His cell phone was not free. Even if it's his parents, somebody's paying for it - both his terminal and the infrastructure that makes it work.
QRO is fine too; just because we enjoy one niche of ham radio doesn't mean we should look down on those who enjoy other niches, should we?

I don't know exactly what kind of emergency operation you're considering, but here's some advice that should be generally applicable:

- Head extension cable (to save table space you can leave the radio in a box, and bring the head up on a table)
- Extra antenna wire
- Tuner (as  KG4RUL showed); in emergencies you may need to use improvised non-resonant antennas
- LED Head lamp
- 12 v Battery charger for AAA and AA batteries (for the head lamp and other various items)
- 12 v light
- Pencil and writing materials (in the assumption that you'll be passing messages or at least logging)
- Documents such as quick reference to your radio (for operators unfamiliar with your model), maps (for navigation or DXing), band plans, net information, repeater directories, important phone numbers, etc.
- A writing surface
- Since digital modes are very useful in emergencies, a digital interface, a laptop, and chargers for it, could be a good idea.

The two main approaches to a go kit is to either mount everything in the box, or use a watertight padded case to protect the radio while shipping it around. Some approaches combine this by using - say - a padded Pelican case, without any holes drilled or things mounted to it, but with a removable frame inside that the radio is mounted to. That way you get both a padded watertight shipping container, and everything is already connected up.

In addition to this you should consider having:
- Your own personal "bug out bag" with water, food, hygiene items (toilet paper, moist towlettes, hand sanitizer etc.), personal documents, change of clothing, any medication etc. Depending on where you'll be operating from (such as a Field Day site or Red Cross shelter), there might be food services provided, but in case it isn't you should be self-sustainable for a number of days. You might make this into a "never getting home kit", and put stuff like digital family photos, insurance documents, pictures of your valuables and scans of your college diplomas in it.

- A portable gel or AGM deep cycle battery. Operating from the car starting battery over extended periods is not recommended. You could get a battery isolator (such as the ISOpwr from West Mountain Radio) to make your car charge the deep cycle battery when its alternator is running, but prevent the deep cycle battery from draining the starting battery.

- A power supply, in case generator or grid power is available at your operating location.

Yellow flashing lights are not for clearing traffic, that's red and blue lights and reserved for emergency vehicles. Some places volunteer firefighters or off duty police officers are also allowed to have them. Same goes for sirens.

As for yellow lights, in some states anyone is allowed to have them, but in other states one needs special authorization for their use. If you're just parked next to the road, yellow lights are probably not needed, but if you're, say, warning other motorists about roadworks, a traffic accident, downed power lines or trees in the road, yellow lights might be appropriate. Just note that they're not foolproof - from some dash camera videos it seems some motorists are attracted to those flashing lights like moths to the flame.  

Here's a video about amber lamps re. tornado spotters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tjGJiRPCuE

The presenter prefers not having them, and instead put some extra reflective material on your car. If you're only stormspotting in the summer tornado season I agree. Note, however, that especially in winter flashing lights may be a VERY good idea. That reflective material on the back of your car will get covered by snow and invisible after a few minutes. The flashing lights will penetrate a few inches of snow, and if they produce heat they might melt it away too.

Or those who enjoy the challenge even though they could run kilowatt signals. Or those who can't afford more power. Or, well, technically if you're ragchewing with somebody you could easily work on 5 watts, the FCC rules actually requires you to QRP.  

Amateur radio is a hobby with many niches. QRP and QRPp is one of them. If you don't enjoy the challenge, try another niche like satellites, fox hunting, moon bounce, packet, ALE, kit building (build a JUMA PA100 amplifier   ), etc.

When I first got into amateur radio, I would sometimes come across hams online who treated their niche of amateur radio as the only niche, advising everyone to get a single-band morse-only radio, or advising everyone that life's too short for QRP so get a kilowatt radio and ragchew on 80 meters all day; some of them would even say that you can't be a real ham unless you're in their niche. Nonsense! Amateur radio is about exploring, enjoying what you like, challenging yourself, and maybe some public service on the side to thank the community for our frequencies. If you're challenging yourself to the point of frustration, maybe it's time to try another niche and come back to QRP later.
Well yeah exactly; if your emergency happened during a geomagnetic storm you might be screwed with QRP, but if conditions were favorable you could summon help. My QRP radio is part of my personal communication plan, but it comes after the cell phone and Personal Locator Beacon.

