during an emp but i'm assuming the worst case scenario again worst case so that's why i went with also the bio no 25 watt panel again because it fits in the in the box this is going to be about as much as i can put in without going to like a roll-up unit but those generally are pretty tall and this needs to fit within the case so it can be affected by your other choices so for charge controllers you got to have a charge controller for your solar panel i went with two options you decide which one will work for you this is the bio no 12 volt 24 volt 20 amp hour charge controller and the buddy pull power mini they each have their different advantages and disadvantages this is a little bit bigger this is a more of a traditional charge controller where you put the raw leads in here with the screws this is more of a portable job you wouldn't necessarily want to like set this up at home necessarily mount it to a wall like this one would be this does allow you to connect power poles directly to it which is nice and gives you a nice readout on the screen this one does two as far as what the draw is and they both feature usb ports for charging which is also again a second level of capability so if you had that first panel the goal zero panel you had usb charging and with this you also have usb charging a little bit of redundancy all right now i got to show you what radio hf radio i'm bringing i think you can guess yes it's the g90 i gave one of these g90s away last year when it came out thanks mfj for doing that by the way uh after i saw it at the ham bench in 2019 in xenia well i decided to get another one so again thanks for mfj for sending this out the more i'm thinking about this the more i'm thinking about putting a a kit aside away that could just kind of sit and and be its thing possibly get dragged out to do a poda a lot of put ups or just drive ups this has a lot of compelling options that um i think is is why i went with it it's inexpensive right obviously so if you're interested in making one of these you could buy one yourself they're like 450 dollars with what i've learned since the first time i reviewed it which again i reviewed it very highly i found out that it's actually pretty easy programming this for doing digital modes which was something i didn't really do at the time with this radio in a review since then i've been having a blast doing digital modes on this and i put on the base plate fan or the tray if you will on this unit specifically for doing digital mode so i can run basically full 20 watt output with it out getting too hot and it's been great it's with the base plate on here sure if you took it off you could save some some weight and some space in the can but you get both the power connectors for power poles and then the stock connector it comes with and then obviously you get the fan to prop it up and keep it cool when you're doing digital there's another reason why all right kilo november 6 go for tell my kilo india 6 november alpha 0. thank you for the contact have a good uh rest your weekend 73. now some of you might be thinking why did he go with the g90 why didn't he go with an ft-891 why didn't he go with some other portable why didn't he go with this kx2 well again this is going to live in a can it's going to be there and second i wanted something that had less power draw than an ft8901 but more power output than a kx2 so if i'm thinking about being able to run as long as possible on a not too large battery assuming that i get decent charge capability out of the solar panel i want something that can live with this relatively well then the g90 is a perfect choice because it doesn't take up that much power on receive takes up more obviously on on transmit but it's still much less than an ft 891 plus it's smaller even if you add the the tray on the bottom it's not as long or as wide and the width is actually what causes the most amount of problems when you're trying to put something in a tall cylinder uh that causes more problems than anything and trying to jam things in and fit them all together so that's part of the reason why i went with the g90 also i don't think that you're going to need much power if there is an emp problem why well i assume that i'm going to be running envis most of the time that's going to be up and back down to communicate locally and if that's the case and we just go through an emp where actual damage is done and grids are going to be brought down then the noise floor is going to be minimal i'll be able to hear everything the noise is literally that static that sits right below what you're trying to hear or sometimes over it it would drop that down to nothing you're going to be able to hear everything and they're going to be able to hear you at even 20 watts so low power output lower footprint really it's got the screen on it so i can see what's going on all of that are just compelling reasons to add the g90 to my emp kit if you will and yeah that waterfall is going to be handy because i don't just have to scan around like crazy i can scan around while also looking at the screen and getting a really good idea of who's out there and seeing them on the waterfall those are all very compelling reasons for me but what would you put in your kit post below now i didn't show this in the beginning but this is the accessory bag for the g90 this com this contains the ce19 and its speaker mic and all that good stuff as well as an extra power lead and and extra fuses for that power lead do i assume that necessarily the emp is gonna take out a fuse probably not but uh why not keep them just in the kit they don't take up that much space so that you could just grab this and go all right my admin bag is the last thing i'll i'll talk to you about and this is normally where the ft 2dr goes and lots of other things i have a lucy lantern in here is it still called lucio yeah it's still called lucy lucy's solar lantern this is a small one solar powered charging so that's a no-brainer got a couple other odds and ends or some tools like this sog switch multi-tool not my favorite multi-tool but it's going to live forever in this bag i can always upgrade this stuff as i get better gear or swap gear out as i need to so have that in mind you're trying to set a baseline of capability and if you start to upgrade over time that would be great add the cables for different chargers little nylon bag for different assorted coax adapters for all