TREX TALK - How To Build a Communications Network

hello everybody and welcome to another t-rex live stream this is the t-rex talk where we talk about uh communications networks and how to build them now i'll let you know just right off the bat this is kind of a kind of bait and switch because i'm going to hold up radios and talk about building a communications network and the thumbnail is radios but the secret ingredient to building the communications network is not hardware it is software the important key component is people so we're going to talk about radio stuff but the important components of the network are in fact the people and i'm going to try because i've said that people are very important and communication is very important i'm going to try to look at the chat i know i do a terrible job of it on most streams but i'm going to try to keep an eye out and then yep yep sure enough people are saying the fed posting has already begun so hello to the atf hello to the fbi um yeah yeah welcome welcome so as we talk about communications networks part of the reason that i'm doing this stream is because i've gotten so many questions after posting various uh various videos related to communications equipment and radios and how ham radio works and how businessman radio works and how to do atac over radio in theory uh cell theory i haven't actually got that working in a way that i like uh yet but this is getting better but there are a whole bunch of questions related specifically to which radios to buy and we've talked about different radios that we like for example the traditional standard balfang actually this isn't the uv-5r the ub5r is the traditional standard baofeng and this right here is one of the 82 varieties which i actually like i like having the dual push-to-talk button right here it's kind of nice and there's not as many accessories for it but i i think it's okay and then we've talked a lot about the hytera radios we're fans of the hytera radios for digital and then if you're a ham radio guy the these any tone uh radios here are also pretty good digital dmr radios so everybody that asks questions about which radio they should buy the the only way to answer that question is to really ask what the specific uh communications network you have that you're trying to communicate with what type of communications network are you hoping to build so one of the things that i really want to get into is is how important that is and i got a couple of examples that i want to look at they they are historical examples of course because uh i wouldn't want any of the um alphabet boy uh guys who are watching this i wouldn't want anybody to get the wrong idea and assume that this is insurrectionist type stuff this is not extremist type stuff this is not for the future this is only for better understanding the past that's all that we are trying to do with this here particular stream about digital radios and communications networks historical historical subject so i got a couple examples and to prove that there's not going to be any insurrection and stuff in here we're going to be looking at paul revere absolutely not an insurrectionist in any way not a government overthrown type dude at all just uh just a messenger man that's that's that's all he was um technically uh technically we're already off topic um but let's let's look at a little more recent example of a communications network so um my family moved to the tennessee area right before a gigantic flood in 2010. so in 2010 there was a gigantic flood in middle tennessee where we were in hickman county we had roads wash out so it's very difficult to get in or out of the county we had power off for probably about two weeks which means the cell phone towers stopped working after about somewhere between 24 and 48 hours depending on how much fuel each tower had in its uh generator backup um and then we also had no water for a while so uh depending on if you were if you had uh city water you you had water for a few days and then it was gone for a couple of weeks so there were a lot of people in the county that needed a lot of different things but the most important commodity wasn't actually water it wasn't actually food it was information the ability to know who had water because water came in on trucks but the ability to find out where that water actually was which roads were open so you could go and get it which of your neighbors really needed it the most these are the things that were really really important for that disaster management that happened it was really really important that people be able to communicate with each other what resources were available where those resources needed to go who was capable of moving those resources and how you could actually move those resources when a bunch of bridges were just out or unsafe or roads had been washed out and leaving the bridges standing in the middle of the new big rivers so that was a fascinating kind of look at when you have a communication breakdown what it is that you're actually what limitations you run into and part of the issue was we were very new to the area we'd barely gotten to know our neighbors we hadn't really gotten to know the county very well so we were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to helping folks and in a disaster scenario like that i actually believe that this is the case having been to third world countries and having done disaster cleanup in a bunch of different places and so forth information is really the key commodity regardless of of what the other resources are that are really desperately needed the information and the communication is really the important the most important thing that you need to deal with and to fix is the most important thing for dealing with a disaster so one of the things that became really obvious after that flood when we didn't know people very well we we didn't know which of our neighbors had radios we didn't know which channels people were talking on the ability to build a communications network after the disaster had already happened was incredibly limited now there's some ways that you can be better at that there are some tools that i have now that i didn't have then that would have been incredibly helpful but building a communications network takes time and the best case scenario is when you do that in the least stressful situation not the most stressful situation so one of the biggest one of the biggest takeaways from that disaster which at the end of the day is fairly minor no no power for two weeks it was actually pretty easy to manage after a while and one of the things that that happened was after a little while it became obvious that there was a pre-existing community network there was a communications network that existed in the county we just weren't a part of it we just weren't plugged into it we didn't know who the leaders of that communications network were we didn't know who or for let's use the networking we didn't know what the nodes were we didn't know how we could actually talk who we had to talk to who would know what other people were doing and what other people were needing and and yet over time as we got to meet different people we realized a lot of that network was already in place and it was not built around radios it was built around relationships and communication and trust so that you know in a disaster like that trust is not as much of an issue in an issue