Most hobby-grade software defined radio setups don’t transmit. Of the few that do, most of them put out anemic levels around one milliwatt or so. If you want to do something outside of the lab, you’ll need an amplifier and that’s what [Tech Minds] shows how to do in a recent video. (Embedded below.)
The video covers LimeSDR, HackRF, and the Pluto SDR, although the amplifiers should work with any transmitter. The SPF5189Z module is quite cheap and covers 50 MHz to 4 GHz, amplifying everything you throw at it. The downside is that it will amplify everything you throw at it, even parts of the signal you don’t want, such as spurs and harmonics.
There are other modules, depending on your needs. The CN0417 covers a very narrow range from 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz. (If you can call 100 MHz bandwidth “narrow”.) The RF2126 will cover from 400 Mhz to 2.7 GHz.
None of these are powerhouses. The maximum 20 dB gain will only give you a watt or so out with the minimal drive from most SDR transmitters. But for very many applications, that’s plenty, especially with some filtering.
Unfortunately the gain isn’t stable, and we wonder about the linearity which would affect some modulation modes. There are datasheets for these devices around, such as this one for the SPF5189Z.
If you are really into SDR, the SDR Academy went virtual this year. You might also enjoy this book.
As popular as the venerable Yaesu FT-817 transceiver might be with amateur radio operators, it’s not without its flaws, particularly in the user interface department. [Andy (G7UHN)] is painfully familiar with these flaws, so he designed this auxiliary display and control panel for the FT-817 to make operating it a little easier.
There are a ton of ways to enjoy ham radio, but one of the more popular ways is to bust out of the shack and operate in the great outdoors. From the seashore to mountain peaks, hams love giving their rigs some fresh air and sunshine. The battery-powered, multimode, all-band FT-817 is great for these jaunts, but to fit as much radio into a small package as they did, Yaesu engineers had to compromise on the controls. Rather than bristling with buttons, many of the most-used features of the radio are buried within menus that require multiple clicks and twists to access.
[Andy]’s solution is a PCB bearing an Arduino Nano, an LCD screen, and a whole bunch of actual buttons. The board sits on top of the case and talks to the radio over a 8-pin mini-DIN cable using both documented and undocumented CAT, or Computer Aided Transceiver commands. The LCD displays the current status of various features and the buttons provide easy access to changing them, essentially by sending keystrokes to the radio.
Hats off to [Andy] for tackling this project. The only other FT-817 hack we’ve seen before was useful but far simpler, and didn’t require KiCad, which [Andy] had to teach himself for this one.
Everyone reading this right now knows how it feels to get hoodwinked. Ripped off. Tricked. Scammed. Straight-up lied to. There is one category of people that you will always have to deal with, and those people are liars. It doesn’t matter where you live or what you do liars will always be there to complicate matters.
The impact that liars have on your life and the consequences of their lives may vary from Annoying inconveniences to treasonous betrayals that can threaten your life. A person may lie simply to make things more convenient for themselves, to save their own skin to take something from you through guile.
To make things even worse some people just seem to have a talent for lying, either through a long practice, necessity or just a sort of perverted gift. What can any of us do to confound these people and their lies?
You might not be able to cleanse their corrupted morality, or convince them to give up their lying ways but there are things you can do, proactively, to help yourself stay safe from their deception by spotting their lies and learning how to do so quickly as sort of a human lie detector. In this article we will teach you how.
Why Do Liars Lie in the First Place?
It is a wonder why people lie. Or rather it is a wonder why some people choose to lie in certain circumstances. I have no doubt that we have all encountered people who, against all rationale and common sense, choose to lie against their own self-interest.
Why would anyone do that?! Maybe it is a nervous response. Maybe they can’t help themselves, or they are some kind of compulsive liar. Maybe they feel like there is some potential outcome that they can only protect themselves from if they lie in the here and now.
One thing we do know for sure though is that people will often lie deliberately, willfully, skillfully in order to get a positive outcome. This is done by fundamentally skewing the perception or the accepted information of the person that is listening to the lie.
What can they achieve by doing this? It could be to elicit a certain response, perhaps one of pity or sympathy in order to steal something from you without conflict; if you give something to someone under their false pretenses that is patently fraudulent on their part.
Perhaps someone is lying in order to spread disinformation, to increase the noise-to-signal ratio in order to cover their tracks if they have been up to no good or did something that they know they shouldn’t have been doing.
By admitting no wrongdoing if accused, changing pertinent facts and making counter-accusations a liar can slow down or even halt the investigative or decision-making process of other people involved in an incident. Even if their lies are fairly shoddy, it can take time to unravel them.
Worst of all a liar can tell you a blatant falsehood in order to get you to drop your guard, increasing your vulnerability, or they can stretch out this false sense of security over a longer period of time in order to lure you into a trap.
The classic “broken bird” ambush begins with a person who is seemingly in trouble or in dire straits preying upon the morality of a Good Samaritan.
You have probably heard the phrase “get off the X” in reference to avoiding ambushes. In such a scenario our liar is the equivalent of the crying puppy sitting right on the X, waiting for some tender-hearted person to come and rescue it.
On a more relatable note, some people might lie in order to protect their hand as it were. They essentially want to keep their business their own business and no one else’s.
They don’t want people knowing what they have, what they are doing, where they live or where they are going since they do not trust the person they are talking to.
This reasoning is valid, especially in the middle of an emergency situation. I would wager that a fair portion of you plan to do the same thing if you are ever in their shoes.
But, ultimately, no matter why someone is lying, and no matter what their ultimate motivations are you can make decisions that result in negative outcomes for you if you get taken in by their lies.
The good news is that detecting lies, or at least the probability that someone is lying, is entirely possible, and the skills for doing so are learnable no matter who you are.
Talent helps, but experience and training is more important. I suggest you start working on it if you want to steer clear of the deceivers that are out here.
But There Are No Guarantees
Before you run off with visions of turning yourself into a human lie detector machine dancing in your head, you need to get straight on one immutable truth: Unless you have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, there is no way to be truly certain if someone is lying, or not just by talking to them and employing observational skills that we are going to go over in this article.
Why is this so? There are several factors. Some people are simply so good, so skilled, so damn slick at lying that they can utterly fool experienced interrogators, interviewers and lie detector machines across several sessions of questioning.
Whether they are natural born-shysters or confidence men made from years of long practice and experience makes no difference; if the best in the world cannot hope to catch these people in a lie in casual conversation chances are you don’t either.
This works in the other direction also. Some people could be telling the truth, and are simply so awkward, so nervous and socially rudderless that 100% factual statements can appear shady as all hell tumbling out of their lips.
People who are stressed out, anxious or fearful for some other reason can produce false positives that you might pick up on as indicators of deception.
I’m not saying that it is a crapshoot, and you should not refine these skills. You absolutely should; just keep in mind that detecting deception is part art and part science and there is plenty of room for ambiguity.
In most circumstances you will only be able to use these skills to tilt your confidence that someone is telling the truth or lying one way or the other so that you can make intelligent decisions even if they are not fully informed ones.
The Ultimate Guide to Spotting Liars
You will need a multi-pronged approach if you want to reliably catch liars in the act. First, you’ll need to know what to look for. As it turns out liars exhibit a fairly reliable set of traits that are easy to spot once you know what you are looking at.
Next you’ll need a bit of a primer on human psychology, the way people act, and the things they will do when they are lying versus when they are not lying. This is where the art of human lie detecting comes in.
Lastly, you’ll need to know how to conduct yourself and direct the conversation in order to calibrate someone so you’ll know when they are actively employing deception versus just nervous or uncomfortable.
This might all sound pretty eccentric but I assure you you can learn this just like any other skill in your repertoire. That’s enough preface, let’s get after it!
Liar’s Tells: Indicators of Deception
Every liar but the most accomplished, coldest con man will exhibit tells of one kind or another when they are employing deception. These are physical movements or reactions that typically result when someone feels stressed.
If someone feels stressed in the course of casual conversation, they might be feeling that way because they know they are lying. The psychological details of why this occurs are quite complicated, but all you need to know is that they are true and generally reliable.
The list below contains the vast majority of the common tells that will indicate when someone is feeling stressed. Don’t misunderstand and think that everyone will exhibit all of these behaviors; they might, but they are more likely to exhibit their own unique set of behaviors taken from the list below.
Your job in the course of conversation is to be on the lookout for which ones appear during relevant questioning because they may indicate that the person is lying. Generally speaking, the more indicators that appear, the higher the likelihood that someone is lying or the more stressed out they feel.
Some are obvious, some are subtle, but you can learn to detect all of them once you can reliably recognize them. Full list and details below.
