AAR: RTO and Advanced RTO, by Trevor Zantos

This is just a quick brief, a full review will follow.  This was my first chance to attend a Brushbeater class in person, and it would be an understatement to say I highly recommend it.  Joe Dolio, of www.tactical-wisdom.com fame, told me to go to the radio course, learn how to do some comms he said, won’t be too hard it’s just two days, well since you’re already here, might as well stay two more days, it’s really only building on what you already did, it’s only a smidge harder, not much math (This last part was per NC Scout).

An example page of a trigram guide and a One Time Pad (OTP)

Then it’s like, well, there may be some math since y’all are going to make some antennas. But basic multiplication and division, arts and crafts (I added some rattle can paint for flair+10), ok, I’m keeping up, mostly, I think. Building knowledge, trying it in field training exercises.

My HSLD rattle-can tractor supply special jungle antenna

Next, we start adding more levels of complexity; instead of transmitting words, we start transmitting in trigrams .

Those are fun; one can see why they would use them; the next part was using OG one-time pads (OTP). Now that was mentally tricky.

*Sidebar* My personal phrase for the week became “Teamwork makes the dream work.”  By nature and by circumstances, I have worked alone more often than not, and it takes some time for me to integrate myself into working in teams.  The attendees I was fortunate enough to attend the classes with and NC Scout’s intentional course design and teaching style helped to remind me in very tangible ways that working in teams isn’t a force multiplier; it can work as multiplying your capabilities by orders of magnitude. I, for one, needed to be reminded of that.

As per usual, the class would take what we had been taught, try doing it in class, and ask any questions we may have. Then there was a field training exercise, and each group had a training cadre member for support. (Notice a theme?)

One of the exercises was that each group was given a message in the clear, then required to encode it using a one-time pad, and send it to the other team. The other team then had to decode it and then send back the message in the clear to check everyone’s work. As one could imagine, we all made mistakes, and much was learned.

(One page of our trigram guide, our OTP, with Codex)

Now we started cooking with some gasoline:

1: More arts and crafts(true Appalachiastan style antennas)

2: Take a plain text message and convert it using our trigrams

3: Properly encode the trigrams using the full OTP with the codex and series of numbers (double, triple check your work, yes yours truly made mistakes, often)

4: Once everyone in the group is absolutely sure that the message is G2G, we used a tablet, a cable, and a radio and sent a burst transmission to the other team,

5. The team replied using the same Technique with a different OTP and the series of five number groups came up on our tablet and the process repeated itself in reverse.

A zoom-in of one page of the trigram

Details on our codex aka number values for letters

I’m barely scratching the service; the training was fantastic, and the people and experience were even better. If you get a chance to take any courses with NC Scout do it! I’ll be writing a more complete review to come, as well as some follow-ons as I acquire some new kit informed by my experience in class and my own needs, etc.

Example of an OTP we used during training

Here’s a handy link to course dates

I appreciate y’all taking the time to read my rambling. If you have questions, please ask, and I’ll try to answer.  I sincerely enjoyed the people I got to meet at the course, and I look forward to meeting others in times to come. God Bless America

Trevor Zantos

Linktr.ee/zantossolutions