I received an ARRL legislative alert email with some good news for ham radio operators like me and perhaps not so great news for property owners who want antenna restrictions.

Congress has directed the FCC to conduct a study of the uses and capabilities of Amateur Radio Service communications in emergencies and disaster relief. The FCC was directed to identify

“impediments to enhanced Amateur Radio Service communications, such as the effects of unreasonable or unnecessary private land use restrictions on residential antenna installations.” Finally, the study is to make “recommendations regarding the removal of such impediments.”

I received the following in email from Nye County, Nevada Hams:

Here is link to the amendment that added the ham radio exclusion:

SB 140 in PDF.

Read it carefully.

The law is primarily concerned with hand held wireless devices, further the law avoids discussing communication/electronic equipment mounted to the vehicle.

A ham radio mounted in a car with a microphone is not a hand held wireless device.

A handi-talkie is a hand held wireless device.

The follow are the exemptions passed in senate bill 140

2. The provisions of this section do not apply to:

(a) A paid or volunteer firefighter, emergency medical technician, ambulance attendant or other person trained to provide emergency medical services who is acting within the course and scope of his or her employment.

(b) A law enforcement officer or any person designated by a sheriff or chief of police or the Director of the Department of Public Safety who is acting within the course and scope of his or her employment.

(c) A person who is reporting a medical emergency, a safety hazard or criminal activity or who is requesting assistance relating to a medical emergency, a safety hazard or criminal activity.

(d) A person who is responding to a situation requiring immediate action to protect the health, welfare or safety of the driver or another person and stopping the vehicle would be inadvisable, impractical or dangerous.

(e) A person who is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission as an amateur radio operator and who is providing a communication service in connection with an actual or impending disaster or emergency, participating in a drill, test, or other exercise in preparation for a disaster or emergency or otherwise communicating public information.

Please note paragraph 2e the amateur exemption, the final statement of “or otherwise

communicating public information” exempts all amateur communication as amateur radio by design is only communicates public information.

It also makes handi talkies legal. Get a Ticket and argue the point with a judge.

Also note exemption does not include CB Radios, but again a mounted radio is not a hand held wireless device. Get a Ticket and argue the point with a judge.

There’s an updated TED Talk at YouTube (from March, 2011–recently rated #2 in a “Countdown of the Best TED Talks” at The Huffington Post), “Salman Khan: Let’s Use Video To Reinvent Education.”

Salman Khan describes how a dashboard program for Los Altos schools replaced “one size fits all” classroom lectures with videos that were watched at each student’s own pace.

This provides the teachers unprecedented data on which students were having difficulty with particular subject areas, and being free of the tasks of lecturing and grading homework thanks to automation, teachers could focus all their time on quality interaction in the classroom.

Khan still does the instruction video creation, but has a top staff of software people developing the application to keep kids focused and motivated, using points and badges like in video games.

A highlight of the presentation is Bill Gates interviewing Salman at the end with questions about how ready the concept is for adoption in all classrooms. Khan replied that there are already a million viewers a month worldwide and the system could handle many more users.

Karl Hess Community
Technology Forum

On a Fifth Monday in a Month

August 29, 2011

Schedule:
Pre-meeting: 6:00 p.m.
Dinner 7:00 p.m.
Announcements: 7:45 p.m. Howard Hinman, Master of Ceremonies
Presentation: 8:00 p.m. J. Kent Hastings:
“Surviving the Phone and Internet Kill Switch”
Questions: 8:45 p.m. Q&A via written cards for at least the first round of questions.
Close by 9:30 p.m.

Location: Asian Buffet (Oriental buffet)
23552 El Toro Rd., Lake Forest, CA 92630
At Raymond, behind a bank, near the public (gov’t) library branch.


View Larger Map
Tel: (949) 206-9988 – Fax: (949) 206-9098

Howard Hinman of Orange County, will serve as the Master of Ceremonies for the event and will offer a Toast to the evening’s festivities.

J. Kent Hastings is a writer, video editor, audio and film producer, computer programmer, agorist and ham radio hobbyist.

Hastings wrote columns about RSA encryption, spread-spectrum radio, and secure privacy-protected off-grid banking transactions in his regular “Techtics” column for SEK3′s Tactics of the Movement of the Libertarian Left during the 1980s.

Kent also wrote an article for the first issue of Agorist Quarterly, published in 1995, titled “The Information Underground Railroad,” after attending the RSA Data Security conference in 1994.