if you if you want to go back to paul revere for example trust is a huge issue you want to know that the people inside of your communications network are trustworthy patriots and not loyalists for example so in in preparation for the war for american independence the communications networks that were built were heavily built around trust and capability not just pure access and so that's the thing that um in a in a different type of disaster scenario like the the flood in 2010 it was just a matter of finding out who needed water who needed food and making sure that they could get water and they could get food and finding out how to get it to them so that is something that i do want to talk about because if you can build those networks and you can build those relationships ahead of time then you know exactly what sort of radio you need to get and if you wait until everybody's cold everybody's hungry nobody has power to charge any radios even if they had radios that is not the ideal time to build a network now it is true that in those sorts of emergencies when people focus on what's really necessary you can make a fair amount of headway in getting a network built but you're at a tremendous disadvantage when you lack a lot of resources so um there's a bunch of people who are in the chat asking various questions um and i also want to make the point that we have built in the 21st century we've built a lot of communities online and those communities online are not necessarily the type of communications networks that you really want to to have in a disaster scenario for a bunch of reasons for example number one there are a lot of communities that are kind of built around one-way communication like all of you guys watching this video right now are receiving one-way communication because i'm not really looking at the chat very well we're not really part of a community at this moment we're communicating this is a communications network sort of but we're entirely dependent on youtube to allow us to talk on that note you should subscribe to our newsletter because that's a little bit more resilient you cannot really rely on the big tech companies to connect you in certain scenarios maybe it's because there's no power running to the cell phone tower that you need to get your internet or maybe it's something else that's completely not sinister at all one of the things that was really interesting for middle tennessee was there was a bombing on christmas day that destroyed it looked like it had only looked like it had only destroyed the front of the building of an att building and yet it had so damaged a lot of the network switches inside that there was no internet on a huge area of of cell phone towers and it wasn't just at t cell phone towers it was the att fiber backhaul for a whole bunch of other service providers so there was a big big chunk of guys that had no internet over christmas and the next few days there is a fair amount of fragility inside of our communications networks and that's why i really appreciate people that are asking the question what radio should i buy because they want decentralized communications that will actually allow them in a disaster to have a way to talk without infrastructure because there's all sorts of scenarios in which case the infrastructure isn't working or isn't working properly or isn't maybe trustable and so having your ability to do communication outside of those infrastructures those large complicated infrastructures super helpful and as we have gotten more and more uh if you'll excuse me while i put on my grumpy old man hat as we've gotten more and more technologically advanced and all the dang kids and their whipper snapper friends are just hanging out on the internet we've kind of lost a lot of the social ability to operate off of social media platforms which is unfortunate because that would be super handy in disaster scenarios and it was actually kind of interesting to see when we had the um christmas internet outage uh i think that actually made for better christmases for certain people and when we had the the flood in 2010 that actually was in in many ways a community building experience in a lot of ways neighbors depending on one another and having conversation with one another and building uh building relationships as they took care of one another uh it was very heartwarming but everyone was also really happy when the electricity came back on so let's talk a little bit about radios in different scenarios you're going to want different things so let's just compare for example these two radios the the balfang radio is cheap and it is an analog fm radio this one here operates on uhf and vhf frequencies so you can use it um as a ham radio you can use it in those two bands and it is not encrypted in any way and you can talk and listen on those frequencies to anyone else who's using those frequencies you can technically but not legally talk on frs and gmrs and mers frequencies with this radio to people who are using the walmart blister pack frs radios you can listen to those frequencies well you can listen to those frequencies illegally but you couldn't possibly communicate on those bands on those channels illegally even though it's super easy to program your radio to talk on those because it is totally within the radio's capability to transmit on those frequencies and it's totally within the antennas capability to transmit transmit on those bands so in many ways this would be a really handy emergency radio to have with you if you did not have a pre-existing communication plan because you could listen and talk to a lot of the handheld radios that are out there that people store for disaster scenarios the problem is you don't know what channels they're on and it's very difficult to actually turn on this radio and scan even with the scan function it's very hard to have this radio scan through the frequencies slowly slowly slowly and actually be on the right frequency at the exact same time that somebody is using it so that you know what you actually need to be on so it's so much better if you can ahead of time figure out what your neighbors actually have and what it is that they're actually wanting wanting to do with their radios you don't even know at what times people are going to have their radios on if if you're like me and you don't do a great job of keeping your radios charged you may only have an hour or two of battery inside of your radio and if my power goes out early in the morning and i use this radio to call for help and then the battery goes out and that's when you drive through my neighborhood to see if there's anybody asking for help we have just missed each other so think through how you're going to power your radio equipment as well that's a very very important thing now on the other hand you may have your communication network already built up you may already have the people that you specifically want to talk to and you know exactly what radios they have and you coordinate together to get radios that are a little bit more advanced like this hytera radio and now you're using dmr so dmr is my current favorite digital protocol for for radio use you get i don't know how much actual extra efficiency you get you get a little bit better range you get a little bit better error correction you get a little bit better battery efficiency but one of the main reasons that you would want dmr is there are fewer people using