Stiff Posture or Standing Stock Still
Very few people ever have a reason to stand completely still, and even fewer stand completely still as a matter of course as part of their normal body posture. We are constantly moving and gesturing as part of our normal communication with other people, even when we are not consciously aware of it.
When people freeze in place it indicates fear likely as a subliminal response to a fear of discovery, as a prey animal would when they know that a predator is near.
Should notice the person you are talking to is standing as still as a statue and trying not to move, you might be on to something and they might be lying.
Altered Breathing Tempo
Every person has their own breathing tempo that is dependent on several intrinsic factors, like how fit they are, how fast they talk, personal comfort and others.
Generally, unless someone has a cause to alter their breathing tempo, like say, for instance, intense exercise or something of that nature, this tempo does not change. Any noticeable change in the course of conversation should be noted, and may well be a stress indicator.
The person you are talking to may speed up their rate of respiration- hyperventilation- or they may slow down their respiration to the point of holding their breath before taking in a big gulp of air. Speeding up or slowing down likely indicates stress, and stress could indicate deception.
Sweating
When people get nervous, they perspire. Some people perspire so heavily when upset it is almost comedic and it is hard not to feel sorry for them.
If the person you are talking to does not have cover for starting to sweat (exertion, high ambient temperature, fever, etc.) it is a tell if they start to do so, assuming they are in a comfortable position and calm.
This can be easy to spot if someone is otherwise cool and dry, as all people who start to sweat will take on a nice sheen in no time when stressed.
Verbal Quirks
People who are in the process of lying are famous for screwing up the way they talk. Stuttering, repeating themselves and other verbal mishaps will be common, especially among those who are nervous or inexperienced liars.
Additionally, someone might hang on a particular word, seemingly developing a stutter out of thin air. Ultimately, you might notice the same word popping up entirely too often throughout your conversation.
A crack or hitch in the voice is not out of the question either, since nervousness and stress will often lead to dry mouth which can cause someone’s voice to crack audibly. Any of the above, singly or in multiples, might indicate that the person you are talking to is lying.
Covers Their Mouth
A fairly well-known and obvious symptom of deception in progress. People that are lying often subconsciously want to physically cover or interfere with their mouth in order to physically block the words that are coming out.
I suppose the idea is if they can contain those words or cover their mouth, then they will hide the lie. Someone who pokes, prods or otherwise plays with their lips or the corners of their mouth using either hand also fall into this category.
Covers Throat/Neck
This tell is similar to covering the mouth, above. This is a subconscious reaction to the feeling of being trapped or in danger. Many people respond by fidgeting with vulnerable areas on the body, the neck being foremost among them.
This particular tell is especially common among women, and they will often exhibit it by dipping their chin or cupping a hand around their chin to shield the throat.
Suspiciously Informative
This tell can be subtle and hard to detect compared to some of the others, especially when folks that are just highly talkative or plain, old motor mounts are involved in the conversation.
But, if you should notice that the person you are talking to seems to be way, way too forthcoming with information about the subject at hand, including all of the surrounding details, the setting and the prologue of the events in question you should be suspicious.
Liars tend to shellac what they are telling you with copious amounts of details and the lengthy, hyper specific answers in an effort to seem helpful. What they are really doing is tipping their hand.
Ducking the Question
This is a pretty obvious one. Anybody who is making graceful or not-so-graceful attempts to avoid a topic of conversation or outright duck a question you were asking them is presenting a significant indicator that they are probably lying, or want to avoid being put in position that will force them to lie to save their own skin.
This is even more conspicuous if it occurs a second or third time when you try to bring the conversation back around to the topic that sent them “fleeing” in the first place. You are also much less likely to encounter this tell if you are dealing with someone who is a proficient liar.
Turning the Tables
If someone has the incentive to lie and feels like they have been painted into a corner in the course of the conversation or they’re just of a more aggressive personality type you can expect them to make counter accusations or otherwise go on the “offense” in the conversation.
This is a form of projection in some instances, when someone accuses you, or someone else, of doing what they did or engineering the situation to frame them, set them up for a fall or some other similar bad outcome.
They may accuse you or someone else of being directly responsible for whatever the topic at hand is if it was something negative, even if it is patently false, in order to buy time for them to slip out of the trap.
Repetition
Significant repetition in a conversation is usually a red flag. The reason why is that the brain is consciously or subconsciously fixed on some word or object, and this can manifest as a Freudian slip (revealing the thing they are telling themselves not to reveal) or as a simple delaying tactic to buy time for them to think of a solution or a way out of the position.
Be especially alert for anyone who is repeating the question you asked them back to you, especially more than once. That disproportionately seems to indicate deception in progress.
Cannot Recall Specifics/Details
This is a generally reliable indicator of deception but it is a highly nuanced one: lots of people have trouble with recall when they are nervous or stressed out, or when being asked to recall details about an event that was traumatizing, scary or long ago.
Nonetheless, you cannot rule it out as a potential indicator of a liar. When someone needs to buy time to think, this is commonly deployed to pay for that time.
The more likely it is that a person- a reasonable, functional person with all their faculties- should have no difficulty at all recalling the details of the circumstances or the event that you’re asking them, the more likely it is that this is a ploy in the service of a lie.
Staring/Locked Gaze
The classic calling card of a serious con man or a born liar. Most people blink pretty much all the time, and people who are upset, nervous or otherwise stressed will typically blink rapidly.
If you should notice this tell exhibited by anyone you need to be on your toes, as this is also particularly common among sociopaths and other unhinged people. It is easy to spot once you know what to look for: A lack of blinking, a seemingly fixed gaze that never breaks from your own and a certain coldness to the eyes.
Unless you can be sure that someone has a neurological issue that causes their eyes to dart back and forth anyone who is showing you jerky glances to and fro is almost certainly looking for an exit and that means they are probably lying, or at least very uncomfortable with conversation.
“Big” Arms
“Big arms” is shorthand for large, sweeping movements made with the arms, typically theatrical in nature. Anytime the arms start moving around significantly above the waistline or around shoulder or neck level, you can be fairly confident that someone’s stress level is rising, especially in men.
This is a sort of subliminal rehearsal for a physical fight, whether that is a real perception or vestigial instinct that has been carried on through the generations over many millennia.
Unless someone typically exhibits extremely animated body language as a normal part of their personality, you should definitely start paying attention if you see this crop up.
Bouncy Feet
Anytime you see someone’s feet cutting a jig in place while they are seated or standing you have another clue, but they are getting a little hot under the collar. This is a conscience or unconscious desire to leave or retreat from a situation, and you’ll notice the feet bouncing, tapping or shuffling back and forth.
This frantic, wasted movement is a sort of simulation for locomotion and when you notice this occur you can be confident that someone is anxious and perhaps getting a lie ready.
Vining
Vining is what you see people doing when they are wrapping a leg or both legs around the leg of the chair they are sitting on, or barring a lack of such features on their seat doing the same with one of their legs to the other.
Less commonly seen done with the person’s arms. This is a protective anchoring or shielding response that is easy to spot and part of a “soothing” complex of behaviors that indicate rising stress or discomfort levels.
Blushing
Blushing is a common and almost inescapable indicator that someone is having an emotional response of some type.
They could be excited. They could be embarrassed. Maybe they are blushing because someone paid them a compliment or they are blushing because they are extremely nervous. They could also be blushing because they fear that their lie will be uncovered.
This tell is much easier to notice in people that have light skin colors, but darker skin colors still show detectable blushing.
Special Tells
Many of the tells above will be all you need to make a solid determination on whether someone is lying to you or not if you are confident in your skills.
But you should know there are few more intricate and special tells that seem to only appear as part and parcel of deception in progress.
These are also not 100% foolproof but if you do notice these come up in conversation you should be extra cautious because they are disproportionately likely to indicate that someone is lying to you.
Hard Glance Up and Right/Up and Left
This tell is a sort of quirk of biology. Plainly stated someone who glances up and to the right while thinking of something or recalling a memory is likely thinking of something that actually occurred in the past, meaning something truthful.
But if they do the reverse- glance hard upwards and to the left- this indicates that they are engaging cognitive processes associated with creation, in our case meaning a blatant lie.
Note that these directions are relative to the person you are talking to, so someone glancing upward to their right will be looking to your left and vice versa.
The reason this tell works has something to do with a connection to the logical versus creative hemispheres of the brain, situated on the right and left sides respectively. The science of it is beyond me, but it works.
Attitude Irregularity
This is a tell that can be hard to put your finger on until you have been informed of it and know what to look for, in which case it will stick out like a sore thumb.
Be especially on guard if someone’s attitude does not seem synchronized with what they are saying to you or with the seriousness of the conversation or topic at hand.
