>>450471

Anons,

Short wave will not work locally unless a special antenna rig is pointed straight up. These rigs require antennas that are much larger that the biggest TV antenna you see out in flyover country.

Short wave relies on "skipping" on the ionosphere and that means there is a "donut hole" of 50-150 miles around a transmitter where the signal is barely detectable.

The first level Amateur Radio license, call "Technician", is primarily for the VHF and UHF bands with highly limited use in the short wave bands. Nellie Ohr has a Technician license.

Now, there are 3-50 mile range digital voice and data techniques available to a Technician in the VHF and UHF bands that she and her cronies could use. I could write an opsec plan to do so that would "fly under the radar" from most hams, but not from the FCC or NSA.

The easiest would be use a laptop paired with a 220 MHz 80 watt mobile radio and put the magnetic mount antenna on your car's roof. Download some digital freeware and then communicate at a pre-planned time on an unused (non-repeater) frequency point-to-point. Use some code words, like the pizza-folks did, and never use voice, just text.

If I needed to talk with someone form home-to-home, I would use a Yagi-antenna mounted in my attic and horizontally polarized to minimize anyone picking up the signal even further.

This plan could be made much more secure and complicated.

But Nellie was probably transmitting around 144, 220 or 445 MHz, not short wave.

>>450690

You could buy a $200 software define radio (SDR) and attach it to an antenna and your PC via a USB connection. That would allow you to look at about 10 MHz at a time, so you would need three such rigs to look at the VHF and UHF bands.

Digital signals look like noise on the screen, so it may not help you much.

Scanners do work, but not really too well for digital text. There are programs that can help, but unless you really, really know what you are doing (i.e. being a RF Engineer with a big budget), you will not hear anything of interest from bad people.

>>450697

The military uses 60 and 90 GHz radio links that do the same thing. They are highly directional and the signals can be made to be absorbed by air, making a side-shot impossible.