brushbeater

Scenes From A Recent RTO Course

IMG_1647 - CopyI’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to get as many people and groups trained as humanly possible over the last couple of months. Rough times are definitely on the horizon, and as I tell everyone in my classes when asked, the best thing you can do is train. Get off the internet, get off the couch, stop reading op-eds and start doing something. The opposition sure as hell has been.

Many people ask just what the RTO Course is- a radio class? What if I have no experience? What if I’m a 30-year Extra class? Doesn’t matter. Long story short, it’s a class on tactical communications. We focus on basic skills and build up to improvised infrastructure, all off the grid, then apply it in a small unit. Just how do you create a local network, even if all you’ve got in a box full of analog HT radios? Where does a mobile unit or digital radio sets fit into the mix? How do we build our own antennas out of common off the shelf components to maximize what gear we’ve got? Where does HF fit into the mix and how to we best use it? How do we effectively use our gear without it being cumbersome or getting us compromised while in the bush?

Gear layout before a patrol. How do we make inter-squad communications work?
An improvised Jungle Antenna being prepped for deployment.
Students attaching the improvised antenna to a hasty frame.
Antenna rigged and ready.
The OPFOR you’ve been observing is popping colored smoke- what do you do? How do you relay this in a competent way to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC)? How do we get that information to our Analysis and Control Element (ACE) to develop a usable intelligence product?
The new CTX-10, currently under evaluation, demonstrating its strengths as a field HF unit.

If you want to know how all this works in a real world environment, come on out. We build the skills necessary to create infrastructure off grid to support small unit operations. This class and quite a few more are on the schedule. World events are getting more serious everyday and it’s looking dark. The best preparedness is knowledge through training. Where are the holes in your program?

 

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