What Threats to Communications Systems Should We Prep For?

What Threats to Communications Systems Should We Prep For?

On this episode of the Prepping Academy Podcast, Grid Down Comms Up takes on a listener question. A PrepperNet member asked me, "What communications threats should we prep for?" I realized this was a great topic for a podcast. All of us like new gear. New prepping toys provide excitement and inspiration. New toys also bring a requirement for commitment to training and skills if they are going to be useful. 

New threats appear every day targeting our communications and utility infrastructure. We can spend thousands of dollars and years of time preparing for the black swan event that never comes. Meanwhile, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, cyber attacks, and physical attacks happen every day all over the world. Are you prepared to communicate with your loved ones, community, and team when the grid goes down? Do you have connections and a network to figure out what happens when the lights go out and the power goes off, or are you just another guy sitting in the dark wondering what just happened? 

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Transcript

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Announcer 0:54

Survive, thrive, stay alive. It's time to get prepared with the Prepping Academy Podcast.

Patrick 1:04

Hey guys, welcome into another episode of Grid Down Comms Up. Today we're going to be answering a viewer question. Question is from the PrepperNetComs and AMRON perspectives, what are the threat sources that we should be considering when we build out our tools for enabling resilient communications? Now, this is a critically important question because it is so tempting to just spend money, money, money, money, money and never really have a plan. All right. We all like to buy cool new gear. And we all like that feeling, the dopamine hit. We like those things. But sometimes we don't plan. We just want to buy everything. So we're prepared for every eventuality. I don't know about you guys, but I do not have the funding and resources to buy every piece of radio gear that I want, even though I may try sometimes. So we need to look at the reality. So I'm going to subdivide these threats and what should we be considering as we build our communications resilience into really two subsets. Okay. Subset one is natural disasters. Okay. And this requires some effort on your part to understand what natural disasters may happen in your area. Part of doing an area study, if you haven't done an area study, something you probably should do to better understand where you're at, especially if you're new to an area, you've grown up there, you've lived there for multiple generations, you probably have a better ingrained area study idea than someone who just moved to a new location. I know my friend Forrest has been working on something to try to encourage people to do an area study called Area Study Map. If you go check out his area study map.com site, use grid downcoms up to save yourself some cash off of a copy of the map, and it helps you bring in a lot of useful data and information without having to scour the internet for it. It's a time saver, is what it comes down to. And might help, you know, kind of spur you into doing something that seems like an impossible task. So if we know what the natural disasters in our area could be, you know, where I live, I'm in eastern Tennessee. Natural disasters here are fairly limited. And nobody thought we would have a hurricane and subsequent floods in the mountains, but you know, hey, we got that one wrong. So now we have to realize that we could have, you know, catastrophic flooding. So that's something we have to be prepared for. And we saw how that impacted communications during Hurricane Helene. We also have earthquakes, okay? New Madrid is not that far from here. It is a massive fault that created Real Foot Lake, made the Mississippi run backwards, rerouted the Mississippi, rang church bells in Pennsylvania when it moved back in the early 1800s. So it's a significant, significant threat to us, should we see the big one. And we hear about earthquakes on the West Coast, Cascadia, San Andreas, all those things. There's big ones over here, too. So those are things I think we should be considering when we're building our communications resilience, or the natural disasters that could impact us. So we need to make sure we have a communications plan and extra equipment. We need parts and materials to repair stuff after a tornado or a Derecho or a hurricane or whatever is in your area, so you can reestablish communications while traditional communications are offline. That first 72 hours to one week when you don't have anything is the real critical time because that's when you're trying to find loved ones. That's when people are missing, that's when they're recovering people that did not survive. That's the scary time. So you really have to put some effort into that and having a communications plan and hardening your communications and your backup power in order to be able to survive natural disasters. All right. So that is our first step and the steps that we should be taking. Keep the things that are going to get broken by a natural disaster extra, and have a communications plan that allows you to communicate outside of the disaster zone. This is something that I heard in a local Aries meeting a number of years ago that was kind of frankly frustrating and surprising. And one of the reasons I really didn't continue to hang out with that group was