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NATO Alphabet – Do You Know Your ABCs?

By
Patrick McCarthy
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Most of us have played, or at least heard of, the telephone game. Each person whispers a phrase to the next person in line, and by the end of the process, the message is completely garbled. This communication breakdown is funny at the time, but when it happens in real life, it’s less amusing… and more frustrating.

In order to be clearly heard when speaking, we need a system that’s phonetically distinct—that way no one’s left wondering if you said “here”, “ear”, or “beer”. When spelling words over the phone or radio, many people often say “A as in apple” or “B as in boy”. However, these aren’t standardized, and may lead to more confusion if someone says “K as in knight” or “N as in night”.

The standard NATO alphabet, established in 1956.
The standard NATO alphabet, established in 1956.

Fortunately, an international consortium of military forces have established a system of phonetic code words for this purpose: the NATO alphabet. This alphabet is is used to spell parts of a message containing letters to avoid confusion, especially for important military objectives such as targets and waypoints. It’s also useful to us as civilians, since it makes communicating clearly much easier.

British telecommunications provider VoIP Broker created the following infographic with pictograms that should help you memorize the alphabet.

NATO alphabet infographic

So, do you know your Alfas, Bravos, and Charlies yet, or are you still scratching your head and saying “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”?

Give it some time, and come back to study and test yourself later. You never know when it could come in handy, especially over cell phone conversations with weak signal. Plus, it sounds a lot more professional than saying “X as in… uhhhh… xylophone?”

Sugar-Based Polymer for Water Purification

By
Patrick McCarthy
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0

As survivalists, many of us tend to favor traditional tools over high-tech cutting-edge gadgetry. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, not necessarily. Many of the technologies we use today are centuries old, and have considerable room for improvement. Sometimes, embracing new technology can dramatically improve our way of life.

Water purification pollution runoff
Water purification is a serious problem, especially when it comes to removing industrial pollutants.

One example of this is carbon water filtration. Civilizations have been using this technique to remove contaminants from water for hundreds, or even thousands of years. There’s even some evidence that it may have been used in ancient Egypt. It works well at removing chlorine, sediment, volatile organic compounds, and even bad taste from water. For a beginner’s guide to carbon water filtration, check out this helpful article from All About Water Filters.

Water purification warning sign

However, scientists may have recently discovered something that has the potential to be even better than carbon filtration. It’s known as β-cyclodextrin (β-CD or Beta-CD), and it’s a “porous, cross-linked complex” constructed of loops of sugar molecules.

This polymer removes BPA (a potentially harmful component of plastics) just like carbon filters can, but it does so in as little as 10 seconds. That’s up to 200 times faster than common activated carbon filters on the market today. Not only that, but the new β-cyclodextrin purifier was found to effectively remove “model aromatic compounds, pesticides, plastic components, and pharmaceuticals” from water, significantly outperforming many carbon filters.

This new polymer is more effective at removing volatile organic compounds, such as those from industrial runoff.
This new polymer is more effective at removing organic compounds, such as those from pesticides and industrial runoff.

Best of all, it’s reusable (although it requires rinsing the filter in alcohol), and initial reports indicate it might even cost less than conventional carbon filters. Obviously, more testing still needs to be done, but this new purifier is looking promising so far.

For more information on the new β-cyclodextrin purifier, check out this article on Ars Technica.

Survival Scenarios: Ocean or Desert?

By
Patrick McCarthy
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Where would you rather survive: lost at sea or stranded in the Sahara desert? That’s our hypothetical question of the day, and we want to hear your decision in the poll below.

This or that ocean
Water, water everywhere… but not a drop to drink.

Before you answer, we’ll provide some more information on the circumstances. In either location, you’ll need to survive for 7 days, and you’ll be alone. The weather will be clear all week, with no rain on the forecast. There’s little to no hope of rescue in either case, and you’ll have the same gear in both situations, listed below:

  • A fixed-blade knife
  • 3 emergency ration bars
  • A metal canteen containing 2 liters of clean water
  • The clothes on your back (long pants, a T-shirt, a hooded windbreaker, athletic shoes, and an analog wristwatch)
This or that desert sand
Windswept sand and scorching heat. That’s about all you’ll find in the barren Sahara desert.

In the ocean scenario, you’ll be stuck smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, in an inflatable rubber survival raft (with sun shade on top). In the desert scenario, you obviously won’t have a raft, but you will have a 1-person tent with some sturdy anchors for the shifting sands. Otherwise, you’ll have nothing but what’s listed above.

Make your choice below, and feel free to justify your decision in the comments section.

Survival Scenarios will be a recurring feature on OFFGRIDweb.com, and will ask you to make a difficult choice between two or more hypothetical situations.

