Category: Home Power

Jim, A very good shortwave portable is the Sony ICF-2010. It is an older portable from the 1980s but is a very strong performer with its synchronous detector. It is often found on the used market and eBay. One fact that many sellers don’t know is that you need to have fresh AA batteries in them for memory retention or the unit will not even function. Many sellers believe that their radios are broken when in fact only need fresh batteries. The unit can be run of D cell batteries or via an AC adapter. Another thing that “goes wrong” …

James: The hot thing in scanners right now is digital trunking. Most public-safety services use this approach, without scrambling or encryption. Analog scanners are useless, but the new generation of scanners include direct support for digital trunking. I recently bought a Uniden/Bearcat BCD 396T, which totally restored my ability to listen to common public-safety traffic where I live. Some more sensitive government agencies use encryption on top of digital trunking, but there’s no strong survival-oriented motivation to listen to their transmissions. Unless you’re trying to survive an FBI manhunt, I suppose. In an emergency, being able to monitor fire and …

Jim, Hail and well met. – I purchased two of the handheld MURS transceivers from MURS Radios. (A SurvivalBlog advertiser.) First off, they arrived really fast. The shipping only took a few days. They were also packaged very securely. Although you can tell that these radios were used, they do not look abused in any way. I was impressed right off the bat by them. For one thing, they do not feel like a toy in your hand…they have some heft to them. They also came fully charged. In the box along with the radios were the chargers and good …

Jim, I for one I’m very happy that your novel “Patriots” back in print. For a long time I gave this book away to friends who I thought might like it, and to some whom I wanted to “feel out” as to whether they thought preparedness was a good idea. I had to stop this of course when your book went out of print, and the cost went skyward. Now I can stock up again. Also I wanted to thank you for turning me on to MURS Radios. I just made an order with Rob, and will be making another …

Mr. Rawles: My friends and I have been using the MURS band for some time. It generally has better range than FRS/GMRS and is much less crowded. There is an interesting product available that works with these radios as a sort of “perimeter alarm” system. The MURS Alert from Dakota Alert is a small, weatherproof box that combines a PIR motion detector with a 1-watt MURS transmitter and a voice module. It uses six size AA batteries and has an advertised six month battery life. The unit is placed near a road, driveway, trail, etc and set up. When a …