I'm really not worried about it, I feel like we'll have what we have and we'll figure out the game plan come that weekend, we have a lot of our bases covered.... and moving forward it's mostly just operational things and gaining a little bit more knowledge to do it better next time

Yeah, so I should be in the area for work and I pretty consistently have build p.f. food supplies as necessary for customer interactions, without spending too long trying to explain it it's really easy for me to get a couple $100 in groceries and write it off as a business expense

Yes, as it currently stands I expect myself to be there the Friday before hand it as I'm needed in Norfolk for work reasons, by pure coincidence 😉

Just a quick status update for the people in this chat in case it becomes an issue, I will be doing some work out on Lake Michigan for the next few days and we'll have very limited access to my phone (with signal), I am expected to be back in port on the 18th

So from November 26th to December s I will be on the East Coast, but up towards the New Jersey, I'll use that to collect supplies and things over the course of the week, and then drive down to Norfolk on the 3rd and be there for that weekend

@ND - Samuel VA sorry about the time zone, I just woke up!

Currently I'm going to be in New Jersey from November 26th until December 2nd, I'm going to use that week to purchase all of the foodstuffs mentioned above, and then drive to my next job site in Virginia on December 3rd, where I'll have a hotel in Norfolk (I'll be working in Norfolk till Christmas)

In the event that my ability to arrive in the area of the event on the day that it's needed, worst case scenario I can send you enough money to pay for anything we might need, but currently that is my plan. Let me know if there's any concerns there.

As far as my c- math skills go, I see maybe $100 in material for breakfast, a hundred dollars for dinner and 50$ in ancillary, with probably another 150 in portable cooktops and Potts, which I fully intend on leaving behind for anybody who wants one.

So all in all not a very significant undergoing to get everything over the span of the week leading up to the event

@ND - Samuel VA I can't guarantee what rental car I'll be able to get, but it's going to be some kind of pickup truck or SUV, it pretty much always is

As my current itinerary stands, it puts me on the Eastern seaboard the day after Thanksgiving and Norfolk the afternoon of the second, or morning of the Third

Believe you me, I am not particularly happy about my schedule changes, but it ended up working out favorably that I coincidentally have to be in Norfolk on December 4th, as opposed to back in August like I was originally supposed to

And even if my schedule does get wishy-washy, I have those days off already, worst case I just have to buy my own plane ticket, oh well

Yes

@ND - Samuel VA I don't actually know where the event city is yet, I don't know if I'm considered "need to know", I'm okay either way

@Thomas I'll be landing in New Jersey tomorrow, and then I'll be gathering the supplies throughout the next week, and then showing up with everything that I've gotten on Friday night/ early Saturday

More then likely, yes, the drive isn't too far/ long

Medium/ large @Mason TX

Oops @Vincent TX

Mighty white of you @Vincent TX, hopefully I'll get my bags today

@Thomas should I also be concerned about getting a couple good cases of water?

@Thomas question, are we going to have persons to stay behind and watch equipment and everything at camp during the event?

Or is that a @NS - Grant MD question?

Just trying to commit the itinerary to memory, a concert that i have is the expediency of being able to get hot food in people's hands from the moment that everyone gets back to camp

With the cold, cook time will be longer + setup + getting people organized and everything

I believe people are going to be hungry as hell Coming down off the adrenaline high from the event, and i want people to get fed as fast as possible, ideally ready to start serving pretty immediately on return

Is there any easy way i could be at the campsite 45 minutes before the main group as to be able to begin getting food ready? At least to begin getting water boiling

Just a concern i have, wanted to hear your input

Okay, understood

👍🏻 appreciate the insight

I could argue the bit of a truck is probably the perfect height

I'm going to be there sometime Friday afternoon, I think we'll have that night and the next morning to play with radios

I think they just want everybody there by zero dark Friday night

Do you have a charger? Or several?