If you are dealing with something that is upsetting, traumatizing or emotionally high-impact, but someone seems unnaturally calm and composed this may suggest that they are putting on a mask.
You can also say the same for the reverse: If someone is coming positively unhinged over something that is relatively inconsequential they’re probably agitated over the strain of keeping their deception under wraps.
No matter which end of the spectrum presents itself, there’s a high likelihood that the person is deceiving you.
Nodding and Shaking of the Head
This is one tell you will definitely kick yourself for missing, and is the very picture of obvious once you know the trick. If someone is responding to a question, specifically a yes or no interrogative watch and see if they nod or shake their head.
If they do, pay close attention for whether or not the nod or shake of the head matches the verbal answer of yes or no. If that nod or shake is mismatched you’re very, very likely to be dealing with a liar.
This is another subliminal thing that is very hard to stop unless the person you are talking to is informed about it and even then most accomplished liars will be surprised if you inform them they are indeed doing it. Just make sure you don’t tip your hand and tell him about it, eh?
Detecting Liar’s Tells in Conversation
This is one of the key lessons for detecting liars: None of the above tells will stand on their own as proof that someone is lying. You have to look at them in the context of the conversation, the situation surrounding the conversation, and that person’s baseline emotional responses.
Their baseline emotional response is how someone acts when they are feeling unpressured, unthreatened, and generally comfortable. You need to know what that looks like so that the tells above, when they manifest, start pointing toward a possible lie.
The concept is easy, but actually doing it while conducting a realistic conversation and asking the right questions takes practice, and a significant amount of focus and awareness.
You also have to gauge how that person is reacting to you: someone that has known you for a significant amount of time is likely to be more comfortable right off the bat, or someone you have only just met or known for a short period of time is probably not going to let their guard down and act like their truest self.
And then of course the elephant in the room: you must always keep in mind that the person you are speaking to might be an accomplished and skilled liar.
So how do you establish a baseline and rule out certain tells? This too is comparatively easy; you will simply observe the person you are talking to during your interaction when they’re at their coolest, calmest and most collected all the while observing for any of the tells above.
The tells that you do notice are likely just physical tics that do not necessarily indicate deception or stress. That is now the person’s baseline, and you can rule out those particular tells as indicators.
Now, as you bring the conversation around to the topic where you suspect they might lie, be on the lookout for new indicators that you have not seen before. Those are their stress indicators, and those are the ones that likely indicate they are lying.
Calm Them Before You Question Them
Before you get any ideas of going in at a liar like some raging inquisitor you need to pump your brakes. Your objective should be to determine whether or not they are lying and then you act accordingly.
Save the fire and brimstone stuff for your favorite crime drama. What did I just get done telling you about establishing a baseline in the conversation?
If the person is not calm and relatively comfortable you will never see what that baseline looks like and so all the readings you are getting off of them will be scrambled. Think of it as getting a bunch of false positives on a seismograph reading when a herd of bison are running around it.
The correct response is instead to take the long way around to the big-ticket questions you need to ask in order to tell if someone is lying to you or not. Help calm the person down.
Be polite, be kind and of good cheer or at least good manners. They need to trust you at least nominally before they will really settle down. You should be able to see this occur as the conversation goes on.
Try to make them comfortable, and you’ll be able to tell one that is happening when someone relaxes, visibly, at least a little bit, and their body language shows they are being more open and less closed off.
Once you notice this has occurred, it is time to take a quick inventory of what tells they still exhibit even while they are calm so you can rule them out and off the list as possible indicators of a lie.
Now that you know what their baseline is it’s time to gently move in on the line of questioning that might get them upset, and that you suspect they are lying about.
Broach the Subject Gently
Never, ever try to catch someone with a gotcha question if you really want to know whether or not they are lying. It is much easier to catch someone who is lying when they are comfortable and unafraid of being caught.
The nastiest trap is the one that people never know is around, and that they walk in of their own free will.
You will accomplish this by gently steering the conversation in the direction that you need to go. Approach topics that are related to the questions that you really need to ask, or at least proximal to them so you can segue to them naturally in the course of conversation.
This is the part of the interview where you must redouble your focus: Pay close, close attention to any changes in the other person’s attitude, demeanor or bearing. These will be the first clues that you are closing in on a potential lie.
If you should notice someone growing uncomfortable with the topic you have brought up as you close in on your real line of inquiry, it is time to turn left or right in the conversation, and keep going the long way around.
Doing this will afford you the time to start really determining what makes the other person anxious, and if you know that you can start to build up a pretty good idea of what they might lie about. Assuming you have the time, don’t rush this part.
Ask the Big Questions
Once you think you have enough information about the person to determine their baseline, and to understand generally what topics and details make them uncomfortable it is time to go straight in with the big questions.
This is not the time to change your demeanor or your attitude at all! You still want to be that person that made the other person comfortable in the first place.
Pulling a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde act where Mr. Hyde pops out all of a sudden will stress out anybody, naturally. Nonetheless, it is not time to shy away from the questions you do need to ask.
At this point you should ask the person direct questions that have clear, concise answers, and then pay attention, the fullest attention, to what they are saying and every single reaction they make.
No matter what they say and how they act keep the conversation on track. Don’t get derailed unless they are getting so bent out of shape they are making a scene that you would rather avoid or you think they are potentially moving toward violence, which is a clue enough if you ask me.
No matter what answers they give, you don’t have to confront them with confirmation or suspicion that they might be lying. Keep that information under your hat, and do with it what you will.
It is here that I must remind you to never, ever forget that your chances are pretty good at some point you will deal with an expert liar. These guys and gals can fool the best interrogators around so you and I really don’t stand much of a chance.
You can only do what you can do, and never forget to trust your gut. Your gut is a finely-honed survival apparatus, an early warning system composed of instinct, primordial senses and good old-fashioned intuition that will rarely lead you astray.
If your brain is telling you everything is in the clear but your gut is telling you something stinks, go with your gut!
Asking the Big Questions Correctly
In short, even though you were asking questions that are likely to provoke a response from someone you should not ask them in any kind of fashion except friendly and calm as you hopefully have been in the entire conversation prior to this point.
It is entirely possible, if you have conducted yourself and the conversation correctly, that the person might not even realize they are in any danger of revealing their true feelings about the topic.
If you notice that a specific question or line of questioning is unsettling them too badly, you can remix it a little bit and ask it in a different way.
Also know that questions about hard specifics, things like dates, locations, who they were with or who they interacted with are very likely to get an emotional response out of someone if they are concealing something.
Something about those pertinent details of physical interactions seem to do better than amorphous queries about what they saw, heard or thought.
Anytime you’re going to hit someone with a question about their physical presence, the presence of someone else or their interaction with someone else that is the point where you must be completely focused on perceiving any of their reactions great or small.
Be especially alert for any combination of tells that we went over above. The more uncomfortable and the more stressed out that someone is how about a question the more likely it is that they will exhibit multiple tells at the same time or in quick succession. This is doubly true if the question you are asking them is not emotionally loaded or unsettling.
If you are short on time and cannot implement all the tips and techniques we have gone over so far, make it a point to ask the questions you need to ask and then looks for as many tells as you can spot.
The more you see, or the more egregious they are, the more likely it is that someone is telling a whopper. We rarely have all the info we need to make a truly informed decision and sometimes we don’t even have the time we need to make a decent one. You might have to make do with a greatly compressed line of inquiry sometimes.
Conclusion
You will probably never become Robocop or the Terminator when it comes to detecting the lies that humans sometimes tell, but developing the seemingly magical ability to catch people in their lies is not the stuff of science fiction or a wizard’s parlor trick.
It is equal parts intuition, practice and experience, but with the right training and the right skills you might be shocked at just how accurate your discernment can become.
Liars and the lies they tell can waylay good people at any point in their life on virtually any interaction and so mastering skills that will let you see through the deception of others is invaluable and one that any prepper should seek to develop.
For many preppers concerned about self-defense, guns take center stage and with good reason. Only firearms can afford a concerned citizen the tremendous combination of standoff capability, lethal power and pinpoint accuracy, and can deliver all the above repeatedly with just the click of a trigger.
But there’s another weapon that almost every prepper carries that they probably don’t give too much thought to in regards to a defensive weapon. I’m talking, of course, about knives.
For most, knives are an afterthought in terms of self-defense. a weapon of true desperation, or tertiary weapon at best. Something to be used when all other options have been exhausted. This is a shame because it’s not framing the knife in its proper context.
While a knife will never give you the advantages of a firearm, they have advantages all their own, important ones. but making the most of them requires the right mindset and dedicated training, just like with any other weapon.
This article, will give knives close examination for your consideration as weapons for serious self-defense.
