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Technology and Internet Emerging and current tech related issues. Internet, DRM, IP, and other technology related discussions. |
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#81
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"Clouds can also block your sat phone from getting a signal. Being inside a building and being under trees does the same thing."
Clouds will do no such thing in any phone made in the last five, ten years. Yes, being inside a building will degrade your satellite phone performance; it will also degrade your hand-held ham radio performance. Under good conditions, your little hand-held is going to have a range of what...3, 4 miles? Your SatPhone has a range of 44,000 miles. Ham radio is an outstanding option during an emergency. Everyone should have at least a handheld and the license to use it (though, once again, you don't need a license to transmit during an emergency). But for pure range and ease of communication, you can not beat a satellite phone. Hell, if you want internet access during this emergency, buy a BGAN unit and blog away during Apocalypse. Point is, this technology allows you the full range of communication that you're used to even when everything else near you is down.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#82
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If you upgrade to general class license and/or have the correct equipment, as JDAY mentioned with a ham radio you can talk to anyone in the world - no repeaters necessary and no limitations. Even communicate with the ISS. Plus you can use it as a scanner and listen in on emergency communications, etc. Lot's of great pluses. I see your point about satellite phones though for the average person.
One has to weigh the option of price point for a satellite phone versus a license for a ham. It's up to each person to decide what's best for them.
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NRA Endowment Member |
#83
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#84
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You can talk to the ISS with a HT, people do it all the time. I've even read about people bouncing the signal from their HT off the moon and making contacts in other parts of the world.
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#85
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None of what you're saying in any way affects what I said.
I don't dispute that amateur radio is a great tool to have during an emergency. But satellite gives you a far greater range with a much better user interface for the average person. It's that simple.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#86
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As an FYI, the range of a ham radio pretty much covers the world.
For the average person I think the user interface of a satellite phone has the greater advantage over a ham.
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NRA Endowment Member |
#87
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http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/96087524.html Quote:
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#88
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Uh Oh everyone. Seems this is JDay's new target, he must be bored with Apple...
As I said before, it works for me and I can afford it. I'm not running off to be in a HAM club, or worry about the tests. I'm invested in too many hobbies to get into HAM. Everyone I've known to get into HAM gets over-invested and usually is the type that ends up needing more sun. Don't be such a hater, everything seems to be crap if you don't like it. I've personally refrained from commenting on your opinions in this forum that are completely wrong about the (unrelated to this topic) field I work in. You seem like a bright guy, but you don't know everything and Google can fail you.
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Disenfranchised NRA Benefactor Life Member. Last edited by TonyM; 06-11-2010 at 4:03 PM.. |
#89
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Exactly.
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Disenfranchised NRA Benefactor Life Member. |
#90
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Randall Rausch AR work: www.ar15barrels.com Bolt actions: www.700barrels.com Foreign Semi Autos: www.akbarrels.com Barrel, sight and trigger work on most pistols and shotguns. Most work performed while-you-wait, evening and saturday appointments available. |
#91
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"Good luck using your sat phone as anything other than a paper weight when this happens (and it will, just a matter of time)."
I would read the report before you start quoting alarmist news articles. Actually, I partly take that back. The reporter didn't cite his source, so I can't really say go and read the article. IF it is the report that I suspect it is (Severe Space Weather Events--Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts: A Workshop Report), it's not nearly as bad as you think. To expand further. Solar flares, radiation and the like are not new issues in spacecraft design. In fact, they are the *key* environmental component that the spacecraft is designed around...more so, even, than the vacuum itself (for non-habitable spacecraft). For quite some time, the radiation belts around the earth were misunderstood as far worse than they actually are, and satellites were thereby OVER-designed. Add to that the usual safety factor, and you've got some pretty damn resilient pieces of communications floating around up there. A loss of a satellite can be a billion-dollar cost...so if the owning company needs to put in an additional million or two to shield the satellite from solar flares, you bet they'll do it. Point is...the sky is not falling, either now or in 2012.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Last edited by bigmike82; 06-11-2010 at 4:55 PM.. |
#93
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Randall Rausch AR work: www.ar15barrels.com Bolt actions: www.700barrels.com Foreign Semi Autos: www.akbarrels.com Barrel, sight and trigger work on most pistols and shotguns. Most work performed while-you-wait, evening and saturday appointments available. Last edited by ar15barrels; 06-11-2010 at 5:32 PM.. |
#94
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Who you gonna call?
