 My name is Specialist McNabb. I'm the communications guy for the Missouri 3rd Italian Sequel Brigade and today I want to talk about emergency communication. So just kind of recap what we've talked about. You want to have good clean water. You want to make sure you keep yourself clean. You want to have foodie. When you're in an emergency you want to make sure that you have the supplies you need for first aid. But then the next part is community. How do you communicate with your community? How do you keep in touch with your family, your friends, the people around you? How do you find out what's going on? We're used to in the United States because we have such good communications. No one pretty much was going on nationwide, knowing pretty quickly, knowing a lot of the wrong things pretty quickly. But the important thing though is that our communications infrastructure may not be quite as robust as it seems right now. I can put myself on and I can talk to somebody around the world. What happens when the cell towers are down? That happened in Hurricane Katrina. A good friend of mine. I wasn't able to talk to him for several days because there was no phone service. Once the phone service came off it was spotty. It was hard to get on. All those sort of things are part of what we want to consider as we're making our emergency plans. So as an overview I want to talk about whatever your communication is and that is basically we want to know about staying in touch. The people who want to stay in touch with the area that's been affected, they don't give you the opportunity to say, I'm okay. And then all your friends will know that you're okay. That's a great way to use a cell phone to quickly let everybody know what your status is and it'll also generally know what your location is. Now I actually had a real world situation like this. We have clients in France who are in the area where the recent French terrorist attack. So within a few moments most of our clients and friends had checked in on Facebook and within an hour all of them had. So they were actually all well wired together. We had four or five people and then we knew not to worry about them. Not that we could have done anything about it. But I can imagine all of their family and friends there in France would have been, France and Belgium would have liked to have known that they were okay. Another one, when you're using your cell network, short message service, SMS or texting, that is actually a better way to communicate when there's a lot of traffic going on. The reason I say that is two things. If you have a busy signal, you can call in again and get an open line. If you use short messaging service, it'll sit in a queue until it gets through and then it'll go through. So you can set up the message to send and the recipient will get it. You can also tell multiple people at the same time using your text. So everybody, does everybody hear text? Everybody not text? Okay. Somebody be like, oh yeah, I'll do a text. You want to keep your voice calls short and do leave a voicemail. I hate leaving voicemail because that means, you know, I got to talk more. But leave a voicemail and include status, location and next step. This is what I'm going to do next. All right. Some of the equipment you want, we talked about this, keep a spare USB battery. It's less than 10 bucks in some cases. I went to Deals and they've got, it's kind of like green and black. It's a unit in, it's a unit in a battery pack. It was like five bucks and I can charge myself on a twice off. All right. Keep that charged up. Keep it in your car or take it and put it in your purse or your man purse or your go bag. That's, I'm sorry, not a man purse, your go bag to get it out there. The critical information you want to look for is the milliamp hours. It's going to be called MAH and the more the better. I always say, I used to carry around these 1200 milliamp hour batteries. That's like good for half a charge with these modern smartphones. So look for one that's like 10,000 or more. But again, those prices are really coming down. I will say if to keep her on the house or keeping the truck, one of these jumpstart batteries, that thing, that thing has a lot of uses for it. And you can see this particular model, I'm not recommending this one. I'm just showing you as an example. This particular model will allow you to actually jack directly in and charge your devices. All right. So what's up? What's next? How do you find those things out? Well, one of the things is keep a battery operated radio. I know that sounds simple, but most of us are used to just, you know, listening to, you know, how many of us listen to stuff on their cell phone? I do. I haven't listened to Rush Limbaugh in the actual air unless I'm in the car. You know, or unless I'm in the podcast whatever you're having on. But you know what, not a battery operated radio sitter out just waiting in case, you know, I don't have cell service. You also, when you're, when you, you know why Camo X is at 1120? It's a clear channel station. That was actually set up for emergency communications back many, many years ago. There's not a whole lot of stations next to it. So when there's an emergency, turn into Camo X and all over the region, you'll be able to catch what's going on there. Smartphone apps. Go ahead and do a search, download a weather, a weather alert application. It'll tell you when bad weather is coming your way. That's a good way of staying alert and aware. And finally, internet, social media. Social media. That's a way of finding out what's going on and what happens next. But I will give you this one humongous caveat. Stick with authoritative sources. The reality is a lot of rumors fly around and even from supposed news stations will put out erroneous information. So take things with a grain of salt and give purpose, not so much what your neighbor said, but maybe from a source that you know to be authoritative and reliable. Does that make sense? Because, you know, if it's on the internet, it's not necessarily true. Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln. Is that going to work? Okay, let's see. Now, if you're looking for a radio, if you're going to buy a radio, I recommend the free play radios. Okay, now I see some of you very wisely taking notes because this information is critical and important and of course extra special ones coming from me. However, I will let you know that since we have your email addresses, we'll send you a link in a day or so where you can download all of these presentations as a single PDF and then you'll be able to review them at your leisure. The notes you're taking now, these are the things that you think are most important and that's great. But when you get these presentations in a PDF, you can review some of them and if they prompt other questions, it'll help you out because I'm all about the communications. Okay, so this is the equipment. I recommend the free play radios. The nice thing about the free play radios, I've got a radio that you've got a crank and it'll run. But you've got a standard for like 20 minutes spinning this thing. The nice thing about the free play radios is they're on a spring. You can crank them up and let it go and it'll actually work for like 15 or 20 minutes where you can listen in. Right now on Amazon, they're a little expensive compared to just a crank. They're free play radios for like 15 bucks. A free play radio might cost you 35 or 40 but believe me, if the shit hits the fan, if the stuff hits the fan situation, doing