Well, one thing is that QRP doesn't necessarily mean compromised antennas. You can certainly run big arrays and get a kick out of only using 5 watts from the radio and getting as good a signal as a 100 watt radio with a compromised antenna.
In fact, starting out with a QRP radio was the right choice for me because I have some space for experimenting with antennas, and I enjoy experiementing with and reading about antennas.
If you feel you're "cheating" versus the backpackers, just don't identify as /QRP. I don't have any contacts logged as /QRP even though all contacts under my home call have been QRP so far (some CW and PSK-31, but mostly SSB).

Maybe one thing you could do was chase for portable low power stations, like by trying to conact as many SOTA operators as possible.

Can a hex beam be rotated? Yes
Is a hex beam non-directional? No, the pattern will depend on the frequency and the height you put it at, but the whole point of having a beam is for it to be directional. You'll still hear people on the sides and back, but you'll hear them better in the direction you're pointed.

If you want to recieve in all directions equally, you might try loading up the mast/tower of the hex beam as a vertical but I suspect without radials it would recieve worse than the back end of the hex beam.

Supply -> Battery -> Radio
Advantages: If there is noise on the DC supply, the battery could "filter" it a bit better than with a diode gate. Less voltage drop from the battery to the radio. If your radio is particular about supply - say, switches off at 11.9 volts or something - it might be better to connect directly to the battery. If your radio accepts a wider range of voltages, this is not as much of an issue.
Disadvantages: If the battery fails, the radio fails. You can't "hot-swap" batteries as easily.

Using a diode gate:
Advantages: If the battery fails, the power supply can run the radio and you can swap the battery without switching off the radio.
Disadvantages: A voltage drop over the diode gate; this can be compensated for by increasing power supply voltage, but you can't compensate for when supplying from the battery.

What I have is a simple diode gate float charger, with a resistor as a current limiter. This only float-charges the battery. If the battery has been worn down, it takes a while to get topped off again. (This design is similar to the PG40 - note the lack of "S" at the end, it's an earlier version with float-only charging.)

While the PWRgate PG40 is float-only, the Super PWRgate PG40S contains a staged battery charger; that means KB1NXE is not simply floating the battery. After a power failure, when the battery is low, the PG40S will take the battery through the same bulk and absorption phases as a regular battery charger, before transitioning to the float charge once the battery has been fully charged. That means the PG40S charges the battery up faster than a PG40. That could be useful in a situation with intermittent power, say an emergency where you run your generator for a few minutes at a time, or where gird power comes and goes.

The 14.2 volt setting at the power supply is to compensate for the voltage drop over the float diode in the PG40S, however the manufacturer actually recommends setting the supply to 14.1 volts for gel and 14.5 volts for AGM as well as installing a jumper inside the PG40S. By doing this, the float charge will still be 13.5 volts, but the peak charging voltage will be raised to 14.2 volts since AGM batteries accept a bit more voltage in bulk and absorption than gel cells do.

Fact is, there are MILLIONS of people who would love to take your guns and radios away. Witness the gun control lobby, some parts of the entertainment industry devoting whole TV episodes or movies propagandizing with falsehoods against gun ownership, or the housing associations hunting for your stealth antennas, or the industry groups drooling over amateur radio spectrum, polluting the airwaves with broadband over powerlines, etc.

It's both wrong to think that Obama is the Antichrist, and to think he is Christ. Obama's just a guy doing a job, based on what he believes is the right and most beneficial way to do it.

Pretending that he's about to knock down your doors and shoot your family is about equally crazy to thinking that nobody wants to change your way of life for the worse.

The truth lies in between these extremes somewhere.

As for the secret Muslim nonsense, while only the truly mental thought that Obama was going to turn the US into the Caliphate, there was actually a kernel of truth in that some Islamist extremists see Obama as a fallen Muslim: They want to punish him for being an apostate. The end result would be the same though, since the Islamists extremists would hate the president whether he was named McCain or Obama.

Hi,
Both me and other users have remarked that it could perhaps have been a bit more noticeable when you get a new message in your inbox. The little [1] is hard to spot for some.
This of course must be balanced against being too intrusive - I imagine there would be much rage if you used the HTML BLINK tag for example. 

Remember that lightning and other RF current likes to travel on the skin of the conductor, so if you coat it with something it should be as low impedance as the copper. Putting it inside PVC pipe or PVC conduit painted to match the house/down spouts sounds like the best idea; if you use metal pipe/conduit it has to be electrically bonded to the strap at the top and bottom.

The highly reactive isotopes have the shortest half life - the fact that they decay quickly is what makes them release more radiation than isotopes with longer half life, so gamma radiation from fallout decays pretty quickly. Hours, days, or a couple of weeks of sheltering might be enough to deal with that.