We don’t just want you to read our posts silently—we want to hear what you have to say. That’s why we’re working hard to provide more interactive content like quizzes, polls, and giveaways. Got any suggestions? Post them in the comments below, or head over to our Facebook page.

Splitting Logs Without an Axe

By
Patrick McCarthy
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Splitting logs without axe

When you’re surviving in the outdoors, constructing a fire is a high priority. It allows you to stay warm, boil water, cook food, repel predators, and provides a tremendous morale boost.

For short-term campsites, using a few kindling sticks and small tree branches may be enough to sustain a fire, but they burn out far too quickly to keep the fire going continuously. Sooner or later, you’re going to need to break down some larger logs into quarters for your campfire, or for use in our preferred technique, the Swedish torch.

Splitting logs campfire 02

However, if you don’t have a proper axe, splitting logs can be tricky. For small logs, you can use a fixed blade knife and a piece of hard wood to baton the wood down to size. For logs that are wider than the length of your knife, though, this won’t get the job done—you’ll need to use the wedge technique.

This trick works similarly to batoning, but instead of hammering your knife through the length of the log, you’ll be constructing hardwood wedges. Note that we said hardwood, as softer wood will buckle or crack if you start pounding it into a log. Here’s a video that demonstrates log splitting with wedges:

You’ll still want a knife of some sort to get the split started. The video host recommends a fixed-blade knife, but we’re sure it could be done with a sturdy folding knife too. All you need is a crack on one end of the log that’s big enough to insert the wedge, and you’ll be good to go.

Making a Blowgun in the Amazon

By
Patrick McCarthy
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If you’ve never seen a blowgun used in real life, it may seem like a comically outdated concept: a tube with a dart, powered by nothing but the air in your lungs. Besides, that’s what the stereotypical cannibal tribesmen use in movies, right?

You might think we have surpassed this weapon with modern technology, but think again. Much like the humble slingshot, the “primitive” blowgun is still in use today, and it’s most definitely a deadly and pinpoint-accurate weapon in the right hands.

Blowguns have been used by cultures around the world for thousands of years, due to their simplicity and effectiveness. Using tools no more advanced than a knife, machete, tin can, file, and some cordage, residents of the Amazon jungle can create these weapons. YouTube channel InnerBark Outdoors traveled to the Amazon to document the locals making a blowgun:

So, maybe you now have an appreciation for traditional blowguns, but you probably also recognize that this design isn’t practical for most of us. After all, many of these materials won’t be easy to find in the suburbs. Fortunately, there are many guides on how to make a modern blowgun using materials available from any hardware store.

For example, here’s an Instructables article on making a blowgun out of PVC pipe, construction paper, beads, and nails. However, be aware that blowguns are illegal in California, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C., as well as in Canada. They’re also certainly not a toy, so be cautious if you do decide to make one.

Xecutioner Arrow Broadheads

By
Patrick McCarthy
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Archery is a skill we can really appreciate, as it provides a way to accurately and silently hunt game at a distance. This puts food on your table, doesn’t consume valuable ammo, and doesn’t alert everyone in a several-mile radius. It’s perfect for a survival scenario, but you’ll need the right equipment to maximize your effectiveness and take out game animals quickly.

Deer

One of the most important parts of an archery setup is the business end: the arrow heads. If you’re using the wrong heads, you’ll end up maiming your prey or losing your arrow. What you need is pinpoint accuracy, deep penetration, and bone-splitting performance. Xecutioner Broadheads has released a lineup of “born to kill” arrowheads that meet these needs.

Here’s a list of some of their offerings:

Xecutioner arrow broadheads lead photo

 

Xecutioner 75gr. Xpandable – Brand new lightweight 75gr. Xpandable broadhead. Field-point-accurate performance with a 1.5″ cutting diameter and sharp .050″ stainless steel blades. Adjustable ferrule settings for low poundage bows, high poundage bows, and crossbows.

Xecutioner arrow broadheads 02

Xecutioner 100gr. Xpandable – Multiple colors, 2.5″ cutting diameter, .040″ blade thickness, razor-sharp tip, plus adjustable ferrule settings for low poundage bows, high poundage bows, and crossbows.

Xecutioner arrow broadheads 03

Xecutioner 125gr. Hybrid – Two-blade fixed cutting head with expanding blades. Expanding blades deliver a 3.5″ cutting diameter with .050″ blade thickness.

Xecutioner arrow broadheads 04

Xecutioner 125gr. Fixed – Two primary fixed cutting blades and four integrated bleeder blades deliver a 1.5″ cutting diameter and shorter blood-tracking. Blade thickness is .050″.

