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General Radio Discussion / Re: Empty HF frequency band for emergency coms
« on: January 19, 2021, 2130 UTC »NVIS during the day. 3 to 7MHz.
Keep an eye on MUF on your local ionosonde.
Very reliable and what pirates and the military have used for years.
Forget CB frequencies, useless unless there's sunspots!
Are you one of those prepping types?
Str.
OK, makes sense. I wasn't a prepping type until recently. You're in the UK, so it probably doesn't seem as important there.
Consider too, do you want your coms monitored by just anyone or are we talking to a specific station? If you want coms that don't need to be secured for some reason, Amateur bands will be full of voices that may be able to help out in a given situation, depending on the type of emergency that is. OpSec however is a major concern if you want to live a quiet undisturbed life after a major societal issue. Listening will yield truths. Why they never paid more attention to HF radio coms in Walking Dead in the early seasons is totally beyond me.
I have often said that just hearing a transmission is information on it's own level. Hearing a lot of traffic means one thing, hearing routine traffic is another. Hearing unwanted visitors on VHF means Danger Close while a fading HF signal is not likely a threat. Stuff to learn.
Personally I doubt we are on the brink just yet. I do always suggest people do what our great grandparents did and just be prepared to be on your own for a while, if nothing else in case of natural disaster or say some nasty virus keeps us all on lock down. I hear the Left Coast had a quake just the other day. "Learn to Swim" - Tool
My 2 pennies worth,
DB, out.
I'd mostly just be talking with another couple stations, but I wouldn't mind if people were listening for the most part. They probably didn't pay more attention to HF because most novices or random people that get ahold of a "ham radio" use a VHF radio. For some reason it's become like the defacto standard even though HF is probably more useful. Like it was pretty hard for me to find cheap HF radios. Almost all of the cheaper ham radios are VHF and I think that's probably what most "preppers" would get. I don't think they bother to think about it any deeper.
Well, maybe not elsewhere in the world, but in the US, something is definitely brewing. Civil war is inevitable in this country.
And yeah, the spectrum is all 'spoken for', but in reality much of it is empty. The frequencies surrounding the CB band have been assigned to various governmental agencies for as long as I can remember and yet I have never in my life heard anything on those frequencies that remotely resembles a government agency transmission. Just outbanders.
Yeah, it does seem like that. It's like everyone is packed into these small bands with emptiness all around. They should have expanded the ham bands. I noticed a couple times that there are licensed HF broadcast stations that are actually outside the allotted bands. Maybe the govt doesn't really care so much about these frequencies cause you would never see that elsewhere. I find it strange they don't seem more interested in these frequencies considering they have good properties that no other bands have.
I guess what I get out of this is - just use whatever as long as it's empty haha.