If electronic communication is important to you then I would look at the modern DMR spec. Has encryption and better radio's support STUN and KILL. So you could temp disable a lost radio or strait up brick it if you know its lost forever. The spec also supports text messaging and (slow) IP networking. The encryption wont stop a glower from listening in but it would stop a local nigger with a scanner.
Ham's have adopted the DMR specification and have set up repeaters all over. I wouldn't count on their infrastructure in SHTF but it would be a good way to practice with the tech now and learn it's capabilities. You can get chink DMR radios (MD380) for 69bux if you only want voice and limited text messaging. All DMR radios can fall back to FM analog if you want. DMR works with a repeater or can talk simplex (radio to radio directly).
Better prepared older cell sites can run for 3 days with no commercial power. Today they build them cheap and only put in limited battery power that will run hours at best. Also with no back haul they are useless. The days of being able to call and text anyone locally on an amputated site are over. All switching and logic is done in the "cloud" offsite. If your comm plan depends on infrastructure you don't control then you have no comm plan.
I agree with that blackpill user in that suicide is the answer for most of Zig Forums but for slightly different reasons tbh
Robert Gray
Solar powered low-band radio with battery backups. They don't require that much power and much harder to damage than digital comms. Downsides would be that they are easily tracked and easily interfered with.
Alexander Gomez
There's a kill switch in basically every appliance.
Chase Collins
Sat phones glow so bright you don't need eyes to see them.
When people talk about "sat phones" they are talking about Iridium Satellite LLC. Look at the history of that company starting around 2001. Satphone to satphone voice theoretically could be secure but the metadata is definitely not. Any phone call made from a satphone to a number that is not a sat phone has to pass through one of the DoD controlled gateways and though the telco switch that just happens to be located in DC. Also when resources are scarce the fed phones will have priority over commercial customers.
So Lots of "if"'s with satphones
And it is pointless to even talk about them as a viable option. The cost just to have one is so high no one on Zig Forums actually has one unless they are a glower.
Couldn't you reprogram the sat phone to connect directly to various Ham-Sattelites? Of course, you'd need to be licensed but in a SHTF situation who would enforce?
John Stewart
It's not the phone that matters. Its the network. They have hotspots that you can connect your own cellphone phone to now. This guy gives a good demonstration of what its like to actually use the service. >youtube.com/watch?v=XF6FwNLHg8Q Voice, text, and data all flows through the ground stations. Its all MiTMed. At bursts of 2.4kbps you could theoretically send something like PGP though it but the main issue is that in a national SHTF situation the 1st thing they will do is shut down commercial use of the network.
Totally different tech. AMSAT just uses normal FM analog VHF/UHF in most cases. See amsat.org/ You might get a few fly overs that last a few mins each. And you need a computer or the internet to predict when the fly overs happen and in most cases where it is so you can point an antenna to it. There is no big ham constellation. It takes Iridium 82 satellites to have the coverage that they have.
