dalepres

I am just guessing from your screen name that you are from Wyoming? That is where I started in the 2-way radio business as a field engineer for Motorola many years ago. My territory was the entire state of Wyoming. I have probably been to every repeater site in the state at one time or another. Living in Casper, Wyoming and Glenrock, Wyoming, we used to laugh when the news reported hurricanes in Florida with winds lower than what we endured for days on end. I also lived in Buffalo for a few years; now that was definitely God's country! What size Rohn towers? 25's? And 36" deep or square on the base? I assume that represented three each 10' sections with one buried in the concrete? For a Rohn 25 (edit - make that a properly - as in very lightly - windloaded Rohn 25) that's overkill but then with high windloading and Wyoming sized winds, the risk would be snapping off at the base - especially a base that solid. :). Assuming you didn't have a microwave dish on the thing, a Rohn 45 would hold up with that base and even Wyoming winds at only 26 feet tall.

I like CW as well. CW and QRP represent what amateur radio is about - though I wouldn't mind a kilowatt rig with a 200 foot tower or a rhombic. But I have to say, I have worked in electronics and two-way radio for 30+ years up to about 10 years ago; now I write computer software in .Net. I wouldn't recommend trying wire wrapped around a pencil on a battery unless it was specifically high-resistance wire. A coil is a dead short to a DC or constant load. To AC, assuming the coil is designed correctly for the load, a coil represents an inductive load that will develop an EMF across it and drop the voltage to a device but for a DC or constant load, it would act like a heater or a fuse...

Heck, they give you the questions and the answers now And no CW

I've been a ham operator for 40 years. I can think of probably a hundred ways that a radio can be used in an emergency with very little power. I have communicated around the world on less than 5 watts power. And VHF/UHF without a repeater can still be useful. Consider that a person is evacuating a flooded or uninhabitable area with a battery powered radio. There are no reachable repeaters with power. He leaves home but cannot pickup anyone on the radio. He turns it off to save the battery until a day later he hits a fork in the road. In one direction lies more destruction. In the other is humanity and help. He doesn't know which way to turn. Now he turns on the radio and perhaps he gets an answer. He's 20 miles closer to humanity than he was when he left home yesterday. He gets an answer that helps him choose the right path and saves him from certain destruction. Do radios represent certain help or certain survival in any disaster? Of course not. But then, neither does having a full pantry. :)

In the bottom pack, you can see the outline of the boot that we made from Food Saver bag and put over the ends of the spaghetti to protect the bag. On the top pack there's no boot which allows the spaghetti to pack more flatly but runs a higher risk of bag failure due to the ends of the spaghetti poking through. In both packs, you can see the outline of the oxygen absorber. I just can't figure out why spaghetti in the store isn't packed like this. Consider all of the gasses, fumes, vapors, etc. that are in the air and yet pasta often comes in unsealed boxes. It sure would be nice to be able to buy it this way at the store.

I am sorry to hear about your daughter. My prayers and wishes go out to her and your family. I'm glad that she is doing well. I don't know where you can buy their products from but Diehl Organics looks interesting. Coincidentally, I emailed them yesterday to inquire about sources for their products in my search for storable fats but I haven't heard back yet. Hope this helps, Dale

I'm not aware of any circumstance or any product that would make drinking toilet water a good or safe idea. Would you care to share what it is that you found?

You have a great start or a great finish on a short-term storage, Phoenix. But you can greatly increase the amount of time you can live on your storage by adding some long-term storage items to what you have. Many like to have a few months of storage using the things we use every day but many of those things won't last for longer term of even a year, let alone two years. That's where the grain and sugar and honey, etc., things that will last a really long time, come in. You don't have to live on them. You don't have to rotate them. Just store them in a reasonably cool and dry place. Then if you have to live on your supply, blend them into your menu before the short term stuff runs out so it's not such a shock but there's no reason to live on or rotate those things. I have known some LDS kids who never had a fresh glass of milk at home or never had a meal at home that hadn't been dehydrated or freeze-dried.