it so it isn't going to interfere with other people as much and other people that don't have dmr radios they won't be able to hear what you're talking about so if your goal with your communications network is to be a little more exclusive then you could go with digital radios because there are fewer of them out there it doesn't make you completely undetectable and it doesn't mean that nobody can understand what you're saying it just means that average people that have analog radios cannot understand what you're saying and if you are on a business band radio you have your itinerary businessman frequencies license you can then use encryption and the hytera radio allows you to use proper 256-bit aes encryption if you have the right model and you can even do rotating keys and all sorts of cool stuff like that but all that that's doing is making it harder for people to talk to you if your goal with your radio is to find other people this radio doesn't necessarily help you do that even though it can listen to analog radio but the main purpose of this radio is to be harder for other people to listen to you now it also i would say it doesn't make you undetectable any radio that transmits uh rf signal is going to be transmitting rf signal that other people can see and triangulate uh whether it's encrypted or not so if your goal is to be invisible radios kind of that's not really what they do a a radio is from an electromagnetic spectrum sense like shining a giant flashlight up into the air and telling people something inside of the signal of that giant flashlight so it's it's really not that hard to see that that signal which brings me to the second piece of equipment that i want to talk about if i am a um if i'm somebody who finds myself in a natural disaster or an unnatural disaster and i want to find out who out there is talking to each other are there people who are stuck in their houses and their only means of communication is a balfang radio or a walmart off the shelf blister pack radio a cool way to find those folks is with a a sdr a software defined radio like this little teeny usb guy right here so this is a rtl sdr and all that you need to do is plug it into a usb port on something and then if you have a phone with usbc you can just use a regular usbc dock plug it in and now you can see a huge amount of the spectrum at the same time i see some folks in here asking about frequency skipping radios back in the past a long time ago those frequency hopping radios used to be really hard to detect and really hard to intercept but because this sdr right here sees so much of the spectrum it's actually not lit very well but you can see just how incredibly tiny this is and you can put a bunch of different antennas on it can see a huge swath of the spectrum it can see everything that these radios can can transmit and listen to but way more than that this is an rtl sdr like most of them but it has this one is from newelek.com and it has an aluminum housing basically all of these use the exact same chips inside and they just have you know different heat dissipation or different antenna connectors so these are 20 to 40 bucks and if you go to uh terminal are you on here terminal advantage i can't believe i just forgot your name um there are folks that sell kind of more tactical setups so that they have already gone out and picked the version that you want that is more rugged and sold put together some training materials on these but basically once you have this connected to your phone and you're running the right app or connected to your computer and you're running the right program then you can see a huge swath of the spectrum you can see hf stuff you can see super high frequency stuff and you can see huge swaths of the spectrum at the same time so you can see all of your uhf signals and all of your vhf signals at exactly the same time and even if there's a frequency hopping radio that bounces between frequencies you see all of the channels streaming down in your waterfall display so it is super easy um it is super easy i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do the quote it's super easy to see frequency hopping radios once you have a software-defined radio receiver that can look at the entire band or look at multiple bands at the same time and one of the cool things about a device like this and uh being able to plug it into your phone and the thing i like about a usbc dock like this is once you plug this in and then you plug a battery pack in and then you plug your phone in you can actually watch and record spectrum for a long time and that would be a great way to actually as you are doing disaster management or as you are exploring or as you were looking for people to help that's a great way to see a wide area of the spectrum and know like oh there's some people with frs radios over here and then you can take your radio and program it over to frs frequencies um or your no actually what you would do to be legal of course is to pull out your frs radio that is separate and part 90 certified and it's legal for you to do this and then you can talk to those folks on their frequency now there is there is a little bit of research and study required to use this properly because the apps that exist do not give you a whole lot of user-friendly information right off the bat like they do not tell you oh this channel over here is clearly somebody calling for help on frs channel 15. there's nothing quite like that you have to learn how to interpret the signals a little bit it's not that difficult but all of this stuff takes study if you're going to do it properly if you're going to do it with any capability so it really depends on what you are trying to accomplish this this question of which radios do i buy which skill sets do i need to develop what thing do i need to study really heavily dependent upon your use case your mission and ideally you have a communications network in place so that as you are doing stuff in a disaster scenario or doing whatever type of emergency communications you need you're not the only one doing it you're not operating alone and you already have enough of a plan that your buddies even if you have limited limited battery capability you know which frequencies you're going to be on and what times you're going to be transmitting you even may need to know what places you're going to go to meet up to talk to each other and whether or not you need to get to a top of a hill to actually transmit to the neighborhood that they're in stuff like that you need to figure out ahead of time so you're not experimenting with this um in a disaster scenario when i was a volunteer firefighter our county is very geographically large and we don't have very many repeaters there were a lot of times where we would respond to an incident and then somebody's job was to kind of wander around and figure out where we could hit the repeater from uh because there was just a huge amount of the county that had some cell phone signal and a huge amount of the county that had some repeater signal and a huge amount of the county that had neither so every time we responded to an event it was always a little bit of an experiment as to figuring out whether we could actually talk back to dispatch or how we were actually going to communicate with people on scene et cetera communicating on scene is usually pretty easy because you switch over to a tag channel and then everybody that's