Xecutioner arrow broadheads 05

Xecutioner Tim Wells Signature Series Slocker– Ideal as a stand-alone small game head or modular collar placed behind your primary broadhead. Features body-shocking 1.25″ diameter to stop small game, turkeys and other prey in their tracks.

For more information on Xecutioner arrow broadheads, visit xecutionerbroadheads.com.

Water Bottle Lantern

By
Patrick McCarthy
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As survivalists, we love finding new uses for existing tools from our bug-out bags. After all, knowledge weighs nothing, and if you’ve already got the gear, why not make the most of it? This trick creates diffuse, ambient light using two items you’re almost guaranteed to have with you: a flashlight and a transparent water bottle. It may be seemingly obvious, but we’re surprised how many people have never tried it.

A simple plastic water bottle works well, even if you find it in a recycling bin.
A simple plastic water bottle works well for this task, even if you find it in a recycling bin.

A flashlight (or headlamp) on its own is great for illuminating a a targeted area, but it’s not ideal for lighting up a 360-degree space. For that task, we have lanterns, but they tend to be bulkier and fewer people carry them on the go. So, how do you turn the focused light of a flashlight into the widespread light of a lantern? Simple—shine it into a water bottle.

Here’s an example of how it’s done, via YouTube channel Smell N Roses:

The technique can be used with virtually any clear bottle and any light emitter. Cell phone flashlight and a soft drink cup? Sure. Nalgene and a headlamp? Yep. Fish bowl and an LED strobe? You’ll look silly, but knock yourself out.

If you’d like to plan ahead more, you can even get a water bottle that has built-in LED lights and a solar panel charger in the cap. Pretty nifty.

Water bottle lantern 02
The Davis LightCap water bottle has built-in LEDs and even a solar panel for charging.

No matter what option you choose, remember that your ordinary water bottle can make a great lantern in a pinch. It’s useful knowledge that can make a dark campsite a lot more livable.

Declassified Nuclear Targets

By
Patrick McCarthy
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0

In order to understand the future, we often must study the past. The Cold War was an era of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviets, leading to many nuclear near misses and narrowly-averted disasters. During this time period, both world superpowers were scoping each other out, looking for weaknesses and strategic targets to eliminate if it came down to mutually assured destruction. While we may never find out the Soviets’ exact plans for attacking the USA, we did recently get a rare glimpse into the U.S. Government’s plan of attack if SHTF.

This month, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a list of the above locations, all of which were being targeted for annihilation by the U.S. Military if nuclear war broke out. The 1959 Strategic Air Command (SAC) analysis of now-declassified nuclear targets includes more than 1,100 airfields in the Soviet bloc (blue icons on the map above), prioritized in order of significance.

However, this U.S. Government study wasn’t just focused on sparsely-populated military targets. It also included a list of over 1,200 major urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction” (red icons on the map above). The targets included cities throughout the USSR, China, and East Germany—major population centers such as Moscow, Leningrad, Beijing, East Berlin, and Warsaw.

General Curtis LeMay, Commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command in 1959. (Photo source: U.S. National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG 342B, Box 507 B&W)

The SAC’s study recommended the use of at least one 60-megaton bomb, both as a deterrent and because it would produce “significant results” against the Soviets. To put 60 megatons into perspective, that’s approximately 4,200 times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed much of Hiroshima, Japan (and killed 66,000). The most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested was Russia’s Tsar Bomba, gauged at 50 megatons, and its seismic shock circled the globe three times.

Imagining the result of a 60-megaton bomb detonated in the center of Moscow or Beijing is reminiscent of Robert Oppenheimer’s thoughts after witnessing the Trinity explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

nuclear near misses

Despite the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it’s now clear just how close we came to global destruction. All the plans were in place—both sides were just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

Gear Nostalgia: Timepieces for Daily and Survival Use

By
Offgrid Staff
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“It takes a licking and keeps on ticking” was a slogan coined by a watch company over 60 years ago. The motto may be old, but the idea it presents is as pertinent as ever. A reliable daily-worn wristwatch is an indispensible tool to have in just about any situation you might encounter. During mundane times, you can reference it to count down the minutes until your lunch break. In more challenging times, you can use it to do everything from guiding yourself out of the wilderness to calculating the ETA to an objective. With so many watches available on the market, how do you go about selecting which one is right for you?

Backup (Two Is One… )

Firstly, we suggest that you have more than one watch at your disposal. That piece of advice is more than just an excuse for you to go buy cool new “toys” — although it can serve as a bonus reason, we won’t snitch on you. Having backups for any type of equipment is always a prudent move, especially when you have the responsibility of planning for the unknown. The obvious reason you want to have extra watches readily available is in case one malfunctions or breaks. The other is that if one powers down for one reason or another, it’s very likely that your backup will still be going. In a survival situation, you probably won’t have the luxury of asking a passerby what time it is. You have to supply that info for yourself. After you remedy the inoperable watch by changing its battery, winding its action, or charging it back to full power, you can reference your backup watch to get the correct time.