What's concerning about some long-lived isotopes is that they are accumulated in the food chain and get inside our bodies. Having these particles on the ground we walk on might be harmless, but having them inside your thyroid or other cells in the body could be harmful. (Alfa particles, for example, are more energy rich than beta or gamma radiation, but they are stopped by your shoes/air before they reach your body. If you breathe in or eat alpha-emitting isotopes, however, the radiation happens inside your body.)

In long term survival plans for larger communities, one needs to consider which crops to grow; whether top soil should be removed or enriched with less radioactive minerals; whether grazing animals can be allowed to graze in areas with fallout, but will be safe to eat if allowed to eat less radioactive fodder for a few weeks before slaughter. These measures may be just as relevant for an area with fallout from a ground-level nuclear detonation as fallout from a nuclear accident. I live in an area where we got a dusting of fallout from Chernobyl, and we had to take some such measures in the agriculture sector for some years afterwards. This is manageable though, if you survive the immediate effects (initial radiation, heat, blast, gamma rays from fallout).

In fact, one interesting scenario for US people could be if there's a nuclear war between - say - Pakistan and India, or on the Korean Peninsula; the fallout (literally) from such a conflict might be dangerous in America.

Since there's no expectation of privacy in an amateur radio conversation, just record your conversation and write a log with dates and times. If the splatterers refuse to listen to you, or dismiss you rudely, you can report them to the FCC. The FCC like to think of radio amateurs as being "self-policing", so they usually don't spend resources on enforcement against amateurs unless they cause interference to other radio services, but in some cases the FCC become involved. From what I hear the FCC are very friendly and helpful if you contact them, and I'm sure they'll be grateful for audio recording, signed and dated logs (contemporary notes have evidentiary value) and perhaps direction finding information too. Then you'll just have to hope that the FCC enforcement agents have time to follow up on the information.

ZENKI, your previous opinion was that the KX-3 would be a poor radio with a far too good receiver, because it was 10 watts instead of 20 watts, but that 20 watts was enough for everyone. Further, that a QRP radio would have no use for narrow filters. Now you're assuming that people who can afford a KX-3 would connect it to horrible illegal non-linear CB amplifiers instead of getting a decent amateur quality amplifier.

It also puzzles me why you think Elecraft should deliver a 200 watt radio when you don't trust them to build a 100 watt amplifier or a 10 watt radio that's up to spec.

The one thing you're right about is that you can't easily filter out wide band splatter with receiver notching filters - that's because it's superimposed on the signal. Due to its random (non-periodic) nature, it's also hard for any noise blanker or DSP to deal with. That's something you deal with by having antennas with nulls, phasing networks, or by identifying the culprit and convincing him to fix his rig, first by asking politely and then by reporting him.

You don't like the KX-3, but the reasons why seem to evolve.

On these frequencies, if you live in a hilly area, you might even use reflections off mountain faces.

Let's say your house is up to residential earthquake standards so it won't take damage but will shake around quite a bit, tipping your furniture etc. Would you need shock absorbers to protect your gear and keep it running during a quake, like the shock absorbers that get fitted to equipment installed in bomb shelters, or would you just tie it down?
I see there are NEBS 4 certified equipment racks for 19 inch gear.
I'd imagine that having solid state storage in your computer would help.

Operating mobile means operating while moving - like in a car (/M), on a bike (/BM), on a boat (/MM), or while walking (/PM). Operating portable (/P) means a station that is transportable - like in a backpack, a suitcase, or a shipping container - and usually has its own power source, but that can't be operated while moving.

I'm happy with my FT-817ND, and I mainly run SSB, but I usually use full size antennas like tuned long wires or the ZS6BKW, either in the yard or thrown up in the trees on hiking trips. With a Buddistick and FT-817ND, you could get good results with digital modes and CW, but if you are limited to a Buddistick and SSB, you might be happier with the 857D instead.

The 817ND really needs a CW filter if you want to use it for CW. The 857D comes with DSP built in. An 817 can be upgraded with filters, DSP, new microphone, etc. but it can end up costing as much as an 857D that way.

Both for the 817ND and 857D you need to factor in battery weight. The 857D draws more power than the 817ND, even when not transmitting. Even if you turn down the power of a non-QRP radio, it tends to draw more power and you have a bit of extra weight to carry around.

If you had more freedom to experiment with antennas and/or digital mode, and would want a small, light and cheap radio, I'd go for the 817ND.
If you plan to go on extended hiking trips, I'd seriously consider the KX-3, which draws less power and has advanced features, but is very expensive.

If you're limited to Buddipole SSB, for short hiking trips and hotel room operation, I'd go for the 857D. Sometimes you need those extra couple of S-units.