 another facet of our preparedness plans and that is communications and if you you don't know it yet but by the end of my presentation I my objective is I would like all of you to get motivated enough by this to go take a test and get your ham radio license talk about that's more that's where I'd like to leave you by the end of the presentation here so in my own personal preparedness plans I like to look at about six areas we've touched on quite a few of these this morning already food water and medical hygiene I also think about shelter you know I eat my home of the wood stove the last few days I've earned some wood but I'm perfectly comfortable if the power goes out for three days or a week or all winter got three or four cords of wood there transportation think about if the grid went down and things really went bad with an EMP your car might not work anymore you might do some things to plan around that security and personal defense I encourage you to get your seal carry license learn learn learn practice practice with your weapon but this morning I want to talk about communications let's say we were sitting here in a meeting and all of a sudden all the lights went off okay no big deal we all go through power outages you probably maybe we're not here with a television nearby so you might grab your cell phone and check the weather or a news feed or something and so what happened if you look at your phone and no signal nothing might start to wonder what's going on so I would probably go out to my truck and turn on the radio see what I can pick up on a news feed there I turn my radio on nothing no stations anywhere AM FM is dead now I'm really start to wonder what's going on and so I'm probably gonna go I'm gonna say I'm done with the medium gonna go home and check on my wife or the kids or whatever and I'll get in my truck and hopefully it'll start start to head home and I look at the gas gauge and oh crap it's pretty close to empty I was gonna fill up before I came to the meeting I forgot to do that so I'm gonna run down here to Weldon spring to the QT and fill up because this might be serious and probably good to have a full tank of gas I get to QT pull up to the pump their lights are all out to walk up there try to swipe my credit card nothing works I'm like well all right maybe I can pay with cash I'll run inside nobody carries much cash anymore I'll go into their ATM inside I go in there that doesn't work either all right so maybe now a little panic is starting to set in this is the kind of scenario they could play out if we had an EMP anybody know what EMP is an electromagnetic pulse could take out the grid big sections of the grid wouldn't have to be an EMP attack it could be a big solar flare or what they call a CME coronal mass ejection I think I read a story the other day that said there's like a 10 or 11 percent chance the earth could be hit by a major CME from the Sun in the next 10 years that's pretty good size chance so and it wouldn't have to be any of those let me give you another example this happened last year out in Arizona some vandals cut some fiber optic lines and a whole area in Arizona couldn't use the internet or cell phones wouldn't work businesses couldn't process credit card transactions ATMs didn't work law enforcement databases were unavailable if you were there you might be wondering what the heck was going on at that time fortunately it only lasted a few hours they were able to find where these vandals had cut the fiber optics but it just speaks to how dependent all of us are these days on cell phones on the internet on that sort of thing and if that would all go away where would it leave you communications wise there's a few more examples some that are fairly close to home a few years ago we had a pretty good size tornado ripped through Bridgeston actually it touched down out here in New Mellon a couple other places on the way down there the folks that were impacted directly they were in trouble for quite a while Joplin had one worse than that and F5 you guys all remember that the hospital was destroyed they had a rebuild the hospital communication locally for them was very bad when that sort of thing happened cell phone towers are so overloaded you're not going to pick up your cell phone calls ham radio operators did a lot of volunteer work there hurricane Katrina same thing was probably larger more widespread than the Joplin tornado blasted longer people were living in the Superdome was not good we had Ferguson riots here look two years ago and we were wondering what might happen there fortunately nothing very significant in the way of widespread communications disruptions but there's a reason when you look at all these things that police EMS firefighters they all use radios those guys don't use cell phones because when it all goes bad those things aren't going to work every county has a group of skyworn ham radio operators that are activated during severe severe weather events there's about 30 hospitals in the metro region that have a network of ham radio operators to call on if needed yesterday I was out in st. Joe West Lake st. Louis participating in their practice drill where all these hospitals talked to one another on the radio and we have groups like Aries you know amateur radio emergency services these guys practice for emergency events all the time so how about you guys setting yourself up with the means of communication that doesn't rely on you listening to broadcast TV or radio cell phones or the internet so what are small turners if you wanted to do that communicate by radio well it starts small I think