This is an update of some of our activities for the month of November, 2024.
One of us talked to a mutual aid group about ham radio. About 50 people were in attendance. Recorded audio of the talk is being edited.
A member from the Great Lakes region passed their Technician’s exam.
Blackblogs.org went down for about a week in November. These things happen even to the best of services. But due to a perceived increase in instability of IT infrastructure across the wider Internet, we have decided to mirror this site on anarchistrrl.noblogs.org. We may also mirror the site in some Smolweb form such as Gemini or a BBS as well, but mostly just for fun.
Crimethinc has an excellent article on an Anarchist response to hurricane Helene. Excerpt about radio below:
Radios, especially ham radios, are another important means of communication that should be arranged in advance with people who already know how to use them. Our mountainous terrain limits the distance that radios can broadcast, but it would still have been helpful if we had possessed ham radios.
ID: BW SSTV mage distorted by Baofeng UV-5R clipped to the top of a wooden fence.
That ridiculous looking 42.5 inch collapsible antenna sold by Abbree is actually pretty good, at least for RX. This makes sense as it’s approximately 1/2 wave on the 2 meter band.
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of October, 2024.
A demo was held at an Anarchist book fair where we made voice contact with a comrade about 950 miles (~1529 KM) away on the 20 meter band.
We have been joined by new comrades from Australia, northern Europe, the East coast, Southeast, upper-Midwest, and West coast of the so-called “United States”. Among these comrades are people connected with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. We are forming plans to share knowledge and resources in the near future.
Archive.org was hacked and came back online 12 days later. 31M user accounts and hashed passwords were stolen. This was a pretty considerable disruption to many online activities, including the ability to archive news articles, political commentary, and to fact check claims about – among many other things – Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.
And while this didn’t happen in October, obviously most of us woke up yesterday morning to find that Donald Trump had been elected to be the next president of the so-called “United States”. Whether you voted or not, and regardless of your feelings about the opposition, now is yet again – and still, as always – the time to prepare, and to protect and uplift one another.
Use Signal, use Tor. Build community, grow food, train up, get comms. We protect us.
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
As another powerful hurricane approaches Florida, many mutual aid organizations are doubtless bracing for impact and poised to help residents recover in the aftermath.
It is predicted that Hurricane Milton will make landfall in as little as a few hours from this post.
Given the rather large role that radio continues to play throughout recovery from Hurricane Helene, some might be interested in listening to the Hurricane Watch Net on the 20 and 40 meter bands.
The Net will Activate Tuesday at 5:00 PM EDT (2100 UTC) on 14.325.00 MHz (USB) and 7.268.00 MHz (LSB)
If you do not have an HF or shortwave radio, you can tune in via a web SDR.
If you do have an HF transceiver and you are not in an affected area, it is important that we LISTEN for information that could be useful to mutual aid disaster relief and recovery efforts.
Florida also has an interesting statewide linked repeater system called SARnet, which also has a Broadcastify stream.
We post this information in the sincere hope that it will be useful for those affected by these hurricanes, and at least educational for those who are not directly impacted.
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of September, 2024.
This month started off uneventful, but it sure didn’t end that way.
At the top of many peoples’ minds right now are of course the people impacted by Hurricane Helene. Rather than try to write something to try and jam this situation into a ham-radio-shaped narrative, we’ll just re-post some links to mutual aid disaster relief efforts you can donate to and/or get involved with however you can, as well as some interesting stories we’ve seen come up in our feeds.
AI6YR as always, has been posting a lot of great information on the hurricane and recovery efforts.
We have witnessed, both on HF and web SDR, folks in affected areas relaying traffic for loved ones through radio operators who in areas that were not hit and still have electricity and working phones.