Kent has returned to an early interest in tinkering with homebrew electronic gear, partly because he finds it fun, and also thanks to recent threats that have resurfaced from government authorities worldwide to cut off private communications on the Internet and cell phones “for our safety.”

He will have equipment on hand to demonstrate various ways around the Internet and cellphone outages that have been imposed during protests (just when you might need rescue from violence the most).

If the power grid goes down, many would lose phone and Internet service because of their reliance on cable company devices. A portable battery with AC inverter will also be demonstrated at the meeting. Solar recharging in the field and other preparedness resources and activities in case of evacuation will be discussed.

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are being more closely scrutinized by police with each passing year. Users have been jailed for organizing relatively harmless “flash mobs,” including celebrities simply inviting fans to the local mall.

Hastings will share his thoughts on how watchdog groups like Cop Block could avoid trouble by using stealthier recording devices and immediate streaming to remote undisclosed storage media, even if Internet access is being blocked.

For the first round of questions, audience members are asked to submit their questions in writing to the Master of Ceremonies, so that they may be presented to the speaker most effectively.

Cost is dinner (approximately 15.00 FRNS) plus a 5.00 room charge per attendee. (Cash only for the room charge please.) MasterCard and Visa accepted by the restaurant. Beer and wine available at an additional charge.

Good food. Some vegetarian dishes available.

For this meeting, leave a reservation message with the subject “OC KHCTF” on the web at http://permakent.com/contact/ or email: permakent@gmail.com

If you have additional questions contact Kent Hastings toll free at 1.877.867-8209 or leave a voice mail message.

Future dinner talks at the Karl Hess Community Technology Forum are still to be determined. We will keep you posted.

Resilient Community Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Its mission is to support a resilient community, including respect for personal rights and responsibilities.

For information about this event (other than reservations) and/or future events, please contact Howard Hinman, Director of Communications, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Legal Researcher, at (714) 244-2291. His email is: Howardhinman1234@yahoo.com.

According to this post at Ars Technica, “Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters,” Facebook has gone completely open source in its server hardware choices in order to compete with Google.

A couple of quotes from Jon Stokes’ article:

“Despite Google’s professed love for all things open, details of its massive datacenters have always been a closely guarded secret.”

and

“Facebook’s new OpenCompute.org project, in contrast, takes the exact opposite approach.”

There are energy and development cost savings from using this “Bazaar” community supported method when compared to the closed “Cathedral” approach.

If you’re building a data center and want to avoid legal hassles and unnecessary operating expenses, it’s worth checking out Facebook’s new OpenCompute system.

The http://agora.io Unconference has my webcam talk online in their archive, “How to Survive with Ham Radio When the Internet Is Set To Kill.”

I plan to edit video from a better camera into a concise little movie based on this presentation, organizing the material and including still photos to illustrate my points.

  Karl Hess, Sr. 1975 edition

Karl Hess, Jr. is the speaker scheduled for Monday, Feb. 21, 2011 at the 200th meeting of the Karl Hess Club (named for his father, the late Karl Hess) at Dinah’s in Culver City. (UPDATE: Due to airline trouble, rescheduled to September 19, 2011.)

Karl Hess, Jr. encouraged me to buy shortwave ham gear when he spoke to our libertarian supper club at the 100th meeting a few years ago, citing its usefulness during an emergency when a colleague was injured in Africa, where he was working in the field.

Since then I’ve put together some kits in custom enclosures with more powerful ones on the way. Alternative communication methods to the phone and Internet grid are always in the news, most recently in Egypt.

See the complete meeting announcement at the club site for more information about Karl Hess, Jr.’s topic, “Wither Conservation in the 21st Century: More Government or More Liberty?.” Excerpt from site:

“The world changed in 1970. Although the first Earth Day called for more aggressive State involvement, over the past forty years conservation has evolved into a movement increasingly characterized by volunteerism, cooperation, network governance, and entrepreneurship.”

Karl Hess, Sr. mentioned ham radio in passing in his book, Community Technology, and even in his 1975 book, Dear America which followed his 1969 “Death of Politics” article in Playboy.

Karl Hess, Sr. was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, then later became an anarchist hippie proponent of alternative energy, off-grid food production and local industry who made a living as a welder for cash, famous for not paying taxes. Goldwater was a ham radio operator who promised to put an antenna farm on the White House if he got elected (he wasn’t). Hess’ autobiography was edited by his son and is titled, Mostly on the Edge: An Autobiography.