all of us probably in our lives use these little walkie-talkies I remember using them for the first time when I was a kid in grade so now they're pretty cheap Cabela's Walmart they work great but they don't have much range they come in various flavors FRS GMRS MERS each of those has a little more range but they're really pretty limited everybody remember CB's CB radio I had one back in the 70s boy I was all the rage everybody had a CB the truckers still use them and this might be a good source of information if there were a widespread disaster these guys are traveling across country they might bring information with them you could listen or talk to them on CB but what I'd like to talk about more today is amateur radio or ham radio it's been around for a long long time and as I say there are volunteer organizations that help out in disasters well you can do this from your home or from your car as well there's a lot of stuff on the screen here but basically what I want to tell you is you might ask how far how many miles can I reach with these different things well the walkie-talkies I talked about are down here FRS GMRS MERS in the best of conditions you might get two to ten miles or so out of them when the leaves are on the trees and everything else you're probably talking more like a mile or two and if you have some hills and valleys that'll cut it down CB radio if you have a real powerful one you might get 10 15 20 miles range out of that the ham radio we'll talk more about the different frequencies and bands you can locally with a little handheld in a decent antenna get perhaps 15 or 17 miles it's very good for locally around the county for a couple of counties and then if you have what we call HF which can do really long distance you can talk all over the country or even around the world it's pretty amazing a little radio sitting over there on the table I've talked to like 50 or 60 different countries here's the only technical part of the lesson today but I want to this illustrates the difference between what we call VHF very high frequency UHF ultra high frequency remember when your television had that on their channel 30 was UHF channel 2 4 5 was VHF same thing this stuff is what we call line of sight the radio can reach another radio if there's not a mountain in between you or a building in between you that's gonna block it all right and this is the stuff that works well around the county if you get your antenna up on top of your roof or the guys that have them on top of a water tower for a repeater it works very well around the metro area and we use it this group practices on HF high frequency is longer wavelength and what it does is it bounces off the atmosphere so you can bounce off the atmosphere and come back down and be talking to somebody in California or in London I've even talked to New Zealand but that's how we're able to talk to you know maybe more regionally Kansas City or Chicago or something like that short wave they're similar they're in these frequency ranges I could show you a chart if you got a shortwave radio it's a receiver only you can transmit but you can listen to these hand bands and they have broadcast stations yep same frequencies and same thing it's bouncing off the atmosphere I'll skip right past this just a moment but this is a chart shows you all the different frequencies bands that are available to hands and there are a couple of them in blue 40 and 80 meters that work great for regional communications out to maybe 500 miles or so the one in yellow 20 meters is really good for long distance if I want to talk to somebody in California or in London and then the one circled in red is 2 meters and that's the one that gets used locally with a little handheld or with a mobile unit in your truck or from your house that's what our old keepers and militia folks around here use to talk to one another so ham radio has been around for decades and decades and our guys that are in it I kind of consider ham radio nerds you know they're into it for the sake of the radio stuff what we're looking at it for here is part of our preparedness points how might we communicate with other folks if we didn't have cell phones and all that stuff and so there's a group that started up just about five years ago called Amron the American readout radio operators network they started out there in the Northwest there's a lot of preparedness folks that relocated out there but a lot of us around the country said hey you don't have to be out there and it has grown in four or five short years from you know maybe a couple of hundred people there now like two or three thousand members of this group called Amron and what I like about them is they're trying to apply this hand radio stuff to us everyday folks and how we can use it for emergency communications for us preparedness minded folks and so we've kind of borrowed this model of theirs see if I can explain this what they suggest is you know ham operators everybody doesn't need to be on long distance ham operator but if you had one or two or three in a group like us that could talk long distance and then the rest of us here locally could just talk on walkie talkies or CB or whatever we could disseminate this information locally so they have this project and it's really grown they call it the channel three project make it easy to remember if you've got a walkie talkie on FRS talk on channel three you've got a MERS walkie talkie use channel three if you're on a CB use channel three the idea is for example our group of keepers and our mission group here in Missouri we've got three or four maybe five