Screenshot of an Instagram post from Meshtastic. It says: We wish to express our deepest sympathies for everyone impacted by Hurricane Helene. Our hearts go out to all those affected , and we hope for the well-being of everyone during this difficult time. <br> To our community, we ask that you refrain from responding to posts about the situation with comments like “this is why you need Meshtastic.” While we understand the value of our platform, these types of comments can come across as opportunistic and may not be helpful at this moment. <br> Instead, let’s focus on supporting those in need right now. There will be a time to educate others about Meshtastic, but for now, compassion and direct support are most important. Thank you for your understanding. –Meshtastic
IF this event has motivated you to prepare for disasters by getting into ham radio and/or other autonomous communications technology and techniques, that’s cool. Here are a few things to check out.
The Baofeng UV-9R seems like a nice and cheap handheld radio. It’s waterproof and charges via USB-C, which are both good and useful features. You can find it on that site where everybody buys all their shit. Once you get the radio, program it with FRS, GMRS and MURS frequencies.
Go to hamstudy.org to study for the ham radio license exams. It’s free. They really have made much simpler what used to be a pretty daunting bureaucratic process.
If you’d like to study with a book, do that. There are a lot of good ones out there. Your local library probably has one.
Take a look at our zine. It’s not a study guide, but it’s got a lot of information in there if your just curious what ham radio is all about.
Contact us! Seriously. We like talking about this stuff and we want to help anarchists get on the air.
In other news: On September 17 and 18, thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of handy-talkies exploded simultaneously in an Israeli attack. As of September 22, several people had died including 2 children, and thousands were injured. We’ll leave exact numbers to the journalists, as there are likely to be fluctuations and discrepancies in reporting.
Initial suspicions were that the Israeli government somehow remotely caused the batteries in these devices to explode. This is quite obviously not what happened. The devices were intercepted by the Israeli government at some point en route to Lebanon and were filled with explosives.
The Israeli government has been committing war crimes and genocide before this attack (and before October 7, 2023), and now the mind is boggled even further by people who still believe this kind of behavior is justified.
Just to be clear: No borders. No nations. Nobody gets an ethnostate. Period.
Should you worry about this type of supply-chain attack?
Short answer: No, probably not.
Longer answer: No, probably not. But you can probably open up your radio with a screwdriver to check on that sort of thing. But basically, no.
As for what we’ve been up to:
winterizing our antennas
a little bit of POTA
voice contact between comrades from the East coast to the Midwest
This is an update of some of our activities in the month of February, 2024.
Did an introductory video-conference presentation about ham radio to a group of comrades in the Northeast.
Two of us worked together remotely to get set up using CAT control and JS8call on one of our stations. CAT control works. However, the contact failed due to suspected coax problems. It was too cold outside to check. It was also suspected that one of the rigs suffered internal damage due to high SWR, but the problem appears to have been solved by a factory reset.
A second attempt was made a couple weeks later, this time using a Linux command line tool called minimodem which is a general purpose audio FSK modem capable of sending at very low bit rates, which, in theory should allow for a message to cut through very high noise levels. Experiments with very low audio (not RF) between two computers in the same building yielded promising results. We set our radios to VOX control and let it rip. No joy. One of the antennas was simply not radiating. The endfed random wire antenna that is proving to be problematic will likely be replaced with a soe form of multiband resonant dipole when the ice melts. Minimodem may get its own post in the future. There’s something to be said for such a simple and flexible command line utility, as opposed to more complex GUI applications such as FLDigi and JS8Call.
Solar powered Meshtastic modules have been ordered and should arrive soon. One Meshtastic device was given to a comrade who lives just beyond line of sight. Arrangements will be made to install the device on a mast, and attempt experimental contact when both parties have time. They are hopeful, as the mesh network is expanding in their localities and contact should be possible through at least two hops.
None of us have been affected by the AT&T outage. Although, it does serve as a stark reminder that whether due to disaster, malice, or sheer incompetence, governments and private corporations cannot always be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure.
One of us built an LCR meter from a kit. An LCR meter measures inductance, capacitance, and resistance of electronic components. It also tests transistors and crystal oscillators, as well containing a few other functions. This should help to adjust hand-wound inductors, and also to help identify mystery junk drawer components.