Selection

There are probably hundreds of thousands of watches floating around. Some are inexpensive dime-store models, and some can cost as much as a luxury car. Where do you begin your search? The key is to keep in mind that you are looking for a watch with features that suit your particular needs and is tough enough to survive abuse. Other factors to consider are what type of power it runs on, your budget, and its style (this final factor is important to some, less important to others). Let’s examine some of the criteria that you want to look out for.

Toughness

How does the watch fare in your intended environment? How much abuse can it take? All the elements of nature apply here — your watch should be able to withstand at least a moderate to extreme amount of heat, cold, sand, water, moisture, and impact force. You want a unit that you can rely on and that can take punishment. This criteria might be hard to figure out though, without actually abusing it yourself.

Some external factors to weigh are the manufacturer’s reputation and warranty policies. Sure, if all hell is breaking loose, you’re not going to call them for a warranty repair. But if a company offers a solid warranty and has a good reputation for making watches that stand up to abuse, at least you know they have confidence that their product will most likely function as intended. When in doubt, test it out yourself by performing your own endurance tests.

Power

How is the watch powered? Mechanical watches require either manual or automatic winding for them to stay powered. That’s great because you don’t need anything but yourself to power it. It also means you shouldn’t forget to wind it.

There are battery and solar types as well. Extra watch batteries are small and easily carried, so you should always have some in your pack of supplies. If things get apocalyptic, watch batteries would probably be near the last to be scavenged and might be easier to find than more common varieties. If you do opt for a battery-powered watch, also be sure that it’s easily replaceable and doesn’t require special tools to do so.

Solar watches can oftentimes be charged by artificial light in addition to natural sunlight. They can run for months and months on end between charges so if you crawl in a cave to hibernate, you needn’t worry about charging your watch for a long time.

Features

All watches tell time — after all, that’s their primary function. Looking past that, you’ll find watches that can do everything from telling you where you are via GPS to letting you know when the next storm is coming by forecasting the weather. What’s your altitude on that mountain? What temperature is it? It also does you no good if your watch can tell you 30 different pieces of information, but you don’t know how to access and understand them. Learn about what features a watch offers, weigh that with what your needs are, and how you can use that information to your advantage.

Let’s take the barometer function for example. Many watches offer it, but do you know how it can be used? It measures atmospheric pressure, and one use for it is to generally tell what weather trends you are about to encounter. It gets complicated, but the basics are that by monitoring the rising and falling trends of a barometer, you can generally tell that a storm might be approaching (continuously falling barometer reading) or that better weather is likely to come (rising barometer). Truly understanding the many functions of your watch is imperative.

Do you want a digital display or an old-fashioned big-hand/little-hand analog model? Those are all personal choices that you’ll have to make. Digital displays are easier to read with a quick glance, and some like having hands so that they can be used as a makeshift compass (see “No Compass, No GPS, No Problem” in OFFGRID Winter 2014). Some offer both. The choice is yours.

Budget

You don’t need to break the bank to find a quality watch. There are plenty of affordable models that are dependable and have useful features. Keep that in mind if you’re getting a backup or two in conjunction with your primary wrist-mounted clock. Sure, it would be nice to have several nice watches in your stable if you have the scratch, but it’s not necessary.

Style

We’re not above saying that style counts. There are those out there that will say function trumps form every time, and we’re certainly in agreement with that. But we also appreciate a good-looking timepiece and say that a little style doesn’t hurt either. Consider all of the above factors when selecting a watch and also pick one that you like the look of as well. After all, you’ll have it for a long time to come and will be looking at it at least a few times a day. You might as well pick one that’s easy on the eyes.

[buyersguide title=”Timepiece Buyer’s Guide” ids=”2471, 2474, 2476, 2478, 2480, 2482, 2486, 2488″]

Pen Shaped Flashlights Buyer’s Guide

By
Offgrid Staff
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Sometimes the best place to stash a flashlight is in those pen loops you find in everything from backpacks and laptop cases to pant pockets and even body armor admin pouches. But for that to happen, you’ll need a flashlight that is thin and shaped like a pen.

In this installment of HIGHLights, we look at specialized lights that are not only slim and compact, but pack a powerful burst of bright light as well. You never know when you’ll need a light, but having one when and where you need it can make all the difference. We didn’t have to search far and wide for them, as there are many great pen-shaped flashlights available. Here’s a look at a few up close.

[buyersguide title=”Pen Shaped Flashlights Buyer’s Guide” ids=”2418, 2431, 2436, 2441, 2446, 2451, 2456, 2461″]

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