Defense with a Knife: Civilian Concerns
If you’re reading this article, the chances are good you are not a military Special Forces operator, a cold-blooded assassin, or a hardened con serving time for attempted murder in prison.
That’s good, that means you’re in the right place since you won’t be using the majority of the techniques that those folks might. If you are a civilian who carries a knife incidentally or purposefully for self-defense, your priorities are different from those professionals, legitimate or not, above.
If you were attacked with lethal force and must defend yourself in kind, using a knife, your sole consideration is getting out of the fight as quickly as possible with the minimum damage and minimizing further risk to yourself.
It is easy to take that statement in too broad a way, interpreted as you should just run away at the first sign of trouble. That is not what I’m saying.
Of course, you should run away and avoid a fight if you are able to do so safely. That little bit of nuance is key, contextually.
What the Sprint for the Car Coalition often fails to mention, is it the party that breaks and tries to run from a fight in progress is the one that most often suffers the most severe wounds. Inertia is a thing.
The bad guy gets a vote. If you have someone actively attacking you or is ready, right now, to do so then chances are a clean escape will not be possible without first neutralizing the attacker, or at least stunning him to buy yourself a window of opportunity to get away.
It is imperative you understand this: any weapon is a means to an end in a self-defense situation. Correct application of that weapon will earn you a chance to get a better outcome. gun or knife makes no difference, it is using either one, anything, to good effect that matters.
When we start to damage the attacker’s anatomical structures vital for continued life or consciousness, or ones that are necessary for proper control of their limbs, we start to degrade and eventually halt their attack.
You can’t attack someone when you’re unconscious, and you definitely can’t attack someone when your muscles are so cut to ribbons or your organs so pulped that your limbs don’t work.
This is why proper targeting with your knife is so important. We aren’t going to slash and hack at the bad guy all willy-nilly, and hope he goes “this sure sucks”, and just gives up and leaves us alone.
We must begin to take away his ability to continue his assault on us, and we do that by specific targeting of muscle groups and other anatomical structures that allow him to perpetrate his attack, specifically remain mobile and wield his weapon, whatever it is.
Our other consideration is inflicting a wound on him so grievous and so terrifying, and seemingly doing that out of nowhere, that it in essence short circuits his brain. It is not something we can always count on but it is something that happens with regularity.
Every person is hardwired with certain survival instincts, things hard-coded into our nervous system. with proper target selection and a little luck, we can use that against our attacker to buy ourselves a momentary respite and time enough to get away or close the fight.
But to make any of that happen, any of it at all, we have to know what we’re doing. First things first, you have to have a knife and ideally one well suited for self-defense meaning use against a human being.
Second, that knife has to be on your person, readily accessible, able to be drawn in a moment under duress.
Third, you need to know what you’re up against, and lastly how you’ll have to employ your knife in the gravest extreme. We will cover it all in the sections below.
The Effectiveness of Knives
Even in this day and age it is shocking to me how many people think knives are the weaker option compared to guns. We need to put that to bed right now.
Guns are certainly powerful. there’s not a pistol on Earth that won’t kill you deader than a doornail. Rifles and shotguns will blast you right into the afterlife. But make no mistake friends, blades, sharpened steel alone is beyond capable of inflicting nightmarish wounds.
Even small, unintimidating knives inflict carnage on the human body out of all proportion with their size. Consider if you will the common medical scalpel, or lancet. Often no longer than 1/2 inch, or 3/4 of an inch these diminutive blades have edges honed to inconceivable sharpness.
They part skin and muscle tissue like it’s not even there. A box cutter or fanatically sharpened small pocket knife can do much the same.
The common fallacy of “it’s only a knife” infests our culture, especially those weak-kneed types that don’t believe in self-defense. Cops and armed citizens alike shoot dead attackers armed with blades the moment they perceive them, and they do so rightly.
It never fails you’ll see the media and the people in the peanut gallery squawking about how they could have shot him in the leg, or how they should have tried to take him down, or subdue him or some other such nonsense.
I can furnish ample examples of victims, cops and citizens alike, who tried to do exactly that in lieu of shooting when they should have that got carved up like they were hanging in a maddened butcher’s shop.
The point I’m trying to impress on you is this: any knife is extremely powerful. Unlike firearms, a knife can be wielded to deadly effect by an untrained user almost all the time so long as they’re motivated. In the hands of a trained fighter, knives can inflict fatal wounds with shocking speed in close combat.
Straight Silver: Knife Advantages
Knives have advantages all their own compared to guns. All a knife really is a sharpened edge with a handle. It follows that knives, as a rule, can be found anywhere, no matter where you go. It means that knives are viable weapons even when you are denied any sort of weapon.
You can duck into a kitchen, and do a hardware store, into a maintenance room or even an art supply store and produce a knife. Knives are also easily improvised from found materials.
One need look no further than every prison everywhere to find thousands of examples of homemade shanks and shivs. if you have the will and the time, you can always find or produce a knife.
Knives are easy to hide. Born the largest and most ostentatious varieties, the average knife will virtually disappear even under a t-shirt. Combined with some of their other attributes, this makes knives a devastating and deadly surprise attack weapon.
It also means you’ll have an easier time getting knives into places where you, quote “shouldn’t have them,” compared to guns.
While there is no practical firearm that is metal-free in its construction, there are dozens, even hundreds of knife designs that are completely non-metallic, undetectable to magnetic resonance scanners and still frightfully sharp and pointy.
This makes knives a definitive choice for non-permissive environment where you might be searched or forced to go through metal detectors prior to entry.
Knives are very fast to deploy. All things being equal, you can clear garment, acquire a grip on and draw a knife and strike with it significantly faster than you can with a firearm. Part of this has to do with their lighter weight.
Neither partner has to do that a knife is “on” the moment your fingers close around the handle. all those required for it to begin working on the bad guy is applying its edge or point forcefully to their flesh.
Even if it’s a bit sloppy, even if it wasn’t perfect, you’ll be inflicting a serious wound. compare that to a firearm, where botching any part of the draw means no bang or a bang off-target entirely.
One of a knife’s biggest advantages comes when someone has already come to grips with you. In an extreme close quarters encounter, a knife can be drawn in the point or edge only has to be leveraged into contact with someone to start having effect.
Pistols, even revolvers, are easily fouled and induced to malfunction when pressed against the target’s body or when they are able to get their hands on it.
Knives are so excellent in this situation that they’re regularly carried specifically for the task; as a primary weapon retention tool when tied up with an assailant.
Lastly, knives don’t run out of ammo and really don’t malfunction. Barring something catastrophic like the blade snapping off of the handle, or I guess the screws in the handle loosening there’s nothing to go wrong with a blade except its edge dulling.
A tip may break off and an edge may chip, roll or otherwise dull but you’ll still be holding a pointy, sharp piece of metal and that knife can still do work, even if it’s degraded.
Choosing a Knife
There are arguably more types of knives than there are firearms, though the operation of knives on the target is much the same: pierce, cut and sever.
Knife aficionados and fans of knives can write hundreds upon thousands boards arguing the minute differences, quirks, merits and perks of a given type of knife, style of blade, point configuration, steel composition and more.
While the choice of any weapon to be considered for self-defense is a serious one, and is due much contemplation as with most things these fans are putting the wagon ahead of the horse.
What is most important for our purposes is a sharp blade made from strong steel, a full tang (if a fixed blade) or a strong lock (if a folder), a handle that securely locks into the hand and a modest size to allow for easy concealment in multiple positions if required.
But before you even consider any of those minutiae, you’ll need to make the most fundamental selection for you knife: fixed blade or folder?
As with everything, both have pros and cons. Fixed blades are extremely strong and extremely fast into action but have a larger overall size for the same length of blade compared to a folding knife. still, their bombproof, foolproof nature make some ideal choices for general-purpose defensive blades.
Slender fixed-blade knife with a blade measuring around 3 and 1/2 in. Is in many ways an ideal defensive knife, capable of doing most things well.
Fixed blade knives require sheathes for safe and effective carry, akin to a holster for a pistol, and you’ll need to experiment with a combination of sheath and carry position to find one that’s comfortable, easy to conceal and fast to access.
As good as fixed blade knives are, it is folding knives that are the reigning champs of the EDC defensive knife world. This is mostly a default matter since most people, preppers included, carry a common folding pocket knife as part of their usual accoutrement every day.
The preponderance of “tactical” folders has seen the popularity of this type of knife for defense skyrocket, even though they arbitrarily have more disadvantages than advantages for the average person.
Folding knives can pack a longer overall blade into a smaller package since they fold neatly into themselves, but they are inherently weaker and more failure-prone than fixed blades, even with the strongest locking mechanisms.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of a folding knife for defense is that the blade must be deployed and locked into position before you can get metal into meat.