on scene can hear each other on that tech channel and then you switch over to your repeater channel and then hopefully you can see the repeater and you can talk back to dispatch so as you're building your communication plan and your network you can figure out whether or not you have the infrastructure yourself whether you can put up repeaters and cover a little bit more of your area um that sort of thing time for a t-rex repeater deployment um yes we have a dmr repeater that we need to set up we haven't really had the time to work on that but it's on our it's on our to-do list um somebody mentioned earlier that you don't need to worry about the fcc regulations in an emergency if there's a disaster that is technically true but it it's kind of up to them to define an emergency so if your life is in danger the president is if your life is in danger you can absolutely use any means necessary uh to ask for help you can break into the local fm transmitter the country radio station and you can ask for help on that giant two kilowatt transmitter that is a crime under most normal circumstances but if you need help you can do that now if you're trying to get help for other people that's where there's not as good a precedent i would say it's kind of hard to get in trouble with slightly improper radio use in a disaster but it's one of these things that varies i feel like the i feel like the fcc is a not up to date and b uh not actually helping with most of things that it could be doing in this instance for ham radio emergency communications there's pre-existing communications networks like races and areas and those are folks those are organizations that you may be able to talk to there may be others in your area there's a forget the acronym there's a different one here in middle uh middle tennessee area that's an emergency radio network and they basically exist to help in disasters so they have a way of talking to their local sheriff or maybe ems or maybe ema and help communicate with other counties and other people when phones are down or various other communications uh things are not available um so there's uh someone here says if you were to broadcast illegally during a during a disaster where you're not directly in danger they might throw the book at you for reasons that they might not throw the book it's someone else if you catch the drift yeah definitely don't take a baofeng radio into uh any capital buildings during uh january 6th that's probably like it's probably going to get uh get a book thrown at you at some sometime so a bunch of people asking questions about mesh tastic transmitters i'm very excited about the mesh tastic project i don't actually have a whole lot of time experimenting with it but that's on my to-do list people asking about super low cost quality radios the bow things the ball fangs are kind of hard to beat and the reason that i say that is just because of how cheap they are and how many of them are already out there if you want to learn about radio technology you should get your ham radio license and you should get a bal thing you probably shouldn't stick with the balfang but you should have a balfang and you should know how to program balfangs because there's just so so many of them out there terminal armament that's your name i forgot for a moment terminal armament is the guy who is selling sdr stuff and doing some sdr uh education post your post your url in here and i'll read it out um so the balfang radio there's a couple reasons why it's not an amazing radio one is it is the build quality is actually better than you might expect for a 20 25 radio um but it's not amazing it's not as waterproof as you would probably like or at least the batteries are not as waterproof as you would probably like and as far as a radio goes the the front end is not amazing there's spurious emissions there's stuff that for ham radio stuff and for just professional equipment stuff it is lower grade but there's also plenty of situations in which this is totally the way to go because you can experiment you need to know how these things work because everybody has them you're going to be finding people buying and selling and asking for advice and asking for help with their bowel fangs for the next 50 to 100 years i'm assuming so you ought to know how to use these and the things like spurious emissions that that potentially cause interference and problems when you're in the middle of rural tennessee and you're running a 4 watt radio i have to say i care a little less about that than other places or other times yes i would prefer all of my wattage to be focused uh onto the exact frequency that i want to transmit on but you know what down the middle of the woods um be careful who you are communicating with very true you should assume that you are um the fcc says never say broadcasting when you're when you're doing this you should say transmitting but you should assume that you are broadcasting uh because you are broadcasting your information widely even if you are running an encrypted radio you are broadcasting uh your location and if you're running an unencrypted radio you are broadcasting whatever it is that you're saying um technically that's not the right term part of the fcc but as far as opsec goes broadcasting is absolutely what you should what you should call it get a camo guy in your family or in your group that is an extremely important thing not everybody has to be a common guy but you need to have a group and your group needs to have a common guy in it if you have no group then you're going to find yourself potentially i mean hopefully you are able to do this but you're going to find yourself potentially building a communications network ad hoc with few resources with no planning and with no assistance and it's not going to go super well um uh a bunch of people ask questions about goten and pros and things okay so this is the gotenna mesh it is not the go tenant pro i am annoyed by the software that you actually run on your phone but basically you you pair this using bluetooth to your phone and then you actually have a small transmitter inside of here that is able to send your message out and not just from device to device but if you have more than one device out there your message will hop from device to device so a mesh network is actually created between multiple devices there's also something similar called beartooth beartooth gives you a little bit extra capability in the form of voice this allows you to send text messages and your gps location the beartooth device allows you to send text messages your gps location and voice messages and it actually works way better than i thought the voice messages send almost instantly but part of the reason for that is this doesn't do mesh networking yet it's supposed to come this year i am curious to see if that happens uh if it does it would be an interesting and very useful device it's extremely small it just connects using bluetooth to your phone and then you use your phone to interact with the device the software for both of these things is not amazing but it's kind of a useful tool and one of the one of the advantages that it does have over an analog fm radio potentially is that with this analog fm radio i need to have a pre-existing plan to talk to people and try to find the right frequency that they are on in order to talk to them if everybody in my community had a go tenant mesh my phone would just