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