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Old 04-01-2016, 08:50 AM
mmartin798 mmartin798 is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2014
Location: Michigan
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The first thing you would likely see is much lower power and range. It's hard justify 25-50KW of electricity for AM broadcasts, even on a part-time basis. But even at lower power, you should be able to detect the signal at a fair distance, say 200 km as the signal can bounce off the atmosphere. At those distance, you probably will not be able to make out much of any of the content from spoken words or music over the static, though Morse code can still be deciphered through the static. It is also likely that AM would be chosen over FM as a very simple AM receiver can be built with essentially a pile of junk. You can see some examples of foxhole and POW radios here:

http://bizarrelabs.com/foxhole.htm


As for ranges for the AN/PRC-68, the 4th edition is right; 300m for the short antenna supplied with the radio and 1.6 km using the longer antenna from a PRC-70. They are line of sight, so you can't be blocked by buildings or terrain. Vegetation is does not block the signal much.

The AN/PRC-70 is a bit more complicated. You can pretty much count on 40 km for FM voice communications and 2400 km for Morse code (CW) and single side band (SSB) voice if the operator knew the best operating frequency for the day. If the PRC-70 was connected to the vehicle and using it's antenna and amplifier, knowing the maximum usable frequency (MUF) is less important. One possible scenario here is that Prime Base or other major installation can send out the predicted MUF weekly or daily via CW to enable long range voice on SSB.

The from range from a PRC-68 to a PRC-70 using the standard PRC-68 antenna is about 1 km, because of the better sensitivity of the long PRC-70 antenna. The range from a PRC-70 to a PRC-68 is about 40 km. This means it is possible to send messages to a squad on foot, but they may not be able to reply.

If you have two PRC-70s, you can do some interesting things. The PRC-70s can be connected to retransmit everything it receives. This lets you have two nets of PRC-68 set up and able to communicate at greater range and even over a hill if the PRC-70s are at the top has line of sight to all the PRC-68s.

As to the kinds of Project radio traffic to expect, it's your game. Just remember there are factions that have Project equipment. This kind of makes the automated broadcasts questionable, since the sources would have been checked out by Krell or KFS at some point. One thing that happened in one of my games is the team sent out a repeating CW message and got a reply back from "Morrow Eastern Command." The Command requested the team's location and offered to send them aid. The team didn't bite, but doesn't mean that the KFS Secret Police would not try that trick again to locate newly awakened teams.
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