A few of us participated in Winter Field Day from our various locales. One of us made 47 contacts in one hour, the furthest being over 6,000 miles away Brazil.
Experiments with LoRa Meshtastic and Reticulum continue.
This is somewhat less of an activist-oriented post, because shit would honestly have to be pretty fucking dire in the world for CW (we’ll get into why we call it that in a bit) to actually be practically useful. Not that such situations are impossible, and of course it’s worth thinking about and imagining, but we just don’t find them terribly likely. For a lot of people, Morse Code scratches an itch on a part of our brains that loves learning languages and sending secret codes. Anyhow, Morse code is cool and fun.
Hams call it CW, which stands for Continuous Wave. That’s because rather than modulating in response to the oscillations of a human voice or multiple tones of a digital signal, it uses one continuous tone generated by an oscillator. The oscillator is either On or Off. The circuit is either open or closed. The differences in the amounts of time the radio transmits is what creates the language.
And yes, it is a language. A relatively unique one, too because it’s neither a written language, nor a spoken one. It is sent by the hand, but also it is meant to be heard and experienced in time, not seen as dots and dashes on a piece of paper.
Each combination of fist, key, and radio system has a “voice” which is as distinct as a human voice, and can be picked out among a pileup of other voices.
It is not exactly binary, even though it is regarded as the first digital mode. If anything, it’s Ternary. The “dits” and “dahs” are not equivalent to zeros and ones, because the gaps in between the tones are just as important as the tones themselves. For example “dah dit dah dit … dah dah dit dah” is “CQ” which is basically a way of saying “is anyone out there?” But if you change the timing to say “dah dit … dah dit … dah dah … dit dah” it says “NNMA” which probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone.
Computers aren’t very good at decoding CW. CW decoders do exist and are quite common, but they require a certain set of conditions in order to work properly. They expect tones in a certain range, a clear strong signal without any interference, and a very regular cadence. When CW is sent by a real human (especially with a straight key) on the real airwaves, using low power, a computer is of very little help. The human ear is much better at decoding this than a computer.
As far as radio communication goes, CW is the most efficient mode there is, by many standards.
Bandwidth: CW uses the smallest amount of bandwidth. Usually only about 500 Hz. Compare that to the typical 2400 Hz bandwidth of an SSB phone transmission.
Signal to noise: some “low signal” digital signals such as FT8 can be decoded by computer when it’s so deep into the noise that it can’t even be heard by the human ear. However, a skilled CW operator can decode CW that sounds exactly like static. That’s not easy to do with the human voice, and computers are not good at decoding messy CW.
Efficiency: You can probably squeeze more miles per watt out of CW than any other mode. Moreso, the equipment can be extremely small and lightweight.
0.3 watt CW transceiver inside an Altoids tin, made by Adam K6ARK https://reflector.sota.org.uk/t/worlds-smallest-sota-station/20825/45 watt QCX Mini CW Transceiver from QRP-Labs http://shop.qrp-labs.com/qcxmini
A word about keys
There are several different types of CW keys, but most people either use a “straight key” or an “iambic paddle”. The straight key is the one most people are visually familiar with.
J-38 straight key
The straight key produces “dits” and “dahs” by pressing down the key for shorter or longer periods of time.
Back when Morse Code was still a primary mode of long-distance communication, telegraphers – especially postal workers – primarily used straight keys. Prolonged use of straight keys caused a repetitive stress injury known as “glass arm”. To prevent this from happening, keys were made which relied on a side-to-side motion such as semi-automatic keys called “bugs” and then iambic paddles.
Most modern radios have circuitry inside them which allow you to set the sending speed, so the duration of the “dits” and “dahs”. This enables the use of iambic paddles.
Search for “stainless steel iambic paddle” and you’ll find these all over the place for about $50. They’re pretty good.
