this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Short wave radio and emergency radio. Some way to listen in and communicate.
i have a standard FM battery powered radio. i also heard anarchist and peer to peer radio tech has come a long way is there any guide on how to make some from electronic junk essentially?
Here's a good video on the peer to peer stuff
I'm not sure what anarchist/peer to peer radio tech you're referring to, but I have experience with a few kinds of radios:
For short range communications (several city blocks from street level, a few miles with open terrain) you can get Baofeng UV-5G walkie talkies for quite cheap. If one of your family is going to fetch water and you want to stay in contact, this kind of thing will do the job.
There's also meshtastic, which has proved itself in several natural disasters already - the hardware these are based on is very common in industry and especially crypto mining, which means that you can find them cheap and flash new firmware on them to become personal radios. They work best if you have a bunch of them in the area. I have them, and have found that they aren't great from street level in a city - they need line of sight. If you can get up high though, you can talk to anyone in the city.
If you want to talk further than that, you will need to get into shortwave. It's not cheap, and it's complicated. I don't have hands on experience with it, but I think a good cheap setup would start with a TruSDX. That would let you talk to people within 300km regardless of terrain, or people around the world depending on weather. You'll need a really big antenna (minimum 10 meters of wire stretched out in a field), which can be made cheaply but you need to know some things to do it. This USian anarchist explains how to put one together for the 300km use case.
I really don't know if any of this is worth doing though. For the most part, you won't be trying to operate a team so much as stay alive, so an AM/FM/Shortwave/Weather receiver might be all the radio you need.
yeah it's probably not worth doing but good to know. thanks.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: