Should we be prepared?

/P setup tested at a German QTH
1,5 years ago

   Should we be prepared for a scenario without energy and (internet) communication? I thought of that after the MIVD and AIVD (dutch military/general "secret service") announced several times that Russian intelligence ships try to gather information about internet/energy cables in the Northsea within our economical territory. Luckely the dutch navy and coastguard did prevent this a few times and are still on it. You can imagine this is just one thing happening, in the mean time it could be all information has been gathered already to plan a sabotage action. I think in the 80 years after WW2 we forget that these happenings can get worse very fast. We are also much more vulnerable compared to 80 years ago. Our country already had several cyber attacks. Internet did replace old telephone lines and is used for 99% of all communications. If you disconnect a country like the Netherlands from the internet the whole country is on a halt. And what about electricity? A few attacks on the biggest electricity plants is wiping out most of our country including the internet. Imagine how most people will panic.

Of course this is all a doom scenario. You all know the preppers that think the world will fall down and anything very bad will happen soon. On the other hand, we have learned from WW2 that radio communication is most important. Back in the days the technology was not that advanced, but the resistance was inventive and we know the stories about successful communication. It is also difficult to sabotage every radio transmission, so it is excellent to be used in emergency situations.

One of the well known hamradio "preppers" is OH8STN Julian. He is well known for his videos about emergency communication setups. Julian tells us that you should be prepared and take action now. Lately he also warns that we should be prepared and exercise our emergency setup regulary. Of course there are organisations like ARES you might be interested in. But the average hamradio enthousiast can be prepared as well. 

Personally I'm not that well prepared. I really should be more serious about this. I decided to make a list of items I really need to have ready when everything fails. Actually I will not publish the list for safety reasons. Call it suspicion...

  I had a small laptop and a small windows tablet, but both were outdated. I did need something faster and have it prepared to use for emergency communications. You probabely think: "why the laptop". Well, like Julian revealed in one of his videos, in an emergency situation you're not able to be with the radio all the time since you need to find or build shelter, find food, find a heat source in winter and care for others. A good emergency system should be working while you do other things. So you can check and send/answer messages whenever you have time. Best (free) software for that is VarAC and Winlink. JS8Call is another nice one that will do fine, but it needs an exact time from the computer in order to work well, this is an disadvantage but can be solved in several ways (more about it in another blogpost).

I'm aware to be prepared means that I should use the system once and a while. That includes updating the software on the laptop. When I really need the software it should be updated, an internet connection will be not available at that time... Another thing is power, I'm thinking of building a bigger emergency electrical power system for instant use if needed. The 90Ah battery I have now is nice but only suitable for a few hours a day especially in the winter.

Inspiration for this blogpost came from OH8STN's article: 

https://oh8stn.org/blog/2023/02/20/starting-point-off-grid-survival-radio/

You probably think now, why put all this on your blog. This should all be a secret isn't it. Well, I'll have to explain that I'm close to one of the most dangerous areas of my country when it gets to a war of some sort. The Eemshaven harbour is an strategic point with all kind of power plants, a LNG terminal, a military area/harbour, a large Google data center, several power cables from Skandinavia, a large fuel storage etc. etc.  And yes, the Russians already know all of this. Not difficult because you can find everything on the internet, and exact locations are shown in google maps. And now the story (in the newspapers) goes that Russians are spying on us when unloading frozen fish at the harbour. Ah well, those journalists have probably never heard of internet :-). The conclusion is, I probably don't really need all my radio gear. In case of a war the first thing I would do is totally destroy all power plants, energy supplies/cables and internet connections, I fear I'm too close to it so I will never get out alive and use my radio to call for help... 

But anyway, others will survive and hopefully this post is an inspiration for them...

In the mean time I'm reading a lot about past resistance communications in WW2, especially from and near my QTH,  for a new story on this blog. Can we learn from what happened in the past? I don't know as 80 years ago it was a complete different era. But at least we learn to fight for our freedom one way or the other.