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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Just gotta keep your ham radio go box in an EMP-hardened roll of tin foil and have a good crank generator, and you should be good to go. In a grid outage even tiny transmitter powers will be able to get out. It's most power efficient to use CW (morse code) unless you plant to have a computer up and running to run the even fancier digital modes.

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Doing CW QRP at 1 watt in the right conditions will cover a huge distance, especially if the power has gone out. It really doesn’t take much when you get down to the absolute minimum viable setup.

Indeed but at the same time, weapons and ammunition begin to look far more valuable than communication. I'm trying to reason through how valuable information would be in a grid-down scenario. Presumably, all the major roads would have check-points operated by the prevailing authority and would confiscate any valuable goods one learned about over the air. It seems to me that having access to defensible food and shelter is vastly more important over the first period of time until things have stabilized at a new local maximum.

I mean when disaster happens weapons are always a top of list item even above food since they are a means to sourcing it (and not just in a killing animals kind of way).

I would not be leaving my property, I live hours from the nearest city, and 30 minutes from “town”. There would be little benefit for me in attempting to travel. I would still like access to information if possible, buts it’s definitely not at the top of the list.

A shortwave radio will get you info without revealing your location or capabilities.

But I'm still stocked with transceivers for HF, VHF and UHF. 'Cause you may still need to transmit in an emergency or to coordinate friendlies.

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