Iambic paddles are pretty good. One of the paddles is “dit” and the other is “dah”. You can press them at the same time send “dit dah” or “dah dit” depending upon which paddle was pressed first. Very convenient. They allow you to send well formed characters very easily.
The dis/advantage of straight keys is that they almost force you to send slower. You also have to be very conscious of how long your dits and dahs are. On the air you can often tell when you’re talking to someone using a straight key because they can lean on the “dah” for what seems like an eternity once you get into the groove. The sounds may not be consistent relative to each other. A consistent and legible operator is said to have a “good fist”. The irregularity of the straight key may or may not be desired.
How to learn the Code:
The most important things to do are listening to and sending CW.
There are three main methods of teaching CW which are generally accepted: Koch, Farnsworth, and Instant Character Recognition (ICR). They’re all slightly different and tedious to explain, but we thought we’d point that out as they are terms you might come across.
Many tools exist to help people learn Morse code. Below is a non-exhaustive list of some options that are out there.
Morse Mania is an app for Android and iPhone. It’s good at teaching letters using the Koch method, but they want you to pay for numbers and punctuation. Rather than paying for software, you may want to move on to Morse Trainer (Android) which is open source and also uses the Koch method, but in a slightly different way. There are many different mobile applications
Learn from people: The Long Island CW Club and CW Academy are two groups that meet online and teach CW in different ways. Participation in both of these groups pretty much requires that you have both a Key and either a dedicated oscillator or a radio with a practice mode.
Long Island CW Club has regular Zoom meetings where people practice sending back and forth. There is no curriculum. You just show up to whichever meetings are convenient for you. There is a membership fee for LICW.
CW Academy is free, but it’s more structured. Students sign up for an 8 week long course consisting of two one-hour Zoom meetings per week.
How NOT to learn the Code:
Most skilled operators will advise that you NOT try to learn it visually. CW is an audible language, not a written one. Do NOT rely on a sheet of paper with the alphabet as a list of dots and dashes. The reason is basically that when you memorize the symbols in a visual way, you will always try and decode using a visual reference to each corresponding symbol, which is much slower than hearing the sound of each symbol.
Conclusion
So, while CW may not be particularly useful in the day-to-day, consider some of the information above. CW rigs are small and light. They don’t require computers or other equipment. The transmissions are very narrow-banded. CW signals can get out in very poor band conditions, when almost no other signal can. It’s a great emergency mode, and just another great skill to have.
Hurricane Sandy’s blackout and the streets of lower Manhattan –Dan Nguyen
It didn’t take long after the attacks on the power substations in Moore county, North Carolina for the old Civil Defense guys in the ham radio community to start ranting about the “Shit Hitting The Fan” in their email lists. Talking about how State emergency response groups are woefully unprepared or – more to their point – disconnected from the ham radio community.
While we disagree with the statist approach to their solutions, they’re not wrong about the problems. If power, Internet, and cellphone systems all go out, that leaves people vulnerable. Elderly people, people with disabilities, people living with food insecurity, etc. You know, the working class.
Prior to 9/11, the number one threat to national security in the eyes of United States government was not from Islamic Extremists, nor “Illegal Aliens”, nor “The Chinese”, but from American white supremacists. The anti-Black racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and hatred of poor people that existed before 9/11 never went away. Instead, it was redirected towards a War on terror, a War on Drugs, and a War on “Illegal Immigration”. The hatred was focused on external perceived threats to cishet white male Christian hegemony. So now, there are power substations being attacked, likely by white supremacists.
In the case of Moore county, North Carolina there’s a possibility that the ideological target was the local LGBTQ+ community due to a drag show that was happening at exactly the same time. The physical target, however, was anyone who uses electricity. While the motivation for the attack in Moore County is yet to be confirmed, the plausibility of terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure targeted at marginalized communities in both the present and future is very real. Regardless, the effect is the same.
Due to the known fact that many police and their ilk are either fascists or simply sick bastards in their own right, it should be understood that state-based solutions to communications outages are neither tenable, nor necessarily desirable for many people.
