REGION – For those interested in learning a new skill and an opportunity to increase your personal communications capability, alternative communication technique (ACT) offers something for an emergency that could save your life, but also something that is fun to use and can be a low-cost home intercom system as a bonus.
We are all familiar with the words “walkie talkie.” You can buy these radios at your local Walmart, Best Buy, Staples, Harbor Freight, Amazon, and many more places. They typically range in price from $15 to several hundreds of dollars. ACT uses units that range in price from $15-$30. Today’s walkies are unbelievably powerful, and have advanced much like cell phones have over the past decade.
To mention a few of the capabilities, they typically can monitor more than one radio frequency at a time. Many can be used as scanners to local fire and police departments. Many have the standard FM-radio-band-receiving capability, while some actually have the capability of listening to shortwave radio, including the CB band. They typically can do two-way communication in three specific radio bands, with a range of several miles unit-to-unit or to a group of units. A license is not needed to use them, but they also can be registered with the FCC without requiring any type of test, to be used with extended capabilities that can reach 20 or 30 air miles through the use of repeaters.
There is another use for these devices, and that is as amateur radio handheld ham units. Now this is an area of usage that some will inevitably want to explore, because then the capabilities of these radios can be expanded tenfold compared to what already has been mentioned. The goal of this article is to promote an alternative communication technique regardless of if there is or is not an interest in ever becoming an amateur radio operator. However, it is the amateur radio hobby that has promoted these walkie talkies to become as powerful as they are today, and still be available for the average citizen to use. If you can operate a cell phone, you can learn to operate one of these walkie talkies.
The most important path to explore is to establish a local community network that allows for local communication between neighbors and neighborhoods, should cell phones and the internet go down. Examples where portable radio communications would be helpful are the extended power outages, disabling road closures from flooding, lengthy internet failures, and the recent AT&T phone service failure which have happened here in Vermont within the past year. If an infrastructure failure even a fraction as severe as what recently happen with the Baltimore bridge collapse happened in Vermont, the ability to communicate and know what is going on would be of paramount importance.
A Vermont group within the Health Freedom Network are offering to help coordinate and set up these local communication neighborhood networks. There will be no charge for this service. The goal is to help communities with an alternative communication technique, and an opportunity to get to know your neighbors and much more. Contact Steve via email at N1QDT@aurorasky.net or visit the www.aurorasky.net/radios website for more information.