More on PMR-446, and going off-grid
-----------------------------------

Recently Logout and I had a brief exchange on the subject of interesting things you can do
with license-free PMR-446 radios.  Logout said he wasn't sure if the DXing scene existed
outside of his part of the world, and I figured that given the relative lack of mountains
near me there probably wasn't much it had to offer me.

I did a little research and it turns out there is actually a PMR-446 DX scene in Finland,
and people have actually made contacts between Finland and Estonia, i.e. across the Baltic
Sea, which is pretty cool.  The PMR-446 regulations require radios to have fixed antennas,
so you cannot plug in giant ones to get more range.  But many of the hardcore Finnish and
Estonian DXers seem to be inductively coupling their radio's fixed antennas to homebrew
Yagi and other designs to increase their range.  I don't know if this is still srictly
legal, but it's surely interesting.

I talked a lot of talk last year about a kind of ultra-frugal, largely self-reliant
lifestyle combining high and low tech as appropriate.  I hope to start walking the walk a
little more this year.  Having read Yargo's first bit of off-grid fiction[1] (which is
very well done and which you should all check out) has spurred me on a bit to start
thinking about backup power situations.  In my ideal world I am completely off-grid and
self-reliant for power, but I am very far from being able to even think about that at this
point.  But something I can aim for is to be in a situation where I can "limp along" in
emergency situations.  I am basically thinking of having some 12V SLA batteries handy,
some way of charging them (solar is the obvious/conventional answer here, but is not going
to work well for 6 months of the year here, maybe I will need to think about wind or
something), and some kind of switching converter to bring that down to 9V, 5V and 3.3V for
various applications.  Ideally I would like to make all the circuits myself, or at least
use commercial products which are sufficiently simple, well-documented and lacking in
magic parts that I believe I can maintain them myself.  Sadly, I don't get my internet
connection directly from the phoneline, but via an ethernet cable which runs to some kind
of common connection to the ISP which is shared by the other buildings in our unusual
little block.  This means even if I power up my router from 12V, I'm not going to be able
to get onilne like in Yargo's story.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70//users/yargo/glog/./t18114-story-offgrid-1.txt