operators now that are hams that could do this long distance stuff and we could do the heavy lifting on on long range communications figure out what's going on if we had an EMP that knocked out the grid through the whole center of the United States we could be the guys that do that and then locally we could get on what's called two meter and this is a map it's not great but this is you know St. Louis North County St. Charles County Franklin County Jeff County and these are some of our more active both keeper ham members that got their entry-level license and can talk on two meters so if I got some information I want to share the whole group on HF from California then I could get on two meters and we could share this all around a several county area here locally so and you could look at this the other way around it doesn't have to be information coming in it could be that we've had a disaster here and we want to send the information out for example let's say a new Madrid we have a big quake things go to heck here in the St. Louis area communications out I've got a son in California he's wandering hey dad are you alright or I'd be happy to help you folks if you have family and friends outside the area you're unable to reach him by cell phone can't send him an email things are gone there but we could help one another here locally which we definitely be doing if an earthquake and knocked out a lot of things could be talking with each other but we could also then get information out to your family loved ones friends elsewhere so it could be a two-way flow and then lastly you could imagine some little spider diagrams like this for each one of these folks in their very immediate vicinity just their neighbors folks down the road and you could use little walkie talkies for that that's the idea behind this and Ron channel three project is you layer ham radio long distance on top of ham radio locally on top of little walkie talkies or nerves radios put it all together and typically years ago the hams were kind of like hey we're the experts we know these guys and Ron are trying to get everybody involved and use this for emergency communications so I told you I'd like to leave you motivated to get your ham license it's not hard you don't have to be an electrical engineer to get your ham license my wife's a music therapist and she has her ham license okay my criticism of the stage is not a real good map of science but there's three levels there's a technician level then the next step up is general and the next step up is extra I would recommend everybody consider getting their technician license the test is I'll get to that in a moment but this allows you to talk on the two meter band that I've spoke of that can do local communications if you then take the second test which is a little tougher but still it's kind of they're all multiple choice and you can really just kind of memorize the stuff and when you really learn is when you get on the air so get your test and get on the air but the general license would let you talk long distance and then the extra license in my own personal opinion that's for the ham nerds and it gets you a little bit of extra band privileges but not much more beyond the general I got that book and I started studying it so how can you get your ham license take a class use a textbook or some online study guides the way I did it was there is one of these little books for tech class there's one for the general there's one for the extra the test is I think for technician like 30 multiple choice questions and they show you every single possible question might be a hundred of them but you'll see everyone that could possibly be on the test I just went through here and I highlighted the correct answer and I just started reading through here and he actually have enough photographic memory almost that you can recognize the answer anyway you go take a 30 question multiple choice test pass it pay on 15 bucks you got your ham license get on the air and practice the st. Charles ham radio club gives this test every fourth Monday of the month the st. Louis club does it down at the cliff cave library off it's down by the JB bridge every week every Tuesday night so it's easy to take the test and lastly I'll leave you with some resources and if anybody's interested I have a printed copy of this one page right here just pass this around take one if you would like there's some websites the organization for hams in the u.s. is the a or or l there's a site called q or z that lists everybody's call signs once you get your license and they have all these practice tests on there there's a some very active local ham clubs in the area st. Charles County st. Louis and Franklin and then our group of keepers of greater st. Louis so take a look at those websites that's what I had for today my objective was to try to get you thinking enough and get you motivated that you would consider go getting your ham license did I succeed anybody think it might be an interesting thing to go to sure great question how much cost to buy a good radio these little handhelds these little bell fans are what 30 bucks 40 bucks maybe these are good for local communication they're only like five watts or eight watts but if you put a good antenna like he's got curled up here on there you could talk from my house out in august to probably down to st. Charles minimum let's say 30 40 bucks another antenna like that another 25 or 30 bucks step up a little bit and get a rig like Kevin's here that's 75 watts he's got a really cool one he put together here in a box with a bigger battery so run a lot longer