Okay, see you at the KHC if you’re in Southern California.

Now, this video from 2008 shows two Arduino boards sending and receiving Morse code to each other acoustically at the same time (full duplex) at 300 words per minute. You could get a 140 character tweetish message out in a few seconds at that rate. Even at just 30 wpm over the shortwave radio the same message would take less than a minute.

Beats walking if the phones or Internet are down.

The oldest radio signaling method was used to send messages between people in Egypt according to this article at the Huffington Post. The link was in a Democratic Underground post that J. Neil Schulman forwarded to me in email.

Quoting HuffPo:
“These messages weren’t coming from mobile phones or computers, but from an amateur radio sending out Morse Code somewhere amidst the chaos in Egypt.”

Hundreds of miles range with a few watts using a wire thrown over a tree branch for an antenna can beat the government kill switch.

Meanwhile, on the political right side of survivalist prepping, Alex Jones InfoWars published a credible list of alternative communication methods from Liberty News Online, “How to Communicate if the Government Shut Down the Internet” (also forwarded to me by J. Neil Schulman).

Just one point of clarification. During a political upheaval, checking the call sign of amateur radio operators won’t be the State’s top priority and effectively jamming all signals might not be possible, especially if one were to use spread spectrum techniques.

Let’s say for example you were to transmit thermal noise in one band and the noise mixed with the message in another (transmitted reference). It would appear to be noise as well.

Perhaps if you have some programming skills you could use the digital “direct sequence” method to mix several pseudo random “chip bits” with each bit of your message while you quickly hop the center frequency of your signal using a fast digital synthesis chip and a secure software spreading code.

And just to be safe you might use a stealthy hidden antenna that looks like a clothes line, basketball hoop, bird feeder, flag pole or other disguise so your neighbors don’t rat you out. Out of sight, out of mind. Morse code and texting can be done silently with earphones. QSL?

Victory over censorship!

I’ve been getting back into the ham radio hobby because of my belief that off-grid communications capability will be needed in the rough times ahead.

The good news for the ham recruit is that all that’s required these days is to learn enough basic electronics to pass a test and some radio operation rules. Morse code is no longer a requirement for any level of the Amateur Radio Service “ham” license.

If you still have some cash, new equipment has some great features and is easy to get on the air. Used equipment can be purchased cheap on eBay or Craig’s List, but there may be some challenges getting it to work. Or you can go crazy and assemble your own lightsaber, I mean, radio gear. I’ve got even more ambitious kit building planned.

What you won’t be doing with new, used or homebrew equipment is paying a monthly bill to some telco or cable company for the privilege of using the public airwaves. A comforting thought if you’re concerned about the devaluation of currency, further job losses, business bankruptcies or other economic disasters.

I hooked up a QRP Mini-Watt board to connectors drilled into the back of a Bumble Bee tuna can last night. It’s a transceiver, thus it can send and receive Morse code signals as designed. The 40-meter band it’s on reaches up to 500 miles during the day and extends worldwide at night. It runs off a 9-volt battery. Here’s an mp3 of one minute of audio received on the 7.030 MHz frequency the tuna can is tuned into.

The audio is actually coming from the tuna can circuit via the ear bud output, not another receiver! (The catch is that instead of the rubber duck antenna shown as a dummy load to test things indoors, the antenna for the audio recording, and for communications use generally, is more than 25 feet of random wire outside, connected to a grounded MFJ-904H travel tuner. The tuna is tuned, man!)

Wait a minute. Didn’t I just say that Morse isn’t used anymore? Nope. Morse is more popular than ever, it’s just that the FCC doesn’t test licensees as a requirement now. It’s still one of the allowed digital modes in the amateur radio spectrum.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of handheld, mobile and base station FM voice gear on VHF and UHF, as well as SSB voice on shortwave, computer modes that don’t need the Internet and even television.

We’re likely to see extended water and power outages in the near future for a number of political and economic reasons, a few of which are described in my personal blog post, “Power and Water,” with links about each point linking to major news source headlines.

Not covered in that post is the continuing drought threatening water supplies and hydroelectric power generation, or short term disruptions due to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. With more subscribers relying on Internet based phone service and cell phones, most people will be out of touch if the power goes out for an extended period.

You can try to use CB (11-meters), FRS (UHF) walkie talkies or those 49 MHz models for kids if you just won’t get a ham license. Or you can be prepared as a fully trained Jedi, er I mean, licensed ham operator and actually find competent help within range when you need it.