the antennas that i would be packing with me and these just get little zipped up bags they got a clip on the side this is nice as a county cob job so the last thing before i show you the remaining antenna and show you how i built this bin is my computer this also has been on instagram this is a gpd pocket two this is this is the whole laptop this is the smallest laptop that i think you can get that is still functional this is a full windows 10 laptop faster than a surface go laptop and the advantage of this over those devices two usb 3.0 ports a usb c port and a micro sd card i have wikipedia loaded on here i have multiple documents loaded on here important documents all the manuals for all the gear in here i also have the image for my raspberry pi along with belena etcher or balina etcher for re-imaging it if i have to do that on the fly the battery life is about five hours and one of the best parts which is why it's in this kit it charges off of a usbc connector and will work off of 5 volts of power yes so you can add whatever it is to your kit make sure your charge controller can actually put out the 5 volts and about three amps that this requires or get yourself a battery backup like a usb bank or something like that and you can run the charge off of that battery bank and then top it off with the solar realistically while you're going through your new future disaster world after an emp you will have to source new better equipment like better solar panels maybe better batteries but at least you have a baseline here that you can start working with because eventually you know it's going to take a long time to charge things up like this and battery banks and keep your radio going so on and so on so keep that in mind you do need to spec your kit appropriately but at the end of the day there's only so much you can fit in here and if everything were to die around you what would you put in here and how much capability would you would you bake into that something i forgot to mention about the gpd pocket 2. the gpd pocket 2 being windows 10 means it's compatible with all the ham radio software so if you are in a situation again where you're going to be running digital modes and there are signals out there that you can receive you can run things like jsa call i don't know why you'd run ft8 after an emp but it runs it for doing poda for instance it will also run fl digi fl rig it will run winlink email system which i actually have been using that through that device with my g90 it's working very well so it's been a lot of fun to build this out let me show you my last antenna that i will be packing packing in and around this kit uh and then we'll talk about how i built the the tin can the tactical trash can all right so my last antenna is the mfj 1664 manual screwdriver antenna that will go all the way down to 80 meters with the stock whip that it comes with it does have a lug here on the side for radials that's what matched the radials that you saw earlier in the video and i have uh i've had very little problems with this you may be asking why not just take the wolf river coil you could yeah it would be fine fine option in fact the wolf river coil has the same mount on the bottom here so it would just go on top of the lid and that would work just fine for me though this was a nice little option mounted to the stock whip and the sleeve fully closed you get about 20 meters out of it so you would have to adjust this shorter if you wanted to get some of the higher bands but so far it integrates perfectly onto my tactical lid for my tack can here and works fine it's an inexpensive option it's not very expensive i found that the tuning is probably the best part about this it's extremely quick to just loosen the nut here bolt i don't know what they call that it's not a wing nut but anyway it doesn't matter and just slide it up and down you pop the g90 into tune mode swr reader mode and then you just go up here turn it close it step back put your hands up look at the thing it's not unadjusted then you just adjust it really quickly like that check it that's all it takes it's very easy all right so what did i do in my tack can to make it a viable option well the first thing i did is i sprayed the interior with contact cement and then i used pieces of cardboard up against the edges and went all the way around and then shoved something down in the bottom on the top of that i used a bit of a thin packing material to coat the inside and then i trimmed the edges that's really all i had to do now a couple of things to keep in mind when you put the lid on top of this and you're sealing it off you're creating a seal for your tactical trashcan faraday cage you're keeping in mind that you know things like this right this little lip here all around it and there's another lip right there could introduce this emp wave radiation into your tactical trash can so you do need to consider the sealing of your lid before you you close this up and consider that you're good it might not be the best it could be particularly if you had a really high powered emp that affected electronics more nearby than you this is the seal that we're talking about it's an electrical seal mesh of of kind of a metal mesh and the center is a foam a bit of foam so we need to get this onto the lid i don't know a better way of doing it other than just start working my way around kind of in the corner because this wants to be straight so i'm gonna i'm gonna risk it i'm going to start like this [Music] so what is the pace plan for all this crazy stuff that i've got on my workbench well the primary is probably going to be again it depends on your goals right we learned in the last live stream your pace goals are going to match what it is you're trying to achieve if you're trying to achieve information gathering and understanding what's going on then your primary may be just this simple am fm shortwave weather aeronautical what else does this do that's pretty much it uh radio it's a receiver it runs off of two double a batteries it's easy to keep up and running and it works really well so that could be your primary your alternate would likely be something like a vhf uhf radio that you're going to carry around with you listen to this is also wide banded and you'd be listening for aprs as well hopefully you pick up aprs signals that be great those are people you can actually talk to that'd be your alternate now your contingency could