Yeah... All of my personal radios run off the AA battery packs, but I have like four regular ones that need to go back to network one I think

Just the normal charger, my radios aren't going to leave my person

A snack breakfast saturday, I've been getting nature Valley bars, pop-tarts, peanut butter crackers ECT... Probably on Friday I'm going to get a bunch of apples and bananas too

Maybe tomorrow or Tuesday I'm going to start with the pasta and accoutrement, but meatballs I'm not going to buy till Friday because cold

Yeah, ill walk you through chirp and software settings and stuff onsite

Just an FYI to have it on the radar, I will not be able to stay super long Saturday night because I have a 4 and 1/2 hour drive back to Newark airport for a very early flight

@Thomas midnightish?

@ND - Samuel VA i have to fly home for a few days to take care of some family stuff

@Thomas I'm going to try to get to the campsite as early on Fridays I can, early afternoon at least. That way I can take inventory of what all we have in case I got to run down to Walmart or something to get whatever we don't have

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

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

@Thomas Friday?

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

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

@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

Heyo ham radio

@Thomas do we have established dinner plans for Friday night?

Also will I be allowed to go directly to the campsite since I'm more than likely going to be unloading a bunch of kit and running back into town to get more supplies?

I don't want to go outside procedure if that's not the case

@NS - Grant MD quick Q for you ^

@ND - Samuel VA I'm going to try to be there around.... 5? Maybe.

It wouldn't be that big of a deal to run into town and whip something together for however many people we have

@ND - Samuel VA 10-4

@NS - Grant MD i will be sure to do so, what address should i meet you at?

@Thomas fully appreciate the discretion, ill be unloading my car (im solo) and heading back into town for more supplies pretty much right away

I have all the foodstuffs

Thank you @NS - Grant MD

I'm about 6 hours out, that puts me there at about 5:30 or so

I was instructed to ask you the specific address of where I should be bringing all of the equipment I have

@ND - Samuel VA that link isn't working for me

Good copy, once I know the way, will I be able to just run straight back since the first thing I'm going to be doing is unloading equipment running into town to buy more

I'm looking at 5:00, maybe towards 5:30

I'll head to the checkpoint and talk with Bill MA, I know I'm on the list for people that are supposed to keep their phones because I have a burner

That would be just a treat and a joy if you brought it along

If it's under $100, pick up two and I'll reimburse you

If it's under $50, pick up three and I'll reimburse you, unless they don't have that many of course

@ND - Samuel VA it'll be just a peach either way, we'll make do

@ND - Samuel VA I agree with this, there should not be the expectation of food at the campsite Friday night, but I will pick up simple snacks for the walking wounded and weak and weary

Are you at the checkpoint for the next hour?

Ill be at the checkpoint in 20 minutes (17:20) in a white Jeep compass w/ NJ plates

Thank you everybody for the last 48 hours, I think all things considered we did a phenomenal job and I'm immensely proud of how professional and motivated everybody I saw was, you people are all heroes to me and I am immensely proud to call you my brothers

Holy s*** I'm so sorry I missed this

@Thomas inside of the trailer is 440 servings of pasta and meat sauce, that stuff has an expiration date that I am pretty sure is pretty far out in the future, whoever feels motivated to take home 43 lb of pasta and accoutrement more than welcome to it

I ended up shuttling a bunch of the Missouri guys back to camp and taking the last of our guys from The exchange, the Washington boys, and I'm about halfway to Newark airport where we're all flying out of

Is RC working again?

Got home 15 minutes ago, i am extremely sick, i spent 1/2 my flights and the time in-between hugging toilets... Had to be wheelchaired put of the airport in Idaho because i would black out when i stood up

I don't know, Fredrick OR and i spent the most time together, i need to contact him

Its like food poisoning but the worst i have ever had.

Frederick Oregon and myself both stopped at this Chinese restaurant across the street while waiting for the Uber to pick us up from the AutoZone where we had to leave the second box truck, but because we ran out of time I was only able to eat maybe two or three bites of it, Frederick ate most of his serving

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

Hey, I got salmonella poisoning from that Chinese place

Nearly put me in the hospital

You okay?

@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

@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

Yes, sorry

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

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

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

@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

Thank you @Billy Merse TX