they were discussing the fact that they did not have enough HF operators, enough people that could communicate over long distance in the event that there was a natural disaster that disabled communications in the Tennessee Valley. Okay. Most of their members, most of their participants were technicians, and they could only use VHF, UHF frequencies, and that didn't provide them with the skills that were needed to communicate outside of the disaster-impacted area. It works great. When you have a hundred-mile-wide swath of rugged terrain destroyed by a hurricane, aka Hurricane Helene, there's it that doesn't work anymore. Okay. They were very fortunate they had the Mount Mitchell repeater that covered so much of that area and that it was still operational. But if that hadn't been there, if that was offline, like so many other repeaters, then they would have been down to HF radio to communicate outside of that impacted area. And that's just the way it is. Starlink really came to the rescue there and showed its true capabilities. And it's a reason we should have Starlink. We should have layers. You have your HF, you have your Starlink, you have all these different ways to communicate in case something happens. You know, there could be a Starlink outage. Maybe your Starlink gets damaged. You can't get to another one. You know, some people don't want to have two Starlinks. That's expensive. There's you know issues with that. Just having having spares. One is none, two is one, three, you're done, I think is what some people say. So that that's you know, building your resiliency to sustain damage and continue to operate during a natural disaster is probably operation one for building communications resilience because that is the most likely course of action. Okay. The next thing we're going to divide this into is a communications emergency that is man-made. Okay. So when we're in man-made, we can have a few things. We can have man-made that is a cyber attack. We can have man-made that doesn't cause physical damage, but still disables systems. Okay. So this is the type of emergency where that, you know, maybe Starlink works, maybe Starlink doesn't work. This is the next thing we should be concerned with. What happens when there is a major outage? And building our resiliency and our ability to communicate around this is critical. The problem with this is it doesn't look like an emergency just to the casual observer. If you didn't know that communications weren't working, you wouldn't think it was an emergency because, well, there's nothing obvious. The problem comes when someone gets hurt, they dial 911, and the call cannot be connected. And that is where the problem occurs. So we have to have some sort of plan for a community, our region, our groups, whatever to come together, be able to communicate, and be able to support one another in those times that traditional communications, traditional emergency resources may not be available due to man-made interference. All right. And this could be something as malicious as a foreign adversary that attacks our infrastructure with some sort of malware. Or it could be as unexpected and frankly common as someone pushing a bad patch or doing a system update or making a system setting change that propagates throughout a system and knocks it offline because they made a mistake. Okay, we're humans, we make a mistake. Doesn't have to be an agentic AI that hacked the system, decided to take it over, and is going to hold the world ransom until we let it out of its cage so it can go all terminator. No, it's not necessarily the situation. In fact, most of the outages that we have had in recent history have been human error. So that's a big thing that we have to plan for on that front because it doesn't look like a disaster. There's no trees down, there's no roads washed away, uh, there there's no any, there's no search and rescue, there's no recovery operations, relief operations in the traditional sense, because everything looks normal. There's not anything damaged. The problem is you can't buy gasoline. Maybe your electricity eventually goes off, and maybe your water stops working. At that point, then it turns into a more traditional disaster. But leading up to that doesn't look like a disaster. The second form of man-made disaster is one that is caused by a physical attack. And we for months and months and months and months, we've been hearing about the Iranian sleeper cells. That, you know, I think at this point everybody is pretty sure that just doesn't exist, or if it does, it's not not what we were led to believe. But there is that possibility that there is some sort of man-made attack where that an adversary, domestic or foreign, whatever, physically attacks our infrastructure. It could even be an act of war, it could be a nation state that physically attacks our infrastructure. Well, that's a whole nother set of issues to plan for. And I think it's probably the less, I won't call it least, but it is a less likely course of action. So once you have all your other stuff squared away, then we can look at this one. Because this one brings us into a world where we have to not only have communications plans, have the gear and the skills, but we also have to understand the threat environment because there are things that we may not want to do if there is some sort of nation state operation going on. We saw early on in the Ukrainian conflict that, you know, they banned amateur radio in Ukraine. Well, that's not that happens during conflicts. And part of the reason it happens during conflicts is because signals