connect to this goteno mesh and then this gotended mesh would connect to the other gotennas and i would just see who's out there and i could broadcast to everybody that's in range excuse me or i could send a message to a specific person that i know and have in my contact list from ahead of time so there are some ways where this actually helps you discover and build that ad hoc mesh network but only if everybody else is using this device so you kind of need to get people on board with using this device to build your ad hoc network ahead of time when it's not actually technically ad hoc anymore so yeah the go tenant pro is five watts with external antenna yes the go tenant pro is much better the go tenant pro however is also incredibly expensive and you need proper licensing to use it so the go tenant pro has better hardware and a better app but it's it's uh it's harder to get into so couldn't get my gotenna mesh to work over half a mile in urban environment yeah it's this operates at 900 megahertz and so there's going to be a lot of 900 megahertz signal interference in urban environments it goes a little bit further in a rural area but you'd be better off with uhf or vhf radios so yeah my local ems went digital so you can't scan um it depends there's a lot of scanners that cannot de-trunk traffic but there's software for sdr radios that can de-trunk traffic they can't necessarily uh decrypt it but they can de-trunk it so it kind of depends on what your local guys are doing so people asking about atack hammer air ps i i need to get back into my research and experiment with some of that stuff before i actually make recommendations about it um but you should definitely um be thinking and experimenting about radios but the important thing that i i want to get to now is uh the fact that the software matters a lot more than the hardware the the important part of the network is the people not the equipment so this is a book that we have recommended before paul rivers ride and it talks about specifically uh paul revere's ride it talks mostly about that that's a very famous ride that he made in 1775 april 19th where he went out and he told people on the way to lexington and concord he didn't make it all the way to concord but he told people along the way that the british regulars were marching and they were going to confiscate stuff at concord and that is what actually allowed the militia to come out and be organized enough that they were able to fight the british and that was really the beginning of the war for american independence it did not uh actually start on july 4th 1776. it actually started april 19th 1775. that was that was the shot that was heard around the world that was the um the bell that could not be unrung that started wheels in motion that couldn't be stopped and american independence was the the war for american independence was inescapable at that point it wasn't clear who was going to win but at that point it was pretty clear that war was inescapable and when you read this book of paul revere's ride um there's two ways to read this book the first is just as a pure history book talking about what happened who was involved where they went etc the other way to read this book is as an after action report on one of the most important intelligence and communications operations in american history and if you do that a whole bunch of stuff gets revealed in this book and the first is that paul revere is not just a messenger guy he is actually the uh not the head but one of the most important central nodes in a whole bunch of different communications networks that were pre-existing and already set up so that when the time came for people to be ready they knew exactly what they were getting ready for they knew exactly who to trust they knew exactly who to talk to they knew exactly who to call out they knew exactly what lingo to use they had signals set up and again paul revere set all of this up without radios all of his communication equipment was pens and paper and horses and other guys on horses and lanterns that was that was all the communications equipment that he had and yet there was a very effective and sophisticated communication that the network that existed between uh between people so that is something that we should look into and we should we should study um we should study different times in history where disaster management or at any time when communication really mattered you should look at the way that um resistance fighters during world war ii used communications technologies or communications methods or the way that they built out their networks to communicate within resistance units or the way that they communicated back out to allies these are really important things to study because they they help you really see what some of the key fundamentals of a communications network are and how you build those things out and paul revere is an excellent example of this again we usually think of him as just purely the um the guy who saw something jumped on his horse ran around and told people uh but it's actually so much more complicated than that uh in many ways we were talking about him earlier paul revere shows up over and over and over again in revolutionary war history there's important events and paul revere is just there so either he is the forest gump of revolutionary war history and he just is at all these important events purely by accident or paul revere is actually the tony stark of the revolutionary war and he is actually making stuff happen he is actually the support network or the support guy for stuff that is happening and if you read through his stuff um his life and the things that he did it becomes really obvious that he was a key organizer of the systems that worked now not everything he did worked out well for example he was an artillery officer for a while that didn't go too well he was actually kicked out of command because that was not something he was particularly good at but he made cannons that were used by artillery divisions and battalions and he was just involved in a whole bunch of different stuff you probably know a little bit about him he was a silversmith and he was a goldsmith and that meant that he had a business he had a business that gave him resources to actually build and cultivate a network he had enough spare time where he could actually build out networks like the sons of liberty he was very much a part of some of these groups that were discussing things ideology but they were also discussing things like intelligence they were discussing things like how many british soldiers are here which british ships are arriving what is actually going on at the command level what is actually going on the company level what have you noticed any british spies walking around and spying out the countryside are they which particular roads are they checking out this is the sort of stuff that was being talked about very heavily by a lot of very organized people who were also being very careful and one of the things that um that comes out is these face-to-face relationship-based networks uh were the most important part of of all of what happened so there were some tremendous advantages that the american colonists had at that time and and they did a really good job of making the most of those advantages so their biggest home court advantage at the beginning was the existing relationships within communities so that it was