With that said, it may be obvious to us that having a ham radio base station at the local police department monitoring for emergency traffic may not be so desirable. What may not be obvious is that police departments tend notto want people calling them over the radio either.
So what is to be done? The short, very general answer – and probably the most important – is to build dual power in the form of networks of solidarity and mutual aid. But here are a few ideas.
What already exists? NCPACKET, APRS, solar panels, batteries, flashlights, candles, heaters. What should we build? As always, build community, bases of knowledge, networks of mutual aid and solidarity. What does that look like? Queering ham radio and building Community mesh networks.
Pick up some FRS, MURS, GMRS or CB radios for your friends and neighbors. Come up with a comms plan and practice.
Following the police murder of a comrade at the Weelaunee Forest, we endorse the statement which can be found below.
As for our own words, we support the rights of people to communicate freely and to enjoy nature. We oppose mass surveillance and the Carceral State. Aside from that, we love trees. They hold our antennas.
We call on all people of good conscience to stand in solidarity with the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta.
On January 18, in the course of their latest militarized raid on the forest, police in Atlanta shot and killed a person. This is only the most recent of a series of violent police retaliations against the movement. The official narrative is that Cop City is necessary to make Atlanta “safe,” but this brutal killing reveals what they mean when they use that word.
Forests are the lungs of planet Earth. The destruction of forests affects all of us. So do the gentrification and police violence that the bulldozing of Weelaunee Forest would facilitate. What is happening in Atlanta is not a local issue.
Politicians who support Cop City have attempted to discredit forest defenders as “outside agitators.” This smear has a disgraceful history in the South, where authorities have used it against abolitionists, labor organizers, and the Civil Rights Movement, among others. The goal of those who spread this narrative is to discourage solidarity and isolate communities from each other while offering a pretext to bring in state and federal forces, who are the actual “outside agitators.” The consequence of that strategy is on full display in the tragedy of January 18.
Replacing a forest with a police training center will only create a more violently policed society, in which taxpayer resources enrich police and weapons companies rather than addressing social needs. Mass incarceration and police militarization have failed to bring down crime or improve conditions for poor and working-class communities.
In Atlanta and across the US, investment in police budgets comes at the expense of access to food, education, childcare, and healthcare, of affordable and stable housing, of parks and public spaces, of transit and the free movement of people, of economic stability for the many. Concentrating resources in the hands of police serves to defend the extreme accumulation of wealth and power by corporations and the very rich.
What do cops do with their increased budgets and their carte blanche from politicians? They kill people, every single day. They incarcerate and traumatize schoolchildren, parents, loved ones who are simply struggling to survive. We must not settle for a society organized recklessly upon the values of violence, racism, greed, and careless indifference to life.
The struggle that is playing out in Atlanta is a contest for the future. As the catastrophic effects of climate change hammer our communities with hurricanes, heat waves, and forest fires, the stakes of this contest are clearer than ever. It will determine whether those who come after us inherit an inhabitable Earth or a police state nightmare. It is up to us to create a peaceful society that does not treat human life as expendable.
The forest defenders are trying to create a better world for all of us. We owe it to the people of Atlanta and to future generations everywhere to support them.
Here are some ways to support the defense of the forest in Atlanta:
Donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to support legal costs for arrested protestors and ongoing legal action.
The Narrow Band Emergency Messaging System is probably one of the easier digital systems to implement. In its simplest form, all you need is your radio and an Android device running AndFLmsg. Simply type your message in the app, hold your radio up to the phone speaker and press the PTT button while the encoded message plays over the speaker. This method is called “audio coupling”.
The downside of audio coupling is that it makes a lot of audible noise in your local environment. The sound is pretty annoying, too. It’s also possible for environmental noise to interfere with a good copy, although some of the modes used with NBEMS are fairly robust against noisy environments.
There are a few ways to solve this, but they all involve either more equipment, more capable radios, or both.