Amber Alert GPS 2G
Abductions of children are increasing thanks to more idle hands not otherwise being employed. To address that risk, and for many other reasons such as simply being lost or having an outing schedule change, kids have a new safe way to talk with parents without the user interface complexity of a cell phone.

The Amber Alert organization is taking pre-orders for their November 1 release of its new line of “panic button” devices, called “Amber Alert GPS Armor.”

Armor is the next version of their popular alert device that looks like a toy gizmo, but actually uses sophisticated GPS and cell networks to call for help with the location already known and to provide safety information. (And you don’t have to surgically implant RFID chips in your wee rascals’ skulls.)

Here’s an excerpt from the information I just received from them via email. You can subscribe to updates at their site, http://www.amberalertgps.com/

“It will be a bit bigger in size than our famous 2G device, but
it will pack one heck of a punch. Here is a list of things that
are going to be different this time around (I’ll give a brief
description of each feature here, but I’ll go into them in more
detail in another email)…”

“1. Bigger battery = longer battery life! (this is a big one that we really struggled with in the 2G). We even will have an extended battery option.”

“2. Predator Alert – be alerted when your child goes near the home of a registered sex offender (VERY powerful!).”

“3. “Raised” SOS button – now your child can feel for the raised button on the device in their pocket or backpack without having to take the device out, when they are in danger.”

“4. 2-Way Voice – actually talk with your child, not just listen in.”

“5. E-mails, not texts, this time around…save battery life (more about that in another email).”

“6. Live, up-to-the-minute tracking on your web-enable SMART phone or computer (oh yeah, this new device is set up to work off your computer or your web-enabled SMART phone…which means you will need the internet on your phone to use the device with your phone).”

“7. Locate your child via our new phone APP or your computer.”

For video about the original product, see this local San Francisco TV news report. It’s also been featured on Oprah, Good Morning America and other major network shows.

ABC News just ran a story, “Clean Energy: Why Is China Ahead of the U.S.?” It describes how NatSolar’s new solar panel technology was rebuffed in the U.S., but CEO Chuck Provini was flown in and welcomed by China and given a deal to create green jobs over there.

It seems energy production from any source has to overcome enormous legal barriers in this country. Here’s just one hurdle mentioned in the long article.

“. . .he [Provini] also worked with a major Washington, D.C., law firm and was told that a $750,000 application fee was necessary just to apply for a specific federal program.”

With big oil, coal, nuclear, solar and windpower facing legal hassles, we may have a low powered future in which we depend on whatever solar panels and turbines we can install in our private backyards for reliable energy.

The April, 2010 issue of ARRL’s QST magazine featured the vital role ham radio played during Haiti’s earthquake. An online article, “Amateur Radio Operators Provide Communications Support in Haiti” describes the ham support of doctors in Project Medishare.

Seismic scientists agree that California is in for a big quake perhaps sooner than later. The Haiti experience is instructive to anyone preparing for interruptions of utilities such as water, power and telephone service.

If landline phone service is knocked out, cell phone systems will likely be overloaded or knocked out because of landline network connections.

Ham radio doesn’t require learning Morse Code anymore. Passing a test on basic electronics, radio theory, and operating rules and regulations may be a small price to pay for uninterrupted communications (and no phone bill).

  Bee CCD background
From Slashdot, “Study Claims Cellphones Implicated In Bee Loss.” If you need a laugh, check out the reader comments on the story, such as “The queen should stop texting and get back to work.”

But seriously, this is an important issue for off-grid living since homesteaders are likely to depend on radio links of some kind and are also more likely than other people to have beehives pollinate their edible forest gardens.

Being a ham operator, I would add other variables besides transmitter power to a bigger study. Frequency (cell phones operate in or near microwave bands) and modes such as analog AM, FM, or SSB, also if there’s digitized content, check if the type (voice, music, or text) makes any difference.

The legal response to this new published study will not be swift because it’s not very authoritative. Only two hives were tested. Quoting an excerpt:

“. . .one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two 15-minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed. After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.”

One of the readers noted in a comment that because of the inverse square law, the field strength of the transmitter inside a hive is many orders of magnitude greater than would be experienced from usage in real life.

Other theories for honeybee colony collapse disorder involve pesticide and herbicide chemicals, genetically modified plants, and transporting of hives from around the world to pollinate big cash crops like almonds.

Michael Pollan referred to this pool of unrelated hives mingling on distant farms as the annual “honeybee brothel” spreading diseases.