very easy for them to spot spies it was very easy when the british would send out soldiers in plain clothes to go look around pretend to be surveyors or whatever it was very easy for people on the ground to recognize them as being outsiders recognize them as not really fitting in to recognize that the things that they're looking at have strategic or tactical importance because the guys on the ground are part of militias and they're part of conversations about what the british army is doing and so rather than being kind of clueless and just seeing a guy not knowing who he is or where he came from or what he's doing they were looking with a pretty careful eye and seeing like oh this guy is looking specifically at bridges he's looking at the width of bridges so that he knows how many men can march across them he's looking at the quality of role roads so that he can have a rough idea of how long it's going to take a company of british regulars to get from a to b they were thinking in these terms and so they were actually able to gather useful intelligence very quickly and pass it around very quickly and the relationships inside of these communities were strong enough that people had a rough idea of who they could trust and why and how much they could trust them and with what information these were all things that the american colonists could have had or could not have had if they were kind of lazy at developing those relationships or lazy at developing those skills but because they weren't lazy at those things they were actually organized they were actually careful they're actually thinking about the future they were prepared and they were able to use all of those advantages they had those capabilities in their toolbox and that was incredibly valuable as it turned out um and and you can see paul revere's um you can see paul revere as an organizer in a bunch of different ways but he also did some interesting things as far as disseminating information so he was a goldsmith and a silversmith that meant that he also was an engraver he engraved a bunch of the printing plates that were used to print political pamphlets and so he drew political cartoons and things and so one of his most famous drawings that you probably have seen is he drew and published the most popular or the most widely spread pamphlet on the boston massacre you've almost certainly seen his artwork if you've seen any boston massacre pamphlets so paul revere is working to develop networks uh in a bunch of different ways and uh and yet at the same time he's also being careful and cautious so even though he is so and some people have criticized him uh for this because they say that it's hypocritical that he would publish pamphlets about the boston massacre that are anti-british but at the same time as a i believe that he was an eyewitness but as a a very important community figure as as a sort of father of the uh of the town he actually showed up and provided testimony at the trial of the british soldiers who were on trial after the boston massacre and the testimony that he provided was actually uh exoner helped to exonerate those british soldiers so some people have said ah he's just playing both sides against the middle uh he's just being hypocritical uh i don't think that's the case i think that he was actually able to say two things at the same time first the british should not be here and should not be stationing soldiers here but at the very same time in this particular instance these particular soldiers are not at fault so as he was developing these networks and communicating these ideas and growing his business and growing his influence and growing his relationships with people uh he ended up developing an intelligence agency called the mechanics and i think this may have been the first proper intelligence agency in in the united states elias boudinot ran a pretty significantly successful aspiring but paul revere may have been building out the mechanics ahead of time but he had actual guys running around gathering intelligence for him and they were called mechanics and that's a very interesting thing again he is he is the tony stark of the revolutionary war he is not uh he's not just some random guy on a horse um and so as as you take the opportunity to study stuff um like when we recommend books like paul revere's ride there is uh so much that you can pull out of a book like that there are ideological lessons there are lessons about uh troops facing off against one another and yet there's also a bunch of lessons about the kind of communication networks that allowed organized stuff to happen and there were a bunch of different um there were a bunch of different what's the right word for this ryan there's a bunch of different launching pads or on-ramps or there's a bunch of different starting points for community and communication networks that he was able to utilize they're a little harder to utilize today like we talk about how every every one of the founding fathers was some kind of conspiratorial freemason uh that's a that's a pretty uh common nicholas cage uh conspiracy theory that's not actually true although it does happen to be true about paul revere he was a mason and his particular lodge was full of sons of liberty guys so inside of this book the this is the david hackett fisher book this much of it is this much of it is the story of what happened and then the rest of it is appendices and footnotes so when when you ask him what his sources are he doesn't say trust me bro he has pages and pages of sources and he has his research that he's documented so he has a list of several uh liberty based organizations these are these are uh they're not clubs they're organizations so one of them was the saint andrews freemason lodge uh the masonic lodge which was founded in 1762 then there's the loyal nine then there's the north caucus then there's the long room club then there's the tea party then there's the boston committee of correspondence and finally in 1775 the last one that was founded was the london enemies list they call themselves the london enemies list and then he has pages of people who are members of these groups and some people are members of one or two but when you look at paul revere he's members of almost almost all of them he's members he is a good member in good standing of five different uh liberty groups this isn't even counting the sons of liberty which wasn't a secret organization it was a bunch of people who were being very public about talking about liberty so um and when you talk about the sons of liberty i don't i don't want you to to miss how prepared people actually were so for example when paul revere knew that the british were coming and they were coming by sea and he started to ride he rode to lexington and he found himself inside of um the town of lexington and one of the first places he went was the home of jonas clark who was the pastor of the church there and churches were a pre-existing network in addition to all of these different patriot networks all these different liberty networks churches were a pre-existing community network and the the preacher there jonas clark was a very important organizer of this very important network and so that was i believe his first stop in lexington and when he got there um john hancock and sam adams were already there they didn't know that the british were coming right then but they were doing network maintenance they were