RTO Cards, by GuerrillaLogistician

“I have a deck of cards for you, buddy,” the smiling wirey guy said as he sat next to Franklin on the deck.

“I don’t gamble, James, you know that, and if you are offering it to me, I don’t want to trade for it either,” Franklin said, looking over at James as he held an unprinted can of some local beer.  A very sharp church key can opener lay next to the recently opened can on the table.  The old can opener, designed to cut neat little triangles into cans of liquid, came back into fashion as companies cut every corner they could to save money and production time.  This old convenience became a modern logistical necessity once more. Luckily, they were cheap and easy to make as well. Conflict in the US had decreased everything from manpower to those little extra steps in manufacturing that had made life a little more convenient.  Now, people got beer and even clean water in aluminum cans and would pierce them with a knife or an old-school can opener.

“Look, brother, I know we have had our differences,” James continued after he let Franklin air out for a second.

Franklin cut him off, “No, you look. I bought beer, and you got me cases of water. You swore you needed some gold backs for the deal, so now I am out my gold, and I have a bunch of water with the big obvious W stamped on the bottom.”

“You got beer now,” James countered

“No damn thanks to you, and I still want some beer I am owed,” Franklin gruffed.

“Hey, brother, I got swindled as well. How was I supposed to know?” James said with a hurt expression.

“Turn the damn can over and see the big W stamped on the bottom, maybe” he looked at James, eyes narrowed as if James was a snake.  Franklin shifted his body, rotating away from James, ending the conversation.

“Look, brother, you are now doing encryption in the field for the teams, and you frankly seem to be handling the stress of this not so well.” James said in a calm voice as he pushed over a very cold can and a little green compass pouch. “I can’t make up the beer issue now,” he said, emphasizing the now, “but I will make it up in time, brother, and you need this.”

Franklin turned back to James, eyeing him for the catch, “What is this?” he asked, eyeballing him and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“It is an apology beer I got super cold because the medic owed me.” He took the can, lifted it, and said, “See, not a W on either end.”  Setting the can down in front of Franklin closer and sliding the can opener over, he got serious.  “Look, I am in charge of trying to figure out your mistakes when you transmit your messages, and you passed the training, but you are making mistakes,” holding his hand up to prevent Franklin from interjecting.  “This is common, brother. It isn’t a big deal; stressing about encryption practices, fireteam needs, etc., everyone messes up.” he kept going.  “These cards should help you get better with both the encryption decryption part of your job.”

Ever do something for a while and really get good at it, only to quit for a long time?  Then, when you return to it, you realize you are so rusty that you are messing things up and making mistakes you wouldn’t have before. Well, I have faced that very issue after taking Historian’s HF class. I won’t dive into class too deeply, but it was an HF class based on near-vertical incidence skywave. Not only does this man understand how to hunt down HF, but he also understands how to make it near impossible to find somebody. You would need the RTO class and probably your general license to get a good handle on what he’s teaching, but suffice it to say he has used a lot of knowledge and packed in many skills in a limited amount of time. I’m fairly adept at teaching radios but I also understand how to run trigrams and One Time Pads.  At least, that’s what I thought because I have taught this several times and studied it long before taking the RTO course.

So off I went, practicing a bit of my knowledge and what do I find out, but I’d forgotten to do a one-time pad quickly and accurately. Retouching this past knowledge came from the fact that I was reading a book called Between Silk and Cyanide, which was recommended at the course.  He also recommended London calling the North Pole, but I’ve yet to read that book. One of the main topics in the book was how encryption was handled and how people made mistakes, and I thought it was a great time to retouch those skills. I also wanted to see what little mess-ups I could make along the way, as that was a key point in the book. In fact, the Germans were so good at encrypting and transmitting Britain’s own poem codes that they were nearly flawless in execution, unlike most of the people in the field who hadn’t been captured. If you’ve ever gone shooting on a range and done really well but then done the same course of fire under even a clock, you’ll notice that your skills have degraded due to some artificial stress. Mistakes will be made during encryption, especially when somebody is working in a hostile environment with enemies hunting them down.

Leo Marks, the author and real-life cryptographer, tracked these people’s mistakes before they even left on their operations and had set up key techniques to assist those captured and warned Britain about this issue. I made a couple of hints to this previously in other articles, specifically the one on the 6100 and even the one on the Jockey 320, which is more of a tactical setup of defending somebody who’s transmitting than really discussing encryption in general. I hinted at this because, generally speaking, it would take nearly a class to make it understandable to the common person just reading one of my articles.

So how do we address problems with improper encryption, as I had just done in my retraining of myself? I’d done something so simple as to flip how the encryption was done on an OTP to make it unreadable not only by the receiving station but also because I couldn’t decrypt my own code. Well, I pulled out something I had picked up, I believe before I went to my first RTO class. I am guessing some of you know the author A. American; you know he’s been a prepper for a long time, and he’s also reached out and engaged with other people in this sphere. One of those is Nick Meacher of https://fortunefavorstheprepared.com/, and if you check in the shop tab, he has these little plastic cards for various areas of knowledge. I’m going to focus on obviously the RTO standpoint and encryption, but there is much more to his cards than just that.

These cards do not cover absolutely everything and will not make you a skilled person overnight. What they will do is give you those common basic knowledge points to jog your memory and remind you how to do something.  These cards range everywhere from how to make an HF antenna to how to figure out the dipole lengths with pre-setup length guides for your standard ham operator. He has AmRRON frequency cards, GMRS, MURS, and common simplex channels.  He also has cards about reading chemical placards and much more.  One of my favorite cards was the one that allowed you to encode and decode numbered OTP very easily. It was a simple graph that allowed you to look at your plain text number, then look at your key number, And figure out what the encryption number was.

If you were in a hurry or you had brain fog, this would allow you to double-check the simple math trick in your head without really doing a lot of work. This was something I found very interesting and actually fairly useful when we did the RTO class to catch myself making common mistakes. The math used doesn’t carry like your normal way of adding and subtracting. Not that it’s difficult, but when your mind is dealing with numbers in a different way for so long, sometimes you’ll make a little mess up. Suffice it to say, these cards aren’t horribly expensive, only costing a couple of bucks, and because he uses a laser etching on the cards, the writing stays fairly prominent even with heavy travel. As you can see from my card, some of them are a little more worn than others, but I’ve had these decks of cards for over five years now. They fit in a compass pouch, are reasonably priced, are waterproof, and take up very little space.  As you can see in the photo, the left card has been rolling around in my gear for years, with the right card being just over a year.  A wet-erase marker also makes these cards good for notes yet