This is a fine motor skill that requires considerable practice to ensure you don’t fumble it and is almost always slower than grabbing the handle of and drawing a fixed blade.
Pulling a folding knife from a pocket where it rides or has been clipped is much fiddlier than drawing a good fixed blade.
Folding knives do have one good trick up their sleeve, though, they can be palmed or “loaded” into the hand in the closed position discreetly, ready to deploy with the slightest movement. This is not entirely possible with a fixed blade knife without hiding the hand holding it in its entirety.
Both types of knives can work very well in a defensive context. It is best to experiment and practice with both before committing so you know where the strengths and limitations of both lie.
It also pays to be comfortable using each; both are extremely numerous out in the world, and you never know when you might have occasion to carry one or the other.
Now, on to other considerations.
What Not to Choose in a Defensive Knife
There are so many variations in knife design, blade- and tip-style that it is easier to tell you what you don’t want in a defensive knife than to list all the permutations of “good” defensive knives.
Below is a list of things to avoid in a self-defense knife.
Straight and slippery handles
Folder or fixed-blade, perhaps the worst mistake you can make when choosing a defensive knife is picking one with a handle that will pop out of your hand when you can least afford that to happen.
Slick rubber, polished wood, and other materials will perform worse than awfully as soon as they get wet with sweat or blood. Bit of a problem for a knife, wouldn’t you say?
Any knife you choose for self-defense should have high-traction, gritty handle scales and/or an ergonomic shape that will lock into your hand when you grip it, mechanically preventing the knife from slipping.
Hooked, extremely serrated or pronged blades
I trust our readership is not comprised of the dread Tactical Timmies and mall ninjas, but just for the sake of completion I must heartily recommend against the choosing of any defensive knife that has multiple blades, aggressive-looking hooks, extensive or full serrations, wide swells near the tip or any other protuberances that are apt to snag and tangle in clothing or actually anchor the knife inside the attacker when you strike.
Leave the Skeletor-looking flea market toys where they belong. You need a knife that will pierce and insert cleanly into the target’s body on a thrust and cut effortlessly with a slash. The faster you clear the target after a cut or stab and can “rechamber” for the next one the better.
Large or Extra Large Knives
Large knives have a definite mystique and a certain attraction to them. A large knife with a long blade is intimidating, giving its wielder a much needed psychological boost and, it is wistfully hoped, scaring off your attacker (“That’s nawt a knoife…”) but the reality is that big blades have more negatives than positives for defense.
A larger, longer knife certainly affords more reach, a longer cutting surface, and deeper penetration, but that all comes with the cost of being heavier, slower to draw and fight with and more fatiguing to swing or thrust with.
Clearing a large knife from its sheath is a laborious process in anything but ideal conditions, and if you are already tangled up with your opponent when the fight starts you might find yourself unable to clear your pocket saber from its sheathe.
Even large folders are not immune to these critiques, as they gobble up plenty of room when folded, and require proportionally more clear space to deploy.
In the case of a bungled opening, considering you now have your clenched digits on the handle of the knife they will be at serious risk of getting guillotined in the ensuing struggle.
You want a modestly sized, light, nimble knife for defense, not a big Rambo knife no matter how cool it is. Save them for camp or hunting trip.
Now that you have the 101 on knife selection, it is on to carrying it properly so you can draw it quickly in self-defense.
Proper Carry of a Defensive Knife
Proper carry of a defensive knife is a fairly simple equation. Folding knives will ride clipped on or inside a pocket, perhaps on a pocket shield device to facilitate a clean draw and good grip, or sometimes clipped behind a waistband on looser fitting garments like shorts.
No matter how and where you place it, you must do so in such a way that your hand grips it with your thumb and/or finger easily, and is able to actuate the deployment mechanism of the blade before immediately shifting to a full, strong “master” grip.
The more fiddling and movement you have to do to reach this desired end state of blade-locked-open-grip-secure, the worse off you’ll be. This is where fixed-blades enjoy enormous advantage over their folding cousins.
Keep in mind that a folding knife clipped to the top of a pocket may or may not be considered concealed depending on your state and local laws so be sure to check into that before committing to carrying one in that way.
Also, in practical matters a “clipped” folder is NOT concealed: anyone who cares to notice that giant black clip will know exactly what it is. That includes the bad guys…
Fixed blade knives are quite a bit easier to carry with a minimum of fuss. Get a good, sturdy secure sheath that will conceal either vertically or horizontally on the belt, either inside- or outside-the-waistband. Done.
For fixed blades or folders, also decide if you want to carry on your strong side or your support side. If all you carry is a knife for self defense, chances are you’ll be best carrying on your strong side so you can access it with your primary hand.
If you also carry a firearm for self-defense, a knife is best in placed, and trained with, on the opposite side of your gun so you can access it with your support hand and literally cut someone off of your gun in a takeaway attempt.
No matter which side you carry your knife on, it only belongs on one facing on your body: in front! As with guns, small of the back carry for knives generally sucks.
Yes, it is very concealable, but you will have a hard time drawing the knife from back there quickly and an even harder time defending it from a takeaway attempt if someone wants to try.
A knife carried right behind the hip (3:30/8:30, respectively for righties and lefties) is acceptable, but you will always want the knife placed somewhere on the frontal arc of your waistline to facilitate a clean, fast draw.
Deploying Your Knife in Self-Defense
You are beholden to all the usual rules, laws and ethics concerning use of force in defense when relying on your knife for protection. You may never employ it to scare, intimidate or win an argument.
Chances are drawing your knife with the blade visible is considered brandishing if done when you or someone else are in a heightened state of agitation, so never do so unless you are facing an imminent, present and plausible lethal threat.
If a threat can be handled by lesser force (pepper spray, fists) you must use the least amount of force possible. Remember: don’t get taken by the “just a knife” idiocy. That will not help you in the slightest in court.
Assuming you have a known threat you are preparing to fight before they have sprung on you, take action at once! You can draw your folder, and keep it oriented properly in your hand with thumb or finger on the deployment device.
As soon as you perceive the threat to be terminal, i.e. unavoidable, deploy the blade. For fixed blades, you may or may not want to acquire a grip early, as this furtive movement is a major tell of intent.
Trust me, a bad guy knowing you are armed is no impediment to most of them and can actually escalate the situation or make it worse. What you can do instead is surreptitiously clear any concealing garment present, if any, to facilitate a slick, fast draw.
No matter the other circumstances, the decision to draw and/or deploy your knife means that you should be using it on your attacker almost instantly. They have about as much time as it takes for you to complete your draw to about face.
When the knife is in your hand, grip it tightly! Some martial arts schools of knife use emphasize esoteric grips with half-hand pressure or full strength pressure using only the, pinky, ring and middle fingers, or other such strange methods.
But the calculus of bloodletting with a knife demands a rigid and clenched grip on the knife if you don’t want to risk losing it during the repeated impacts sustained during the cuts and thrusts you’ll be making. The less the knife can shift or move in your hand, the better.
Targeting the Bad Guy
At this point in the fight the bad guy or bad guys are about to lose their pound of flesh. Your objective is singular as a civilian defender: escape with as few injuries as you can. It does not matter if you “beat” the attacker, or if you kick his ass or anything else.
All that matters is getting away and going home with the same number of holes that you left the house with.
To achieve this, it is not necessary to kill the attacker. Yes, he may die from the wounds we inflict on him in the course of our defense, but that is not our objective. our objective is to inflict substantial wounds that will reduce his ability to continue the fight against us.
These ones are specifically ones which will reduce or eliminate his capability to use a weapon against us, or ones that will hamper his mobility or immobilize him.
Of course, any wound that damages a vital organ or causes severe blood loss is also a net win; once blood pressure or blood volume drops low enough, no force of will can overcome it.
If the attacker cannot use a weapon, we have drastically reduced the threat. If he cannot pursue us or move quickly enough to strike us, we have significantly reduced the threat. Good alternate targets are those which inflict serious psychological damage.
Even a comparatively minor slice to the face or neck can upset the attacker’s mindset with concern for his own damage. Blood streaming into the eyes is a major distraction and severely demoralizing.
With all of that in mind, here a few good targets for your knife in a fight:
Head, Specifically Face, and Neck
Everyone is naturally very protective of their head, and they should be. The head houses the most vital organ in the body, the brain, and the eyes, the two organs responsible for processing our most vital sense. Any wound great or small to the head bleeds hideously and is a serious psychological obstacle.
Any strike to the eyes will severely hamper on attackers’ vision, giving you a major advantage. It goes without saying that any cut or thrust of the neck is more than capable of easily damaging bundles of major blood vessels which result in near immediate incapacitation.