doing relational building they were talking about stuff that they knew was coming even though they they didn't know that it was coming that night they were already there to ask jonas clark the very important question of is your church ready to fight is your church capable of fighting and are they ready to actually stand up to british soldiers this is the kind of work inside of the network that was being done and it just so happened that it was being done on the very night that paul revere was making his ride and so when he was asked if his church would fight jonas clark said i have trained them for this very hour they would fight and if need be die to under the shadow of the house of god so there has been a huge amount of development of all of these networks and militias and thoughts there's been ideological communication there's been lines of communication opened up between different towns and communities as people discuss these things in pubs and you know you know masonic lodges sometimes um and when you get into a lot of this um the study of these organizations and these relationships you realize how much work was actually done ahead of time it wasn't just a whole bunch of people who were starting to get tired of britain and then a guy that they didn't know who he was came running through the town yelling at the top of his lungs and they were like all right fine let's go shoot some dudes um they knew exactly who paul revere was paul revere knew exactly who to tell and he didn't run yelling through the streets he went to specific people to let them know what the actual intelligence was of what the enemy was doing on the ground and the relationships of all of these people were pre-existing relationships built around conversations like what are we going to do if the british regulars show up that is the conversation that john hancock and sam adams were having with jonas clark when paul revere showed up to say that conversation is super relevant you guys it's happening tonight and uh uh you also see a lot of organization happening around the churches just a ton of sermons that are being preached on the issue of just warfare on the issue of resistance to tyrants guys like jonathan edwards had spent a huge amount of time talking about just war theory it was is pretty ingrained in the culture and that is why um when the lexington militia gathered they gathered under the leadership of john parker who was the deacon of jonas clark's church and they they were the first militia to actually engage um the uh the british regulars so our founding fathers were very uh they were very focused and again when we talk about the founding fathers we're talking about hundreds of people who have very different goals and ideologies and reasons for things and yet one thing that they do all have in common is they were very network focused and they worked very closely together and they sought unity and they really wanted to be in good communication with one another and have each other's backs and so that is something that is a really important part of a communications network particularly when you're not dealing with just a pure natural disaster you are dealing with a situation that's a little more complex and uh you really you really want to have your connections uh based more on more on trust than than anything else and so what happens in uh in april uh 19th 1775 we all know the story they knew the british were coming they knew the british were almost certainly coming to confiscate powder and shot and cannons in concord they fought with them and they they won a couple they want to battle uh a physical battle but they also want an ideological battle and a political battle in the way that they fought back and they could only do that because of the preparation that existed not not just the preparation because they heard ahead of time from paul revere that the british were on the way but a lot of preparation ahead of time within these communication networks so i don't want us to get too distracted and too focused on which radio should i buy because that's the question that you ask after you already know what you're trying to accomplish with your communication network and roughly what it is so earlier i saw someone say is this is this the uh the live stream that teaches you how to make friends and someone replied no this is the live stream that tells you uh that you do need to make friends that's that's probably pretty well said so yeah i want to thank you guys for for watching this is going to have to be a slightly shorter live stream because we're filming some other stuff in the studio but i want to take a couple of other questions and just talk through a couple of different a couple of different radio things because i know that that is what you are actually here for one of the most fascinating things about um modern radio technology is uh there are all kinds of very cool options that are are potentially there so one of the things that that i think that we should be experimenting with is stuff like mesh tastic various other mesh related radio technologies there's a whole lot of stuff that is extremely cool from a emergency communication standpoint and as good as these off-the-shelf fm radios this is this is for the most part fairly old technology and you should own it you should know how it works you should be capable this should be a tool that is in your toolbox both physically but also mentally but there's also some really cool stuff that could be developed there's there are potentially ways to connect some of these more advanced technologies together to build something that is extremely effective and capable and cool and easier to use and more just better at all the stuff that radio is supposed to be doing and um so hopefully we can keep tinkering and experimenting with stuff like that meshtastic is probably the most interesting project at the moment on on that on that front that i'm aware of but um yeah that's only for for short range shortish range communication for long-range communication that's a whole other thing and long-range communication is something that again the war uh for american independence a really important part of the war for american independence is that when this battle on the way to concord the the first shot that was heard around the world that was fired at lexington on lexington green one of the really important parts of that that battle is america was the first to get the account of that back to europe so the american account of what happened was what was in the european newspapers and the british newspapers so long range communication also extremely important but that is a whole other stream so uh yes there's a bunch of people asking questions about public communication and people watching yes you should assume that public communication is always being watched especially now that's that's always been true to some extent but the technological capabilities of certain people to watch everything have only only been increased by all the centralized communication that we have that's part of the reason that i like decentralized communication devices that work without infrastructure they're not necessarily going to be harder to watch but they're definitely harder to control i mean right now there was a discussion this past week um with joe biden and the bite administration talking about how yes there's almost complete control over the conversation about certain