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You think you know, but you have no idea. The information posted here is not legal advice. If you seek legal advice hire an attorney who is familiar with all the facts of your case. |
#95
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http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-..._1_solar-flare Quote:
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http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/sp...orm/index.html Quote:
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#96
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Ham is good, but you have to practice it or know some theory for it to be
useful. With ham, the ability to communicate rises as the factorial of the number of nodes. For telephone service, capacity is limited to the smallest-capacity link between the handset and any other handset in the world. Sat phones are good, but capacity is quite limited compared to land lines and ham. 3-watt simplex FM ham will go 100 miles if you have good equipment and good geography. I do it a _lot_. In a true SHTF situation, use your ham radio to talk directly to the cockpit radio in those planes flying above. Switch to AM, tune in your local tower frequency, identify the nature of the emergency, and talk. They will be listening. |
#97
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Holy crap! A ten minute outage??? Whatever will we do?
"The damage that could be done should a Carrington-flare occur anytime soon would be catastrophic, with estimates reaching between $30 and $70 billion. With technology so ingrained in our everyday lives, how much more will life be affected than back in a day where the telegraph was the most sophisticated form of communication? " Is there an actual technical source for this, or this pure FUD? You are giving me *many* examples of temporary outages due to solar activity. What you have no presented is WIDE-SPREAD damage to the satellites. You'll find incidents of one or two breaking down there and there, but a massive destruction of the orbiting satellites IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. It HASN'T happened. Nor will it. The solar activity is going to interfere with transmissions *during* the event. Not before. Not after. I can play this "what if" game too. What would happen if the sun suddently went nova? OH CRAP! THE END IS NEAR! We're screwed. Sell all your posessions 'cus they won't do you any good during the solar blast. All you're posting, JDay, is articles which *SPECULATE* on the effects of a worst-case scenario solar flare on poorly manufactured satellites. And that's all it is. You will not find any evidence of systemic vulnerabilities to the satellite infrastructure caused by solar activity.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#98
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OCSD Approved CCW Instructor NRA Certified Instructor CA DOJ Certified Instructor Glock Certified Armorer |
#100
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That was caused by a small flare that wasn't pointed directly at us. Imagine a larger one that was.
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#101
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"Imagine a larger one that was."
There have been many large solar flares over the last two decades. Very, very few have succeeded in completely knocking out comsats. Your biggest group of victims are your scientific satellites, as organizations who sponsor them generally don't have the resources of the big guys. "Look again, this was wide spread disruption that lasted for several days." Again, on a scientific satellite designed to measure the strength of a solar flare. The 89 event, which was substantially larger, also only lasted two days, interfered with GPS and did not damange any comsats. I've been unable to find any reference to any that were damaged. The GPS outage was caused by a degradation of the signal through the atmosphere. Those signals are already very very weak and received by tiny antennas. It takes much less to interfere with those signals than that of a standard satellite communications link. GPS is not equivalent to regular satellite communications signals. "Not speculation, historical fact." Wrong. It is speculation. There is no historical evidence that suggests that comsats are vulnerable to a large solar event. You do not have any cases where a large number of those satellites were damaged by a solar event in the past two decades. You simply don't. Saying that some hypothetically large solar storm is going to destroy our space communications infrastructure is pure, unadulterated FUD. On a seperate note, terrestrial power grids != satellites. Power grids have a wider 'receive' area than a satellite, and because of their very design, are more susceptible. The article I mentioned earlier has some great info on this specific issue. Here's a spoiler: We, in SoCal, aren't vulnerable. (See page 79).
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#102
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NUNQUAM NON PARATUS |
#103
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Pardon if this is a stupid question, as I'm 3 beers down on a Saturday night, but with a SAT phone, you need some kind of provider, right? Specifically, you need to PAY some company so much money per month (or year) to access the satellites, right?
Well, in true SHTF, who is to say that THEIR infrastructure won't go down, and you therefore lose connectivity to the satellite(s)? I mean, if you have to pay them monthly or yearly to maintain your comms, it stands to reason that they are a weak link, and if they go down, your SAT phone goes down too. Last edited by xrMike; 06-12-2010 at 9:18 PM.. |
#104
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http://www.whenshtf.com/showthread.p...138#post113138 Quote:
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Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#105
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"here's a good reason that I saw on another board."