Arm and Hand
Any major wound to the muscle groups of the arm or the hand itself will begin to take away your attackers ability to use that arm against you, either directly or by holding a weapon.
Cutting the muscle groups of the upper arm will degrade the attacker’s ability to control the lower arm. Cutting the muscle groups of the lower arm will impact the opening and closing of the hand, meaning their grip.
Any direct attack on the hand itself will obviously severely impact their grip and is also another psychological barrier to continuing the fight.
Lower Body
Attack below the belt are definitely worth pursuing if you’re using a knife on defense. Jordan growing itself for the pelvic region around it has a high likelihood of severing major blood vessels, and cutting vital tendons and muscle groups used for stability and control of the legs.
The psychological and emotional impact of a cut or thrust to the reproductive organs needs no discussion. Attacks to the huge muscle groups of the thigh are also money makers, and damaging or severing them will do much towards hobbling one of the attacker’s legs.
Remember, if they cannot pursue you and you can get away, you win. One easy target is the band of muscles directly above the knee on the front of the thigh.
Processing the Fight
When you are attacked, or the attack is imminent, it’s time to fight now. Don’t wait until you are wounded to begin your defense. Forget right now the idea of two fighters slowly circling each other with knives or other weapons in hand.
Your street fight for survival will not look like a boxing match, and will not look like the flowing, almost gentle sparring of two martial artists in a ring in a dojo.
Street fights are a clash, two bodies slamming into each other and trying to pile on as much damage as quickly as possible. This will inform how we fight.
While you are on the defensive as the victim, there’s nothing defensive about protecting yourself; a good defense looks a lot like a vicious offense. Your goal as the would-be victim is to attack the attacker with such ferocity that the only thing he has time to think about is saving his own skin.
Drawing your knife only to hide behind it, and wait for the attacker to do something is the wrong play. Unlike training for a fight, your attacker will not feed you a choreographed, easily intercepted attack like you two are in the practice ring. Expect every attack will be followed up by another one as fast as you can think.
No matter how fast you are, no matter how good you are at countering, some of those attacks will get through. Once you are wounded, and wounds pile up, your defense will degrade and pretty soon he’ll be closing in on the coup de grace.
Don’t let that happen! To prevent it, as counterintuitive as it seems, you need to go on offense. Make him react to you. Try to tie up his weapon arm and land cuts or thrusts on all major targets as quickly as you can until the attacker is disabled or gives up.
Note that “giving up” is not him screaming or begging for mercy. Giving up is dropping the weapon, falling to the ground, halting his offense or trying to escape.
At any rate, the moment you think you can disengage and actually get away from the attacker, do so. Remember, in a self-defense situation you may only use the precise amount of force necessary to stop the unlawful use of force against you, and not one cut, scratch or poke more.
The Bloody Aftermath
Unless we are talking about using your knife in defense during a true WROL scenario where you’re answerable only to your conscience and your God there will be legal fallout that must be attended to, whether you want to or not, after your defensive encounter.
One thing to keep in mind if using a knife for self-defense, is in the minds of much of the citizenry it has a sort of “bad guy weapon” label.
Don’t misunderstand, you can rest assured most people on the jury will be at least passingly uncomfortable with the idea of using lethal force in self-defense at all, compared to a gun a knife May skew their opinion of you.
Gunshot wounds are never pretty, but compared to the slaughterhouse horror that repeated blows from a knife inflict on the human body they are virtually clean. Perception controls events, and controls people’s personal realities.
Separating the carnage you inflicted on your attacker, even when you’re the victim, even when it was in defense of your life, may be challenging for your “peers” on the jury.
You can quote chapter and verse all you want regarding legal use of defensive force, but I’m telling you that your fate in a courtroom will come down more to attorneys and what schmucks are sitting in that jury box than the law as it is written.
In this regard, knives have a distinct disadvantage compared to guns, which are far more commonly used by good citizens in self-defense than any blade.
This is not to the dissuade you from using a knife if it is the right tool for the job or is all you have access to under the particular circumstances you are living and working in.
You do, after all, have to be alive to see your day in court and clear your name. But it is something you should plan for now.
Discuss the matter with your family attorney and if they are not comfortable defending or advising you on matters of self-defense, they need to refer you to someone who is.
Preferably, this referral will have experience and expertise in civilian use of force on defense and especially should have experience in defending in court use of a knife, though this is very rare among lawyers.
Lastly, the onus will always be on you to precisely articulate why you took the actions you did in defense of your life and why they were necessary to achieve the outcome escape and survival.
Any fight, especially one with life-or-death consequences, seems to happen in a confused blur I am with the benefit of hindsight and time to reflect it can be extremely challenging to put events in the proper order and then assign what your thought process was to each action.
Compared to use of a firearm, especially in an event where you had standoff from your attacker, use of a knife will be highly chaotic and extraordinarily emotionally charged.
This will not work in your favor when you’re cross-examined in court and have to explain each frantic cut, thrust and maneuver you made.
Those decisions you had to make in an instant, but for lollygagging jurors and dispassionate judges they will weigh, analyze, and then pass judgment over at their leisure. Remember that, and plan for it now.
Conclusion
Knives are powerful and universally available weapons for self-defense. But using a knife for self defense and attaining proficiency in it must be approached in a different way than preparing to use a firearm.
Knives have their own strengths, but they also have their share of limitations, ones you must work around if you hope to be successful with it. Read over the concerns presented in this article and start building your knife-centric skillset today.
In the early morning hours of April 10th, a support cable at the Arecibo Observatory pulled lose from its mount and crashed through the face of the primary reflector below. Images taken from below the iconic 305 meter dish, made famous by films such as Contact and GoldenEye, show an incredible amount of damage. The section of thick cable, estimated to weigh in at around 6,000 kilograms (13,000 pounds), had little difficulty tearing through the reflector’s thin mesh construction.
Worse still, the cable also struck the so-called “Gregorian dome”, the structure suspended over the dish where the sensitive instruments are mounted. At the time of this writing it’s still unclear as to whether or not any of that instrumentation has been damaged, though NASA at least has said that the equipment they operate inside the dome appears to have survived unscathed. At the very least, the damage to the dome structure itself will need to be addressed before the Observatory can resume normal operations.
The Arecibo Observatory by JidoBG [CC-BY-SA 4.0]
But how long will the repairs take, and who’s going to pay for them? It’s no secret that funding for the 60 year old telescope has been difficult to come by since at least the early 2000s. The cost of repairing the relatively minor damage to the telescope sustained during Hurricane Maria in 2017 may have been enough to shutter the installation permanently if it hadn’t been for a consortium led by the University of Central Florida. They agreed to share the burden of operating the Observatory with the National Science Foundation and put up several million dollars of additional funding.
It’s far too early to know how much time and money it will take to get Arecibo Observatory back up to operational status, but with the current world situation, it seems likely the telescope will be out of commission for at least the rest of the year. Given the fact that repairs from the 2017 damage still haven’t been completed, perhaps even longer than that. In the meantime, astronomers around the globe are left without this wholly unique resource.
A Cold War Relic
It might not be immediately obvious why the loss of Arecibo might be such a problem. After all, it’s just a radio telescope. It’s not even the largest one anymore, as that title was taken from it in 2016 by the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China. Surely researchers could shuffle their experiments over to other observatories?
In some cases, they likely will. But the Arecibo Observatory has a special feature that makes it unique among all of the large radio telescopes in the world. It can do something that even the much more modern FAST isn’t capable of: it has the ability to transmit, where the others can only serve as receivers. This lets Arecibo perform radar astronomy, by transmitting microwaves and observing how they reflect off of distant objects.
Workers installing the reflector’s mesh panels in 1963.
Normally, transmitting is not something a radio telescope would ever be expected to do. No more than an optical telescope would be expected to project light into the sky. But the Arecibo Observatory wasn’t actually designed as a radio telescope to begin with, at least, not primarily. Its original goal was to help detect nuclear intercontinental ballistics missiles launched from the Soviet Union.
In the late 1950s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now known as DARPA) started looking into ways to detect incoming ICBMs as they reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. It was generally understood that a object traveling at reentry speeds through the atmosphere would leave a ionized trail in its wake, and that further, this would show up as a distinctive radar signature. But there was little hard data on the subject, and even less was known about the region of the upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere.
To help fill in these gaps, and hopefully produce a reliable way of detecting and tracking potential ICBM warheads, a contract between Cornell University and the ARPA led to the construction of what was then called the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in 1963. By sending powerful radar transmissions into the ionosphere and studying the returning echo, the installation would be able to study electromagnetic interactions at the wispy edges of the atmosphere.