pandemics and certain uh what are they called certain mandatory vacations that there's currently currently any conversation about this stuff on social media gets flagged and tagged and you see a a banner that tells you where you can get approved information on these topics but that's not happening with face-to-face communication and it's not happening over your just regular phone calls and text messages and they're talking about bringing that to sms communication so if you just text somebody on your phone somebody will see that and make sure that your friend receives the approved information about what it was that you were trying to talk about so that is another reason that uh more decentralized communication is better and face-to-face communication so you know one of the things that worked incredibly well for our founders was the ability to sit down face to face see one another in uh in a pub like the great dragon pub and uh so yeah it's really important to build some of those relational trust based things with actual human beings not with random random internet handles that uh probably probably atf guys like most of the time anytime somebody on the internet tells me that i should really have a short barrel shotgun i assume that he's an atf agent and uh i i rarely i really check but it seems like you know it's a pretty good guess google is also creating mesh networks uh and amazon is amazon is creating mesh networks with some of their different amazon devices so this is this is fascinating technology it's very cool and i think that it is it's double-edged sword stuff so this is technology that can be used for good or for evil it kind of depends on who has it um i think we should be experimenting so that we have more people doing stuff with the technology so that we have more competition as consumers we can pick different types of double-edged sword that are pointed in different directions shall we say um face to face communications being limited over the last year is interesting when thought of in that context yes face face communication is harder based on a bunch of stuff that happened last year and it was replaced primarily with online communication that can be you know monitored and addressed a little better definitely something to think about definitely spend more time getting to know people face to face it is very very important that is the most important part of building a communications network i think so uh thank you very much for watching and i want to finish i want to finish this uh by reading a quote of one of the minutemen that responded in lexington and it's something that is very important when we talk about uh when we talk about particularly the the revolutionary war and the founders and we talk about freemasonry and we talk about deism and we talk about the stamp act and we talk about all these things they're very important don't get me wrong the the people that actually made the laws and made the constitution and made the bill of rights and signed the declaration of independence all that paperwork is very important and i don't want to undermine it but the guys who were willing to go out and fight and die and do the soldiering and protect their neighborhoods and their families and their churches it's really important that we not forget those guys because those are the guys that actually made all of this stuff possible so i want to read an account from levi preston he was interviewed at the age of 91 about what it was like to respond to the alarm on lexington green go out there and and fight with the british and technically the militia lost that battle the redcoats uh were able to outnumber and beat the lexington militia they marched on to concord and then they came back and by the time they got back to where the lexington battle had been militias from surrounding towns were there and were able to pick off british regulars all the way back to boston so so a historian asked captain preston what made you go to the concord fight what did i go for the old man replied subtly rephrasing the historian's question the interviewer tried again were you oppressed by the stamp act i never saw any stamps preston answered and i always understood that none were ever sold what about the t tax t-tax i never drank a drop of the stuff the boys threw it all overboard but i suppose that you had been reading harrington sydney and locke about the eternal principles of liberty i never heard of these men the only books we had were the bible the catechism watson's psalms and hymns and the almanacs well then what was the matter and he answers young man what we meant in going for those redcoats was this we had always governed ourselves and we always meant to and they didn't mean that we should so this is this is the words of an actual militia man who responded and and these soldiers the guys that actually were willing to put their lives on the line are worth studying and reading about not only just to see how they did what they did but why they did what they did and so as we want to learn about communications technology or the ability to do certain things so that we have the tools in our tool kits to just be better at taking care of our families and our own neighborhoods it's important that we read after action reports of different types of actions so that we can determine what worked and what didn't but also better understanding the people is a very important part of that and that's going to be that's going to be true when you're building your communications network as well you're going to want to understand the people who are in your communications network um and have actual relationships with them an actual understanding about what they what they think and what they believe that's going to be a really important part about building the sort of trust that these guys had in one another so that when some random not really random but when some boston goldsmith rides up with intel people who trust him uh are actually ready to take action on that intel so that's something to really think about which isn't to say that you should stop asking me questions about which radio you should buy but you should uh you should start thinking through the actual practical applications of what you want to accomplish with communication and then make some of your radio based decisions with that mission in mind so thank you very much for watching the stream thank you very much for sending me so many questions about radios even the ones that i don't know how to answer that's uh 90 of them uh and thank you very much for being interested in building the kind of communications network and the kind of capabilities that um that we're talking about today not just not just talking to each other because it's cool to do it over the radio instead of instagram but actually wanting to build the capabilities to uh to help people so thank you for watching t-rex arms and i look forward to seeing you guys around on the various various social media platforms that we don't control and can't trust anybody on uh i'll see you on those platforms next week wednesday 4 30. have a great week you

Channel: T.REX ARMS

Views: 73,452

Keywords: sionyx, isaac botkin, trex arms, RTL SDR, ham radio, emcomm, emergency communications, david hackett fisher, paul revere, intelligence networks, atak, dmr, gotenna, beartooth

Id: 6ZbY_ERuwCg

Length: 66min 48sec (4008 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021