this is going to suck. So anyway, some of these radios will have a USB port for charging and that's going to be really helpful because the cell phone grid might come back up and there's a lot of things you can do on your phone off the network like a calculator or taking notes or taking pictures in case you need to for whatever reason. That'll be handy. And then finally, a lot of radios will have a generator or a dynamo on them. Those will probably be my third choice but as I said, they take a lot of spinning. Okay, so what's up, what's next? Is there a ham radio person here? The television's out, you can't hear much on the radio. Is there a ham radio operator? How many of you driven around the neighborhood and saw that great big tower in the back of somebody's house? Okay, this guy's seen it. I've been looking for it, but look up on there for like an old-fashioned television antenna. They got the downsized one now. They got the downsized one, right. Anyway, you can also check with the amateur radio relay lead asking who the hams are in your neighborhood. If you know that guy, be nice to him. He's going to be a big nerd, I can just tell you because ham nerds have nothing on computer nerds, I can tell you. This one's old. Exactly. You know, bring him some Mountain Dew and Cheetos. He'll be your friend. And then he's going to be able to communicate all over the planet, okay. And that would be absent some more authoritative sources and be an opportunity to find out more. These guys are trained for, they're very friendly. They actually, they do spend a lot of time on the radio talking to strangers. They're trained for emergencies. You want to know those guys before you need them. And obviously, we're going to talk a little bit more about how you too can be a ham radio operator. Also, community bulletin board. If there's a disaster, find a local place like a local park or a shelter, set up a bulletin board where you put notes on. Okay, that's a great place. You know, you're going to be moving around. You know, if you put a note up on a bulletin board, I've actually got one in my neighborhood, right there at Wilmington and horrendous. There's a bulletin board that people post notices to. These are my two neighbors here. Apparently they didn't know about that. Locomediate walkie-talkies. I'm going to talk about this. They're excellent for short-range communications. In fact, my two friends here, we're on a community watch and we use walkie-talkies to stay in touch with each other as we're patrolling in the neighborhood. They're great when you're traveling in groups, but they really generally only work line of sight because they're short-way on UHF. We recommend this piece of equipment. This is what our militia unit uses for short-range communication. A radio and an extra battery is less than 60 bucks. It comes with all kinds of accessories. We found it to be very tough. I've never broken one. Have you ever broken one? Nope, I don't think we ever busted one. And believe me, we tried. It does have extra power. I mean, it's actually a fairly powerful radio for what it is. And it can be used by unlicensed users on certain channels. It'll also tune to AFM radio. You can get no-weather servers where you can listen in. You can listen to police and firebands. And as I said, we use that. And it's highly programmable. Other radio communications are citizens' banner radios. There's no lives required. You can usually get them between 50 and 100 bucks, keep it in the car, and CV radio, the frequency will propagate over longer distances, like within a county or so, unless your charger's got one of those 3,500 watts CV radios that can talk to Mars. But that's what's necessary. Let's circle back to the Balfrain guidelines. Now, this is from my research, okay, that the multi-use radio service channels, you can use them with this radio as long as the power is set to one watt. Particularly radio will go to one watt or five watts. The MERS is for two watts, so you can broadcast on one watt and still be well within the guidelines. So if we're on community watches and our radios, we'll have them found on the one watt and we'll use these channels. And you don't need a license. If you can get a license for a GMRS, as long as one person in your family has a license, you can actually communicate amongst yourselves. And you can also run it at five watts. That means you can talk further distances with that five watts. FRS, family radio services, that's what your baby monitors are running on, that sort of thing. And this radio is way too powerful for that. And finally, this radio will work on handbands, but you need to have at least a technician license or more to legally use it. Now, obviously during an emergency, I don't think people will be running around with those little locator bands to find people illegally broadcasting. And theoretically, the Balfent radio is not necessarily the license specifically for these bands, but again, as long as the power is low and you're using it appropriately, that's what I'm going to do with our community watch. Your mileage may vary. I'm not your lawyer. I'm just the guy talking about the vacations. So running through quickly, hand radio, we had all kinds of... there's all kinds of situations that can happen in the old cars, as we were talking about earlier, and inability to communicate. And so the nice thing about hand radio is you can talk all over the world. And if you wanted to do this, you can set yourself up and have that two-way communications. Amateur radio really has helped out in a lot of disasters through our nation's history as far as just helping to communicate and coordinate what people know what's going on. Answering those critical questions, what's up, what's next. I'm able to run my hand radio off of my car battery, and I'm able to get plenty of air. I'm able to... I am able to communicate as far away as... I've communicated as far as Michigan, for sure I've actually gotten a response back from Michigan. I'm still figuring out some of the problems of how my antenna is doing, but nevertheless, it is a powerful way to do things. It's not really expensive to get your license here. You can also... you can... you can change your antenna and get a lot more range out of it. So for my family, we all have radios, and I have a J-Pole antenna where I'll go up in the top floor of my house. Raquel Higgins, please come to the checkout desk. I am able to communicate quite a bit further distance with my family in an emergency. 37 miles or less? On a good day, with good line of sight, I happen to live at a high elevation, and so I can get quite a distance. I can get as far as... I've talked to my son Darren as far away as probably about nine miles in some situations. I may have been... I may have been using a little more power than... All right. Your mileage may vary, though. You want to test all these things. You want to try things out. I did a cross-country trip with my mom, and my part buddy was driving her truck. I was driving her truck. He was driving the moving truck, and those radios kept us in touch, and it was very, very handy. You can... you can get a handbrake here for your vehicle. They're actually quite compact, for your vehicle. You can also park one up on your... Look for these things, and you're trying to find your handbrake for your neighborhood. And, of course, if you want to go full nerd, you can use a read like this. All right. And that is the end of my presentation. I'd like to invite Captain Hamilton up to wrap things up.