Reaching for the Stars
The field of radio astronomy was still in its infancy when the dish was built, but it didn’t take long before the true scientific value of Arecibo became apparent. The study of the ionosphere certainly had value, but the sensitive equipment at the observatory could see much farther than that. Within a decade of coming online, data from the dish was able to confirm the existence of neutron stars and identify the first binary pulsar.
The first image ever taken of an asteroid.
The installation’s ability to transmit signals into deep space also held tantalizing possibilities. In 1974 researchers broadcast what has come to be called the Arecibo Message towards the star cluster M13. This 210 byte burst of digital information included simple images of the human form and the radio telescope itself.
It represented the first, and to date only, concerted attempt to directly communicate with potential extraterrestrial life. The composers of the message, which included Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, didn’t really expect a reply; but the fact that humanity was capable of sending it in the first place was seen as a technological turning point.
In 1989, Arecibo was able to capture the first direct images of an asteroid in space. Usually asteroids are too far away and too small to be more than a spec of light through an optical telescope, but when viewed by radar, the shape and rotation of Castalia could be observed easily.
Data collected by the dish in 1990 would later be used to confirm for the first time the existence of planets outside of our own solar system. We now know there to be thousands of these so-called exoplanets, and more are still being discovered thanks to dedicated planet-hunting spacecraft that owe their origins to Arecibo.
An Uncertain Future
To this day, the Arecibo Observatory remains the largest and most powerful deep space transmitter in the world. The radar images it’s able to generate of distant objects is absolutely unparalleled, even 60 years after its construction. More than just satisfying our curiosity about the cosmos, this capability makes it an important part of NASA’s Planetary Defense program. We’re already leaning heavily on antiquated orbital assets to help identify and track potentially dangerous asteroids as they approach the Earth, losing the one-of-a-kind radar capabilities of Arecibo is only making a bad situation even worse.
The 70m dish at Goldstone
Until Arecibo Observatory is able to come back online, our closest thing to a backup is the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. Rather than one huge dish, it’s made up of five independent antennas, the largest of which is less than 1/4 the diameter of the primary reflector at Arecibo.
While not nearly as sensitive, the multiple antennas do have the advantage in that they can each be aimed at a separate targets. That’s because Goldstone is primarily tasked with maintaining communications with distant spacecraft, often several at a time. The antennas can be used as radio telescopes, but only when they aren’t actively engaged in spacecraft communications. That limited research time just got even more valuable with the influx of former Arecibo researchers who will be vying for time on the equipment.
The reality is, much of the research that was being conducted at the Arecibo Observatory will have to be put on hold for the time being. There’s no direct replacement for the radio telescope’s unique set of abilities, and the available research time on lesser installations won’t be sufficient to cover the increased demand. Still, the clear scientific need to get the Observatory back online doesn’t automatically make the logistics of making it happen any easier. At least for the time being, humanity’s ability to peer into the cosmos will be a bit more limited than what we’ve become accustomed to.
With the repair manual circuit diagrams in hand, it was no problem to find the GPS RX and TX lines that were being broken out to the external connector. Unfortunately, the radio’s electronics are all 5 volts and the GPS module [Selim] wanted to use was only 3.3 V. So he came up with a small PCB that included not only the voltage regulator to power the GPS module, but also some voltage-dividers to level shift those signals.
Since the Kenwood TM-D710a was already designed to accept a GPS upgrade module, he just needed to change some configuration options in the radio’s menus for it to see the new hardware. Technically the project was done at this point, but since there was still room in the case and he had a GPS module spitting out NMEA sentences, [Selim] tacked on a common Bluetooth serial module so he could see the position information on his smartphone. With an application like APRSdroid, he now has a nice moving map display using the position pulled from the radio’s GPS.
With this modification done it looks like the head unit is ready to go, but that’s only the beginning for a mobile rig. Now we want to see how he integrates the whole thing into the car.
While we can’t argue that FM has superior audio quality and digital streaming allows even higher quality in addition to worldwide access, there’s still something magic about hearing a weak and fading AM signal from thousands of miles away with nothing between the broadcaster’s antenna and yours. If you can’t have a big antenna — or even if you can — a loop antenna can help your big antenna fit in less space. In the video after the break, [TheOffsetVolt] covers an AM loop and shows how it can pull in distant AM stations.
Continuing with the educational radio he’s talked about before, he adds a loop antenna that is two feet on each side of a square, making it four square feet in area. Although he calls it an amplifier, it’s really just a passive tuned circuit that couples to the radio’s built-in antenna. There’s no actual connection between the antenna and the radio.
We aren’t sure if the reradiation explanation is really what’s happening, or if it is just transformer coupled to the main antenna. But either way, it seems to work well. You can think of this as adding a preselector to the existing radio. Loop antennas are directional, so this design could work as a direction finder.
Cities of steel and concrete are testaments to mankind’s ingenuity. We take a lot for granted today, including the internet, our motor vehicles, indoor plumbing and sewage, running water and more.
These are far more than niceties; these public utilities and advanced technologies are what make modern life so luxurious and indeed possible. What you have probably taken for granted even more than that is the one utility that makes them all possible- electricity.
Without electricity all these modern marvels grind to a halt. No more fresh water. No more sewer service. Definitely no more internet, and no more light that comes on at the flick of a switch.
All of those and a host of other lesser technologies will be rendered useless, almost instantly, if we lose power. I hate to break it to you, but the United States’ power grid is a shambling mess: aged, outdated, and ill kept. The electrical infrastructure that keeps all of this running is an incredibly fragile thing.
You might have noticed in the past few years that blackouts are becoming increasingly common. The United States’ power grid for the average citizen goes down more often and stays offline longer than nearly any other civilized nation on Earth.
What’s worse, our power grid is significantly more vulnerable to direct attack or natural disasters. In short, a regional blackout is nothing shy of a major disaster and can be a serious problem for your survival and continued societal integrity.
Any prepper worth the name should be prepared for a major blackout. In today’s article, we’ll tell you how to get prepared for just that.
Why Should I Be So Worried About Blackouts?
Plainly stated, because pretty much the entirety of modern life is entirely dependent upon electricity.
The entirety of our communications networks is comprised of:
landlines and modern cellular systems
air traffic control systems
computerized monitoring and control networks
city water systems
sewage treatment systems
refrigeration
banking
chemical treatment
manufacturing
… and the list goes on and on.
Everything that makes modern life recognizably modern, to say nothing of functional, is 100% thanks to electricity.
The only question is how long things can go without electricity before they start to get really dicey. Almost everyone has been through a power outage lasting anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, maybe even half a day.
While highly inconvenient, and perhaps forcing you to throw out the food in your fridge, these short losses of power don’t really stack up to a proper blackout, which can affect entire cities, or even entire regions.
Those are the ones you have to watch out for, and those are the ones that, if they last, will prove to be a severe test of your survival abilities.
Think about this: a single blackout lasting days or weeks will result in a loss of nearly all refrigerated food, a severe strain on life-support technologies in hospitals that are dependent on electricity, the loss of or adverse reaction of chemicals that must be stored under controlled temperatures, and a severe impairment of the entire transportation grid.
Generators will only go so far into sustaining the most of vital of these processes. The rest of them, well, tough.
It of course goes without saying that people who are dependent upon electricity for heating and cooling in harsh climates will now face a very real risk of exposure, even inside their own homes.
The very young and the very old will, as always, suffer the worst. In hotter climates loss of air conditioning has been a historic contributing factor to mass civil unrest and rioting. I’ll give you some examples just down below.
Lastly, a cascading power failure along with attempts to restart or stabilize the system can cause electrical fluctuations that may yet be very damaging to delicate components of the power grid and every kind of electronic system connected to it.
What this means is that a cure may in the end be worse than the disease; essential computers and other controllers might be destroyed when the power grid comes back online after a massive blackout. The effects of that occurrence are far-reaching.
Major U.S. Blackouts of the 20th and 21st Centuries
All major developed nations have suffered blackouts. The United States has suffered more than most, including some real doozies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Below you’ll find a sampling of some of the largest and the worst along with their effects.
Consider also how much worse any of the below could have been if they lasted several weeks, several months or even longer. It can happen, and more than that it is only a matter of time before it does.
New England-Canada Blackout, 2003
Affected Citizens: 55 Million+. Duration: Varied, one to two weeks for most. The most widespread blackout to ever affect North America knocked out an entire half of New England and a massive swath of Canada.
This gargantuan screw-up was caused by a controller system software error that resulted in the silencing of an alarm typically relied on by technicians to notify them of problems with the power lines themselves.
Always make sure your phones and computers are updated, folks; this little glitch caused the second largest blackout in the history of the world, and knocked over 100 power plants out of commission.