If you’re using a Baofeng UV-5R or similar HT, you could use an audio interface cable such as the BTECH APRS-K1. This cable is usually used for APRS, but it does work for AndFLmsg. One end plugs into the Kenwood connector socket on the radio, and the other connects into your phone with a 3.5mm TRRS connector. If your phone does not have a 3.5mm audio jack, it may be possible to use a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter, but it seems like a lot of people have trouble with this. Besides, that’s a lot of cables and connectors at that point.
Speaking of a lot of cables, you could also use a sound card interface such as the Digirig Mobile, the Wolphi Link, the AIOC, or possibly the EasyDigi if you want a more DIY option. It’s similar to the APRS cable, except that it’s more modular and can be used between various devices and radios, provided you have the right cables to go between them.
The downside to the BTECH APRS K-1 cable is that you either still have to manually push the PTT button, or you have to put the radio into VOX mode. This means that the PTT is triggered by audio rather than by pressing the button. This can cause the beginnings of messages to be cut off, or (in my experience) cause the radio to overheat and kill the battery, or it may completely fail to trigger the PTT at all. The other issue – and Baofeng radios are notorious for this – is that the VOX circuit may be quite laggy, which might cause the first part of a message to be cut off. To overcome this, it may be a good idea to start a message with some junk data, such as a bunch of zeros or just jumbled letters, in order to give the VOX circuit the split second it needs to activate the PTT.
Audio interfaces such as the Digirig shouldn’t give you this problem, as they are able to send the RTS signal to the radio, which activates the PTT much like a radio with built-in CAT control would be able to do.
As of this writing, it seems that the Mobilinkd TNC3 does not work with AndFLmsg.
AndFLmsg is based on a more feature rich suite of free and open source programs called FLdigi. AndFLmsg basically consists of FLmsg and FLwrap. The full desktop version can be a little more complicated to set up, but FLmsg and AndFLmsg are capable of talking to each other.
Sending text
The first thing AndFlmsg shows you is a simple screen that looks like a chat interface. A mostly empty screen with a text field at the bottom where you type the message to be sent. For quick, informal messages that need to be sent from one person to another, this is perfectly acceptable.
However, AndFlmsg also supports forms. These are pre-formatted XML files, often made for particular organizational purposes. The most common form is the ICS-213 “General Message” form. (It is also possible to create custom forms, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
It takes about 3 minutes to send the text of John Brown’s last speech using a mode called MT63-2000L. With the BPSK31 mode, it takes almost 11 minutes to send the same text. AndFlmsg supports dozens of different modes that have varying levels of robustness, and transmit at various speeds. You’ll want to research the different modes and decide which is most appropriate for your group in any given situation. Take into consideration the length of the messages you’re likely to be sending back and forth, how long you can sit in one place waiting for a message to be transmitted, as well as both audible and RF interference in your local environment that you’ll have to deal with.
Sending images
To send and image in AndFlmsg, go to the Compose View and scroll down to select the “picture.html” form. Fill out the form, and attach your picture. Tap “save to outbox” and it will take you to the Outbox view. Select your message, and then tap “TX OVER RADIO”. The encoded message will begin to transmit.
When sending images which contain text using AndFlmsg, we have observed that rotating the image 90° so that the text is vertical makes the decoded transmission 100% more legible. However, sending images with text should probably not be your primary purpose for using this system. It could be useful to send images of injuries, an area affected by flood or fire, the face of a missing person, maps, or aerial photographs for instance – in other words, things which can only be effectively expressed through images. It took more than 3 minutes to send the black and white images above.
Sending text is bound to be faster, more efficient, and less prone to error than sending images, at least in most cases we can think of.
Edit: another application has become available, quite similar in concept and usage to AndFlmsg, called Rattlegram (on Google Play Store or wherever you get your APKs). It uses a method called Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which makes it quite fast. However, as far as we can tell, it is only possible to send text (and emojis!) not forms, images, or files.