be the elinco 135 to get more power on simplex to talk to local stations on vhf you may not want to necessarily put out high power immediately after some kind of emergency don't know this could be your contingency plan where all the chips are down and you absolutely have to call out to somebody you know that you've made plans with or to somebody you heard that needs help or you yourself if you need help this could be your contingency and lastly good old emergency your frs radio maybe not but the idea remains the same this is nice to have you'd be scanning on this and you'd have the capability to talk if you heard a local signal with it all right so let's flip it and reverse it a bit what if i absolutely wanted to get a message out to somebody and we had an agreed to comms plan i had a buddy of mine who set up a tack can just like i do or maybe you set up a tat can just like i do what would be our primary mode of communication probably hf radio without a question we'd probably go here first because there'd be a bunch of you out there and we'd want to establish communication we'd likely use something like jsa call would be a wonderful option for that so that we could connect on here we could send messages back and forth and be able to connect that way my alternate for that would be my two meter packet radio solution using the raspberry pi as the tnc basically and the brains that would encode and decode the the signals for two meter packet with two meter packet we're not going to get the greatest range you could get with hf but we'd still get out there and we would be able to hop through nodes and be able to establish communication that way effective communication really useful communication because it would be over vhf and if we could establish a long line node connection we'd be able to transmit information back and forth very easily now the contingency in this case is a lot to desire right there's there's only so much you're going to get out of this the contingency in this case would likely be aprs now aprs this is a second radio that does aprs you can do aprs with your two meter uh packet radio by the way using different software that runs on the raspberry pi and and that would work for this too in fact probably works better on this way but remember you got to have redundant systems in pace so this contingency option is an ht running aprs in fact they could work in tandem you could work pack it with this and aprs with this and back to frs for your emergency communication this is going to be local comms right you're just going to talk locally i'm sure you probably have better options again you can post in the comments and and you're going to have a different view than i will have as well i want to give a big shout out to the canadian prepper podcast they did an episode on your bucket bug out kit or your bucket survival kit or emergency disaster kit i was listening to the episode and i'm like oh man that'd be fun to do with radio why would i carry my radios around in a bucket and then i went aha a steel bucket aluminum stainless steel whatever that would be emp resistant or emp proof that's a compelling option a lot of go boxes ham radio gear is not really considering emp in uh their preparations and and maybe they shouldn't i'll i'll leave kind of the the video on on this point statistically i don't have a lot of faith faith that there will be an emp disaster in the future i don't i don't think that's really something we have lined up for us but i have been asked this question a lot in the comments and that podcast gave me a perfect opportunity to explore this space so thank you to the canadian prepper podcast for for kind of putting a little ember in my brain and all the questions uh that acted as fuel on that ember to create this roaring inferno of of radio equipment that i have in front of me i had a lot of fun making this and thinking about this i've had a whole lot of fun deep diving personal self-reliance in the area of communications this last couple of months as we've you know we've had mike on the show there was time leading up to that where i was talking with mike about what we could talk about we obviously did the pace video a couple of weeks ago or last week it's just been a lot of fun to kind of reinvigorate emergency preparedness with an angle on emergency calms specifically i will post links to all of this mountain of stuff hopefully i've been tracking along and the cards are over there or something like that those cards will take you to videos where i have reviewed all this stuff before and reviewed the different methods of communication that i have been speaking about so js8 call fl digi two meter packet these are all things that have been topics of my shows in fact multiple topics of my shows i will include them in the description as well so that you can find out more about these different modes of communication i'm already way deep in the minutes in making this video and all the stuff that went into it so i'm going to end this here but please go explore these other content spaces not just my videos the other videos that are online as well because these are all really valuable modes not just for amateur radio but for just having fun within the hobby they're great but these are also really good for emergency preparedness jsa call is probably the unsung hero that's probably not getting uh the it really doesn't get the the credit it deserves i think uh largely broadly there are definitely pockets on youtube that are absolutely uh nutso over the application and justifiably so i want to hear your pace plan for emergency communications after an emp again we're assuming the worst here i want to hear it i want you to post it in the descriptions i want you to post on the facebook group and the discord we've got an mcom discord chat room on our server the link is in the description i want you to make videos on this topic and and add them to me whether they're on instagram twitter or here on youtube let me know i want to check out your plan for a emp resistant or emp proof tactical trashcan or maybe you've got a better container you can put all your stuff in i want to see it anyway my name is josh ki6naz you've been watching the ham radio crash course thank you so much for doing so if you haven't please give me a thumbs up consider subscribing i do live stream every saturday at 5 pm pacific standard time all right i'll talk to you later see ya [Music] you