The greater effects resulting from this monster blackout included the loss of all utilities in major cities including sewage control, stopping of trains and planes, and the contamination of water supplies.
Pacific Blackout, 1982
Affected citizens: 5 million+. Duration: 4 days. This humongous blackout knocked out power to the majority of California and even all the way as far down as Las Vegas, Nevada.
This one resulted from a literal case of disaster dominoes: gale force winds knocked over one transmission tower into its neighbor, which hilariously resulted in a series of towers failing. This power failure itself prevented the energy company that owned the towers from issuing vital orders to response teams and repair workers.
The result? A sluggish disaster response that left the majority of California and Nevada without power for four days. The blackout originated in Tracy, California but had the greater effect of disrupting entirely electricity as far away as Las Vegas.
Stop and ponder just how intricately interconnected our power grid is, and you may be thankful it wasn’t worse.
The Big Apple Blackout, 1977
Affected Citizens: Millions in and around NYC. Duration: 24 Hours +/-. This Metropolis-scale blackout was caused by lightning strikes, pure and simple.
Most of us have lost power during a bad thunderstorm before, but chances are it wasn’t for this long and also didn’t have the rotten luck to occur during one of the nation’s and city’s worst periods of economic shrinkage.
And it also occurred during a brutally hot summer in the middle of July… and, as it turns out, New York City was also caught in the iron grip of Fear due to the ongoing Son of Sam murders.
Almost simultaneously with the power going out, looters and rioters took to the streets, smashing the windows of thousands of businesses and setting thousands of fires to go along with it.
This stretched emergency responders to the breaking point, and resulted in a staggering $1.3 billion dollars in damage. This blackout more than any other illustrates how quickly society can fray at the seams without electricity.
Getting ready for any blackout, big or small, you’ll need to gather some supplies you’ll need to survive as with any major disaster, along with inventorying essential provisions, medications and other resources that are absolutely dependent on electricity for viability.
This does not necessarily mean keeping the Wi-Fi going so you can stream your favorite show in the comfort of your darkened home: I’m talking about things like medication that must be refrigerated, certain food supplies, and any critical life support equipment for persistent diseases and ailments.
If you don’t require anything like that, so much the better: you’ll have a much easier time of surviving a blackout. If you do, however, you’ll need to take steps to maintain continuity of power in the event that our power grid fails running like the time.
This could take the form of a deep cycle battery bank, a generator, or alternate power generation supplies, be they solar or thermoelectric. More on that in just a minute.
The Basic Blackout Survival Kit
All the items, equipment and Provisions in this section are based off the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) published guidelines and recommendations for citizens along with a few enhanced lighting recommendations from the author.
If you are already a seasoned prepper, you’ll recognize most of this stuff, and probably have it already. For those of you who don’t, take note: the core survival kit (or shopping list, if you want to think that way) for most major disasters looks very much the same.
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Equipment
Clothing – Typical daily wear clothing according to weather and season, along with extra protective equipment like sturdy gloves and boots.
Shelter – Especially vital in cold climes. You will want plenty of blankets and sleeping bags along with a good tent, or the stuff to make a passable tent (even within your own home) so you can create a microclimate shelter inside if needed.
Lighting – You definitely don’t want to be left to stumble and toil in the dark during a prolonged blackout, so you’ll need plenty of off-grid lighting solutions.
Flashlights – Your most used utility light. Handy for chores and self-defense. Acquire flashlights which strike a balance between brightness, long runtime and additional features like SOS strobe, low-light color LEDs and more.
Headlamps – Headlamps afford you most of the advantages of flashlights, but allow you to employ them hands-free, and are ideal for work details.
Lanterns – For all around area lighting that is still portable, it is hard to beat a lantern. I heartily recommend you stick with battery powered or rechargeable lanterns to keep the fire risk down; oil- or alcohol-fueled models can burn a house down quickly after an accident.
Chemlights – AKA glowsticks. These lights are not just cheap novelty items for parties and Halloween. Good chemlights can provide completely safe, soft lighting suitable for marking, signaling and close-range work. Best of all they stay lit for hours and don’t gobble any precious batteries.
Batteries – With the exception of the chemlights, all of the above personal lighting tools will need batteries to operate. Make sure you have a big supply on hand and keep them rotated according to their projected shelf lives. You can ease your logistical burden if you make sure your lights all use one or two kinds of battery, max.
Tarps – Used as a ground cover, to block light from windows and for improvised shelter making.
Cell Phone – Save this for emergencies, not games. You might get lucky and be able to access cell towers that have backup power supplies. Make sure this includes a spare battery and charger.
Emergency Radio – An NOAA emergency radio will hopefully let you hear from authorities who will doubtlessly be working furiously to correct the current troubles. Battery powered is acceptable, but the dynamo-powered crankable models are better for longevity.
Solar Power Charger – You will have plenty of electronics that are still useful during a blackout if only you can find a way to power them. Additionally, modern electronics and devices have a strong preference for efficient rechargeable batteries instead of disposables, so having a completely off-grid way to fuel them makes sense. Everything from flashlights and lanterns to satellite phones and even fans can be recharged in a reasonable time using the latest in solar charger kits.
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Food
Food – Adults need around 2,000 calories a day. You can get by with around 1,700 if you are not moving or working much. Stick with options that are canned or in pouches, shelf stable and require minimal preparation. Remember fuel will likely be at a premium. Also don’t forget to include disposable plates, utensils and a can opener!
Water – In mild areas count on using one gallon per person per day. That includes drinking and rudimentary sanitation. You’ll need more in a hot climate.
Hygiene Items
Include all the typical items you need in the bathroom day-to-day: deodorants, soaps, toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving kit if desired, feminine hygiene items and baby wipes.
Medical Kit
Basic First Aid – Smaller injuries like nicks, cuts, scrapes, rash, bug bites, sunburn, blisters, etc. Also include medicines for common ailments.
Trauma Kit – For major injuries and wounds. You will need training to make use of this component, and should be able to treat sprains, fractures. Penetrating and lacerating injuries, head trauma, major burns, blood loss, etc.
Any Prescription Meds – Any and all prescription meds or eyewear, at least a one week supply. Consult your physician about long term storage since you cannot count on getting these in an emergency.
Additional
Toolkit – A basic toolkit that will help you fortify or repair your home or help someone else do the same. Think hammers, saws, nails, screws, drivers, pry bars, etc.
Document Pouch – Hard copies of all vital docs like ID’s, mortgages, deeds, birth certificates, social security numbers, etc.
Cash – It is the only currency you’ll be able to count on for the duration of the blackout.
Entertainment – If things don’t get too crazy you could still be in for a long wait until things get back to normal. Have on hand some playing cards, a few board games and books to help stave off boredom.
Should you care to invest in something like a diesel or gas generator, you can enjoy all the accoutrements of modern life in your home that other people, those who lack generators anyway, will be going without during the blackout.
Be advised this will do nothing to ensure the water coming out of the taps is safe to drink if it comes out at all, or the sewage system will be functioning normally. You will be able to rely on though your computers and home appliances like the refrigerator and alarm system continuing to work.
Another option is a deep cycle battery bank, one that is charged off of normal power supply coming into the house that will activate manually or automatically after grid power is lost.
Lacking a generator or any other way to recharge it will only provide power for a limited time.
This, of course, begs the question whether or not you should invest in something like the now-ubiquitous solar power panels that can potentially provide your entire house with power, or even something like a windmill.
Be advised that all of these systems require a significant investment to make them operational, as well as ongoing maintenance to ensure they function when the time comes.
What you should also consider is the fact that being the one house that is lit up while, literally, an entire city is in the dark will raise eyebrows and may make you a potential target among undesirables: all of the above systems are perennial targets for thieves even when the lights are on.
Security Considerations
As you learned in the example blackouts above, looting, rioting and arson seem to regularly accompany major blackouts. You must be prepared to provide for your physical security during a blackout that lasts more than a few hours.
The worst parts of humanity will come scurrying out of the storm drains to raise Hell, loot and set fires. Getting a gun and learning how to use it is the most obvious answer to help ensure a positive outcome for you and yours.
If guns are simply not an option for you, consider getting a large “riot” canister of pepper spray. Larger units afford greater range, better coverage and enough capacity to deal with multiple attackers over multiple instances.
Conclusion
Small-scale blackouts are pretty common and nothing to get too excited about. Major blackouts are serious disasters, and may lead to significant threats to your health and security.
You can be prepared for a blackout by amassing the right supplies in the right quantities, and having a plan for dealing with the after-effects. With a little luck, the lights will be back on in no time. But if they aren’t, you’ll be ready.