To counter that... http://www.globalcomsatphone.com/globalcom/katrina.html xrMike, here's how a satellite phone works. You need to purchase a phone on a certain network. Satellites phones are generally not interchangeable between providers, as they're set for different frequencies, different modulations, different satellites and different encoding schemes. So when you buy a phone, you're also buying into the network provider (kind of like a cell phone, but even more restricted). Once you have that phone, you have to prepay for minutes, or pay a monthly service charge if you're on a post-pay plan. The problem with prepay minutes is that, for Iridium specifically, those minutes expire within a certain amount of time. So if you prepay for 20 minutes, that would expire in a month. If you buy 200, those'll expire in six months, and so forth. The more you buy, the longer they stay active. It's a method that Iridium uses to ensure they keep some sort of steady revenue stream. "Well, in true SHTF, who is to say that THEIR infrastructure won't go down" Let me use Inmarsat as an example, because I'm more familiar with their products. Say you have a disaster of epic proportions here in Southern California. Giant 8.0 earthquake, a mega tsunamic and rioting out the wazo. Say it affects *all* of Southern California, from Baker to San Diego to Santa Barbara. No power, no phones, no public services...all gone. The reason satellite continues to work in these circumstances is that the key components of that satellite link are very, very far away. The satellite itself is up in space...20,000 miles away, and completely unaffected by this disaster. The earth station that receives the signal from the satellite (and from your satellite phone) is also very, very far away. In the case of Inmarsat, the earthstation is in the Netherlands (or Hawaii, or Italy). All three locations would be completely unaffected by anything that happened to you in SoCal. This is the key reason why satellite communications are so invaluable in the response component of a disaster. Sure, if World War 3 happens, there's a good chance that the satellites will go offline (though its by no means a certainty...between the Iridium satellites, or the MILSTAR constellation, what do you think a bigger target for the Ruskies would be?). This is not to say that satellite communication is not without its weaknesses, nor is it the end-all be-all to disaster communications. But it is very, very good at providing you with communications in a situation where the local infrastructure is overloaded or destroyed.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#107
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In a true SHTF scenario I am going to be working real hard and the only communication I will need is LOCAL, people that can directly affect my condition. Who will have time to talk outside the area? Whowill have time. I may need to call my buddies to assist me in what ever, local Comms. Satellite TV is good, wide band receiver is good, but I doubt I will have time or the desire to talk to anyone outside of the zone until its stabilized. Way to much diarrhea of the mouth in modern society, talk less and do more. If I need for any reason to touch base outside the zone, I will go talk to the 80 year-old man with the HF rigs if his tower is still standing.
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"The California matrix of gun control laws is among the harshest in the nation and are filled with criminal law traps for people of common intelligence who desire to obey the law." - U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez |
#108
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I dont know about the rest of you, but ill be on my race radio, VHF, weatherman ch.
See you richard craniums after SHTF... Offroad reference specifically: weatherman. Seriously though, all of us offroad guys use VHF, do many normal people use it? I am a complete radio noob btw... |
#109
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__________________
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
#112
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"Wait, what?"
Yeah, it's kinda cool. You can use internet via ham radio if you've got the correct equipment on each end. Just a huge caveat. Don't even think about doing anything work related using this method, as it is illegal. The ARRL book I read for my basic license emphasized this repeatedly. Anything even remotely resembling business can not be done over amateur frequencies.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#114
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i cant believe i read all 3 pages...
you guys are dorks. when shtf, im going to be too concerned with finding rabbits and water than to fiddle with some radio crap. OP- i understand the jest in your thread, so my opinion is to get anything but an apple. my nokia e71x is a great phone, but im always looking for something new, so i have my -free- hp ipaq glisten in the mail from at&t. i have to have a qwerty physical keyboard on a phone, as i want to text fast without errors, and hate predictive text. it pisses me off.cuz when the zombies and red chinese fascist commies are busting down the door, i gotta be able to text "hugs n kisses" to the old lady in nanoseconds. sorry for late reply. aint bin 'round for a bit. |
#115
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#116
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If you had an amateur radio you could be asking someone else if they have any rabbits or water or where they got theirs .
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NRA Endowment Member |
#117
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"How does it exactly work? Would there be signal sound of some sort, like the old 56k days? And what about encryption? "
Depends. There are various different modulation schemes that you can use. I don't know much of the technical details behind this within the Ham world, but it is as easy as grabbing two modems (one on either end) and connecting them via an open frequency. You plug in one modem to the network, and your computer into the other, and suddenly you've got access. Google Packet Radio and AX.25, and go from there. If you don't have an amateur license, get one first and see what kind of local clubs you've got access to. Someone there is bound to have a working setup they may let you look at / play with. The signal you send out can not be encrypted. I don't know the correct laws for it, but I do remember reading something to that effect in my study guide.
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-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 |
#119
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felt compelled to poop in thi thread, it was getting waay too serious in here.
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#120
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
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__________________
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (Pearce and Hale, eds., Boston, 1850) |
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