I just wanted to make a little thing about a discovery that I made, I know I talked the other day about newer import radios being restricted from broadcasting or receiving on particular restricted frequencies as a condition of the importation laws passed by the FCC, my theory was that this was done the firmware settings to avoid the cost of implementing a manufacturing change in the motherboard. I found a program that is able to modify boot sequence code in the radios and change this restriction, allowing one to broadcast and receive on essentially any frequency within reason

So it is no longer a concern about acquiring new radios that have been manufactured after the FCC ruling, because it only takes about 15 minutes to change boot up instructions in the firmware

@all simple FYI

Noted, nice work Mike

Phenomenal work, thank you for everything you do bro👍

I am now currently experimenting with dtcss and ctcss to make sure that I understand the implementation correctly, as far as I'm aware the setup we are going to have is, as described with three radios:

A can talk, B and C can hear
B can talk, A and C can hear
C can talk, A&B cannot hear

It's a little nerdy, but I'm excited about it, I've brought up in the past that an operational security data point is people being able to visually see or take a high resolution picture of the radio and see the frequencies that we're talking on and be able to use that information with a countermeasure

So using a little bit of firmware scripting, I figured out how to completely mitigate that issue in a really cool way

Hopefully the video works correctly

That sounds like a fun and quirky way to save us some tape

Nice job

@Vincent TX does the video I posted work for you?

Yeah looks great

Setup looks really good unless I'm missing who needs to talk to who. C could potentially be the drivers

@Adam NC A&B is all of us, C is the rest of the world.... Just because of the nature of all radio, any person with a radio will be able to listen to us, but the point of ctcss is that there is an encoded word bit that is transmitted before and after every transmission on our radios that have been specifically configured to broadcast and listen for that coded word, and they will only listen to transmissions that contain that coded word... So even though everybody else will be able to hear us, we won't have the issue that we had in Philadelphia where we had bad actors who figured out what frequency we were communicating on and were "stepping on us"

I think we had somebody broadcasting rap music or something? And it made our communication useless

I can explain all of this much more eloquently in person

Friday will be very fum

Heyo ham radio

i brought 4 radios and i have 4 radios

of differing natures

@ND - Samuel VA they are all the same, i came with 5 and left with 2... I'll lose not a minute of sleep

Are you implying that DHS or Antifa should have the ability to override our DTCSS? How would that work technically speaking.

Was it a blue top tuberware?

@Vincent TX it's actually pretty easy, there are only 142 (i think?) Possible combinations due to limitations in binary without having repeating numbers, with positive and negative polarity that gives you about 300 possible combinations, for less than $150 on Amazon you can buy a radio decoder that just rotates through all possible dtcs codes very rapidly until it hits a transmission using the same one

If you're asking how they can brute Force our radio comms, if you just blast a warble tone at as many watts as you can, it dramatically reduces the ability of our handheld units to pick up that dtcs code at the beginning of a transmission and discern it from all of the background noise on that same frequency

@Vincent TX it's pretty well documented that DHS has done so during BLM and antifa movements, like that occupied zone they had in Portland

Interesting.

Do you think it was just a time thing? Like they didn't have enough time to figure it out. The guy who knew how to do that just was on lunch?

@Vincent TX it would be nothing but conjecture since we only have this singular data point, I know in Portland we got stepped on very heavily and it shut us down entirely, granted we had a couple of additional measures to prevent that this time, and it's going to be interesting seeing in the future how effective it's going to be the second, third or fourth time around

You mean Philly

Yes, sorry

Ok, with you there.

If there is any way to improve beyond this let's discuss that. But this is excellent work, we owe a lot of the smoothness to you.

I mean, believe me that our opposition is having these exact same conversations within their own circles, and it's no secret what hardware we are using

Moving forward, besides rotating frequencies and DTCS codes at random per event, I would feel comfortable saying that we do it again the same way until we run into our next obstacle that needs to be addressed

We were rotating?

Because the problem is that it starts getting exceptionally cost prohibitive to have even more secure communication then we already have

@Vincent TX I mean that whenever a frequency and dtcs code is used at an event, we retire it and never use it again

Roger

I thought it was dynamic.

We can start getting into Tx/ Rx offsets, but I would rather have some tricks up my sleeve saved for when we need it

I guess, in summary, the success of our communication Network at this event was "surprising and noteworthy" from my perspective

How cheap could we get these radios if we did a larger order, perhaps?

I believe the radios are no longer commercially available, but @Adam NC and @Mike ID could probably speak better to this

@ND - Samuel VA I either posted in this chat or the event planning chat, but using the software that I was using to program the radios, you can overwrite the restrictions on newer, post ban radios, so it isn't a concern to buy more of them anymore

@Thomas depending on configuration like battery and antenna, they run anywhere from 30 to $45 per unit

I'll poke around on eBay or Craigslist to see if I can find something maybe