A couple of years ago I wrote a commentary on the role of the Special Purpose Rifle, which was originally a special operations project to make a more accurate carbine than what the M4 afforded, providing ground units with precision fire capability while keeping magazines and ammunition loadouts standard across the team. My buddy and …
Continue reading The Recce Carbine: Jack Of All Trades, Master Of A Few?
Making the standard AR-15 into something more than an intermediate carbine is an old concept, going back to nearly the genesis of the weapon itself. It really hit its stride in the early 2000s with the Special Purpose Rifle (SPR) concept- a Small Unit level Designated Marksman’s rifle. It’s advantages are numerous; light weight, accurate …
Folks, I've been inundated with emails and course requests. I'm answering between 50-75 emails a day, and that's on top of coordinating people for courses. This is not a complaint, hell, if anything its validation. The free market spoke and in this case its loud and thunderous...cue the inner Sally Field. But that said, please, …
Going back to the early days of the Brushbeater blog, the Jungle Antenna post has been and continues to be one of the more popular posts I’ve done. And for good reason- I wrote it to be used. It’s the antenna every student in the RTO course builds and one of the designs they get …
Continue reading The Jungle Antenna Revisited: Task and Purpose for the Partisan and Prepper
The cornerstone of why you need communications in the field is unit coordination. Teams must have a way to relay what they see and update the situation to other partner teams in the field and to a command location. This is what’s known as Inter-Team Communications and should be thought of as your lifeline for …
Continue reading Guidelines for Integrating Inter-Team Communications Into Your Kit
The use of Directional Antennas are the most basic way to improve communications security even if all you’ve got is a set of inexpensive radios. In Part 1 we talked about the theory of use and why they’re important to have for the dedicated RTO of a small unit. Sending your signal in one direction …
Continue reading Directional Antennas For The Small Unit, Part 2
One of the biggest misconceptions behind communications security revolves around misunderstanding not just the role of the equipment but also how it functions. A big part of that is the basics of antenna theory. For most radio seems to be a plug and play kinda deal- it either works, or it doesn’t. Antennas are a …
Continue reading Directional Antennas For The Small Unit, Part 1
I've had a lot of inquiries about the Alumni Weekend on the Training Calendar. In short, its a laid back weekend of meeting other students you may not have had a course with, to re-connect with those you did, and to build on some follow on skills and share knowledge. We're going to be hitting …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQbQTv3aMkU Pretty neat bit of history and something we cover in the Advanced RTO Course.
Since I started the Brushbeater blog project back in late 2015, a constant question I’ve got in emails has been about communications security and very often how to use encryption over the radio. Back when I got into the civilian side of operational communications and I no longer had uncle sugar providing my equipment, I …
Continue reading No Encryption, No Problem: Analog Radio Operations For Guerrilla Units