Thanks, Phoenix. That's a great start. We have made cakes and breads with our whole wheat flour for years but I'm starting to worry a little about how we're going to use it without some of those great ingredients such as eggs, shortening, etc. Your recipe sounds like a good start. What has been your experience with the shelf life of powdered butter and eggs?

I have had a food storage program for many, many years. We have always stored large quantities of the basics - wheat, beans, rice, sugar, salt, etc. We have always stored a lesser quantity of canned foods and other foods for shorter-term emergencies. What we have never tried is things like powdered eggs, powdered butter, powdered cheese, powdered shortening, etc. I see these items available for sale on Walton Feed's site but there is no information about the products, their use, their shelf life, etc. Some of these things would go a long way toward making the basics more interesting and palatable. Who has used them? And how? Are there links you can share that have more information about these products? I've emailed Walton Feed a couple times since they've redone their site and stripped it of most of the useful information but they seem to be busy enough and without competition enough that they just don't really need to respond.

I don't think you can actually make ramen noodles go bad. And I'm pretty sure that the FDA will tell you that spam combined with either ramen noodles or spaghettios makes a balanced meal. I'm just curious. How does that stuff taste? And, assuming it is dehydrated, where do you store all the water it will take to reconstitute it? Though "store what you eat and eat what you store" has fallen out of favor in deference to long-term storage of something that will keep you alive, you may find yourself wishing you had some more familiar food in a shorter term shortage. Maybe you can borrow some Spam to spice it up, though. :) But then when the rest of us are eating beans, rice, wheat, and oatmeal, you can pay it back with some dehydrated cooked diced beef. :)

Spend $10 extra dollars each time you shop. :) Or even $5. In Oklahoma, canned vegetables are about 50 cents a can. Tuna about 75 cents. Then there's Spam and canned hams for $2.50. Canned chili meat without beans (we already have those separately, right?) is about a dollar. At those prices, you can begin to build up a pretty decently short term supply (a few months' worth) within, well, just a few months. :)

I have some more tips on vacuum packing that I'm excited about. We bought a VS-280 vacuum sealer from Sorbent Systems. This is not an ad for them; I have no association from them other than having ordered from them twice now. This vacuum sealer is also available from quite a few other places. What is cool about it is that you can vacuum Mylar bags or other non-channel bags. It has a nozzle that penetrates the bag opening during vacuuming and retracts during heat sealing. This means it doesn't need the special bags that Seal-A-Meal or Food Saver type sealers require. This sealer is about 100 dollars. There doesn't seem to be a mid-grade or budget high-grade sealer in this category. The next lowest-price nozzle vacuum sealer seems to be in the 2000 dollar range. Bags for this sealer cost about 10 cents or so each instead of 40 cents or so. The down-side is that it is trickier to use. My wife threw her arms up in frustration with it but I was able to use it without any trouble after a few failed attempts. Besides the savings, which may or may not be worth the extra effort, I like it mostly because I can vacuum seal Mylar bags. This gives me a stronger storage container with better barrier specifications and light blocking as well. Another new tool that we bought for vacuum packing is an 18-inch table top impulse sealer. This is the type about 100 dollars - not the really fancy ones. It is amazingly fast. It seals the Food Saver bags as well as the Mylar bags - but no vacuum. What I used it for today was to quickly turn a bunch of over-sized 8" x 16" Mylar bags at 35 cents each into two perfectly sized 4" x 16" bags for spaghetti at about 18 cents each. These bags are heavy enough that we didn't have to use the spaghetti boots that I described using with the Food Saver bags in another thread. This sealer is great because it has an effective 100% duty cycle - at least for us. We can seal as fast as we can prepare bags to onto the sealer. Your mileage may vary :). Using the specialized sealer for bag making/resizing work saves the duty-cycle-limited vacuum sealers for doing vacuum work. This greatly increased our production rate when sealing rice and pastas. I think that the rice and pastas packed this way with a thrown in 100cc oxygen absorber will last for the rest of our lifetimes.