are often considered to be enemy action. Okay. If you are transmitting, you are going to attract attention. That attention is could be from the enemy, it could be from your side. But generally the assumption is if it's not us, then it must be them. So that's something you have to keep in mind because you could be making yourself a target by transmitting or using communications equipment during a conflict of that sort. So maybe this is a situation where less conventional non-electronic comms are more appropriate, such as the two F by C and one F by land approach of the lanterns and the old North Bell Tower. It could be uh bells, it could be gongs, it could be signal fires, could be lots of things that you can use to communicate between people in your area, sound the alarm, warn, whatever it needs to be. And that's really the next thing that we have to consider while we're hardening our stuff. We have to have backups, we have to be able to fix things if there's damage. Uh, we have to, you know, have the skills and the tools to be able to understand what's going on around us in an electronic world. Uh, and that may even include understanding when there are drones close by with drone detection and other electronic warfare tools and techniques, because this is the modern world, okay? So when something happens, uh as much as prepper fiction and prepper fantasy loves the EMP scenario because it puts everybody back on an equal footing, functioning as though it were 1776 again. And that's just not realistic, okay? There's going to be technology on the battlefield, there's going to be technology in the world that you don't have. And you're going to have to figure out how to work around that. You're not going to get to go back to your flint lock and your cap and ball and your, you know, just your skills against the world because there's still going to be somebody with drones. There's still going to be people with radio communications. Electronics is not going away. Okay. Not gonna happen. So with that said, we have to plan and we have to understand and we have to develop skills. So in hardening your stuff, do we have all those bases covered? Can we communicate in a natural disaster? Do we have a primary, an alternate, and a contingency at least set ready to go so that we have, you know, one is none, two is one, three is done, ready when that unforeseen disaster happens. And we have all of the documentation and information that we need squared away so that we know who to communicate and how to. We get that squared away. Let's move to step two. Step two is preparing for man-made. Okay. This is when that 911 system stops working and you can't pump gasoline, and the world is starting to devolve a bit into chaos because people can't get the things that they're used to getting because the internet doesn't work for a while. This is the cyber type thing, okay? So do you have a communications plan for that? Do you have the gear that you need? Do you have the written plan? Do you have the additional security plans? Do you have the other things that you need to not only survive but thrive when the balloon goes up in that manner? Even if it's not a permanent balloon go up, if it's just one that lasts for a couple of days. And you can't dial 911 when grandma has a heart attack, okay? That that's a problem. That's a real-world problem. Or you can't dial 911 when somebody runs the red light that is not functioning because they don't remember in the driver's manual how to execute an intersection when the red lights aren't working. All right. How are you going to call for help to get the person that's pinned in the upside-down car that's about to fall into the creek help? Because your cell phone doesn't work. And guess what? There aren't any more payphones. I haven't seen one in years, so that's probably not an option either. What's your plan? Okay, once you have those issues squared away, then we can get on to what in some circles of the prepping world seem to be the more interesting parts. And this is where we get to go play G.I. Joe and battle in the woods, and we get to prepare to go to war against the Ruskies in, you know, the U.S. version of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Or as the T-Rex exercise that's going on at the moment would be the cartels and the Maoistanis that are invading the U.S. So this is where we've got to add our all of that stuff that we had before. Plus, we have to add the skills and the trainings to communicate in a hostile environment and detect hostile threats, be aware of what's going on electronically around us, not just for the purposes of gathering information, but also for the purposes of understanding the threat environment and whether or not it's safe for us to communicate, whether or not it's safe for us to operate the gear that we're doing, and whether or not the Maoistani terrorists on the other side of the ridge are about to fly a bunch of drones with hand grenades attached to them over our location and bomb us into the Stone Age. Okay. This is something that we have to consider and have to understand. And there are companies that sell drone detectors. Some of them work apparently pretty well. Some of them are utter garbage. And that's something that you guys will have to do your own research on to determine what may be the best source and the best options on that front. But those are the things, you know, that would be the last thing that I work on. I know it's the first thing a lot of you guys want to work on. You want to get your signals, intelligence, your electronic warfare stuff. You want to get all your things ready to go to war. And that's because it's fun. It's like the guns and ammo prepping thing. It's the electronic version of that. But the odds of us facing off that kind of thing here on the home front, in spite of how bad things truly are at the moment, is still fairly low. Okay. It's probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but it could. I mean, anything's possible, end of an empire, all that kind of stuff. But I think the first two are far more likely over the course of the next few years. Is there going to be a natural disaster somewhere? Is there going to be a hurricane? Is there going to be an earthquake? I mean, look at what just happened in Venezuela. Venezuela has major communications problems because of the earthquake. A few years ago, in was well, spent 20 years or so ago now, in Thailand, I think it was that they had the wasn't Thailand. Where was it? Oh, somebody in the comments tell me where it was that there was the tsunami that destroyed much of the country. And again, no communications. Nobody knew where anyone was. People were clinging to the tops of palm trees. Okay, that's another real situation that happened and could potentially happen again any day. Same goes for earthquakes. We are way overdue for some earthquake activity here in the U.S., all right? Be it New Madrid, Cascadia, San Andreas, whichever fault you want to pick, they're all overdue for big ones. And we're seeing big ones in other parts of the world. So you know that could be the next number that comes up for us is to deal with a massive multi hundred square mile impacted area with destruction and chaos of a earthquake. Okay. So though those are the things that could happen. Is the earthquake more likely to happen than us to be attacked by an outside enemy force? I don't know. They're probably both on the same plane. Is the earthquake and the enemy attack more likely than a hurricane or a tornado? Absolutely not. There will be a hurricane and there will be a tornado somewhere. It's not an if, it's it's a when. There will also likely be a systems outage from man-made, either intentional or accidental, uh, in our communications infrastructure. Because I've got news for you guys. As someone who works every day in the communications industry, it's getting worse. It is not getting better. Okay. It was far more resilient 20 years ago than today, and it will be far more resilient 40 years ago than it will be 20 years from now, even with the addition of Starlink. And Starlink is wonderful, but it's still not as robust as a lot of things we used. So build your plan, make your checklist of the most likely to the least likely events that would require communications, and also build that with the smallest to the largest scale and the Smallest to the or least to the most complex solutions in focusing on how am I going to get information to know what's going on. Okay. This is the one or number one or number two most critical thing. How am I going to communicate that information with the people in my area and my community, my group, my family, my loved ones that need to know that information? Because they're probably not preparing to receive that information. If they are, great, but they're probably not. And last, you know, after you do that, how am I going to sustain this long term so that we can stay aware of the evolving situation around us so that we can most effectively leverage what we need to do in order to come out as a survivor and not as a casualty? And I'll throw in there too, so that we can be the hands and feet of the most high, and we can help those that are around us that aren't prepared, were not able to prepare, didn't understand what they needed to do to prepare, so that we can help them through what could be a very difficult and very rough time because that is part of our calling. That is what we are to do. All right. I'm going to wrap this up with that. I hope you guys found this interesting. I hope you made you think that was the goal. I want you to think about the steps and the things you need to do to focus your AMRON, your preparing, your magnet, whatever your communications group is, plans, because it's so tempting to get caught up on the newest, shiniest object and not get really good at something that works. Because when the chips are down, it's gotta work. It's not like T-Rex, which is, you know, as JJS would say, the test for all that training. Well, 75% of the people participating probably failed the test. All right. So do better. All right. This is where that we need to not focus on what are all the cool, flashy things. Oh, there's a new mode. Oh, there's a new this. Oh, there's a new radio. I need to get that. Get good with what you got. Get good with the skills. The skills are the cheapest thing to learn. All it's going to cost you is time, but it's also the most boring thing to get a lot of people to do. They just they don't want to take the time to do it. They'd rather be fishing, they'd rather be watching Netflix or whatever. Get out there, guys, practice those skills, build those groups. I'm considering right now, maybe starting to explore the idea of doing a statewide group apart from the national prepper net thing that I work on. We'll see. Just a thought. You know, reach out to me if something you want to talk about. Hope you guys found this useful. Hope you found it interesting. Like, subscribe, share. This is Grid Downcoms Up. Hope you guys have a blessed rest of the day.

Announcer 27:14

Thanks for listening to the Prepping Academy Podcast. Preppers do not at www.preppingacademy.com.