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Phoenix, AZ
Joined October 2009
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No handheld radio can bridge that distance.
Look into Starlink Mini.
The Roam plan is $55 a month.
After 30 days, it can be converted to a standby plan for $10 a month.
It's the best option for long-distance communication without a ham license or an expensive radio.
Supernatural Saturday November 14, 2026 xitter.gq/i/broadcasts/2dKRgpKjo…
Praying Medic retweeted
Sorry for the long-ass post, I did some OSINT shit.
I pulled live public flight feeds, weather radar status, and space weather data to see what's actually going on during today's nationwide FAA grounding.
TL;DR: radar, GPS, and weather sensors are all working fine. What broke is the long-distance communications network that lets the FAA's 22 regional air traffic control centers talk to high-altitude planes and hand them off to each other.
When people think of air traffic control, they picture the glass tower at an airport. Those towers only handle takeoffs, landings, and nearby airspace. Once a plane climbs out, it's handed off to one of 22 regional Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) — giant facilities that manage high-altitude cruising traffic across whole regions of the country.
Normally, those 22 centers are regionally isolated: if one loses power or a local fiber line, neighboring centers absorb or route traffic around it. Having all 22 degrade at once is virtually unheard of because it means a shared national backbone failed, leaving no healthy neighbor to take over.
That's why the FAA's Command Center used such stark, blanket wording ("Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety... all airports are ground stopped until further notice"*) — it's standard protocol when a national-level freeze has to happen immediately before engineers even know how long repairs will take ("safety issue" means "oh shit, stop" in aviation circles, unlike with AI companies).
All 22 centers losing comms at once is, indeed, "extraordinary circumstances".
Here's what the live data shows:
1. US airspace is emptying out fast.
Normally on a Friday evening, thousands of planes are in the air over the US. In live tracking data from OpenSky Network, the number of airborne planes over the lower 48 is steadily draining as flights land and no new commercial departures take off:
• 6:36 PM EST: 1,083 airborne
• 6:42 PM EST: 1,035 airborne
• 6:49 PM EST: 990 airborne
There are zero emergency distress codes broadcasting.
2. Major airports are, predictably, stacked.
Looking within 30 miles of major hubs around 6:37 PM EST (`adsb.lol`), almost nothing is moving:
• NYC/JFK area: 8 in the air vs. 67 on the ground
• LAX: 14 in the air vs. 40 on the ground
• Dallas (DFW): 7 vs. 36
• Denver (DEN): 13 vs. 29
• Atlanta (ATL): 5 vs. 25
• Chicago (ORD): 9 vs. 24
• DC (DCA): 8 vs. 22
A lot of the coastal airports had to stop accepting diverts.
3. The few planes still taking off are enlightening.
Across the entire US at 6:36 PM, only aircraft were taking off (that is: below 10,000 feet and climbing). They fell into two clear buckets:
• 3 international widebody jets (`DAL281` out of Seattle, `DAL156` out of NYC, and `AFR71E` out of Newark), matching the FAA's note that international flights are being handled case-by-case.
• Small private planes and a couple of business jets flying under VFR (visual flight rules) — essentially, staying below 18,000 feet, where pilots don't need en-route air traffic control clearances.
Honorable mention to the 1 Coast Guard/military helicopter climbing near Tampa, out of 29 military aircraft tracked nationwide.
4. Weather radar isn't down, and there's no solar storm or GPS jamming.
A lot of people wondered if today's FAA ground stop, rumors of a National Weather Service outage, and Microsoft's 365 outage were all connected. Checking the raw feeds:
• Weather radar: 199 out of 208 US Doppler radar stations are actively sending fresh scans (within the last 15 minutes). The "NWS outage" rumors were website and caching glitches, not offline radar hardware.
• GPS & Space Weather: NOAA space weather is completely quiet (`Kp = 0`), and aircraft GPS accuracy readings across the Midwest and Northeast look totally normal.
• Local airport radar & towers: Local FAA ground-station radar broadcasts and local airport control towers are still up and transmitting.
So, local sensors and local towers are fine.
The failure is specifically in the long-haul telecommunications backbone connecting the FAA's 22 en-route centers to their remote radio sites — which is why en-route controller frequencies went quiet while local towers, weather radars, and low-altitude visual flights kept running.
Federal officials say there's no sign of a cyberattack, so we're waiting on the FAA's technical post-mortem for what tripped the national network.
That doesn't rule out a cyberattack as the root cause of the comms outage; it's a "we don't know".
Shoutout to adsb.lol for their free API.
Praying Medic retweeted
🚧 DO NOT GO TO THE BEACH/COAST TODAY 🚧
Buoy 46042 this morning hit 32 ft @ 21 seconds. At this height fully exposed beaches could see 40+ft waves with sets in excess of 60 feet.
Not a safe day to be in or even near the water. Watch from webcams and local news.
#cawx
Praying Medic retweeted
NYT has responded to my post by claiming that I’m “spreading conspiracy theories.” But which of us is the one trafficking in unsubstantiated allegations?
Recent coverage (including CNN, which I QT’d) shows:
— The intelligence community has not established conclusive evidence that Alice Huang knowingly acted as a spy or funneled information to Beijing.
— There is internal disagreement about the strength of the evidence and whether she was recruited by the MSS.
— Attorney General Todd Blanche has said on the record that the Justice Department, he, and FBI Director Patel have reached no conclusions about “who she is or is not.”
— Some officials at ODNI and CIA have indicated the “Chinese spy” label is not fully accurate or is “over-torqued” based on the available intercepts and collection.
— Incoming House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes, a Democrat, said it was still unclear whether Alice Huang was a Chinese spy immediately after he was briefed.
NYT’s stories (which have alleged “Chinese spy” dozens of times) have relied exclusively on anonymous officials. No official has gone on the record affirming it as established fact, and the more recent reporting reflects greater caution and disagreement inside the government.
So when I point out that the spy narrative is unconfirmed and increasingly contested, that is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a growing body of evidence that indicts the NYT’s reporting.
Bombshell story. The spy narrative is collapsing already.
Is there clear & convincing evidence that Alice Huang was a Chinese spy?
- AG says no. (“no conclusions reached”).
- CIA says no. (“not yet convinced”).
- DNI says no (“not entirely accurate and over-torqued”).
- Ranking Democrat on House Intelligence (incoming Chairman) says no. (“today, at least, I don’t know”). This was immediately after he was briefed.
Who argues otherwise? Anonymous officials tell CNN “it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies.”
This is their proof after a year of investigating and surveillance? That she was a “successful Chinese businesswoman”?
At this point, the only crime that we know for sure happened is the leaking of the classified memo. Who did that and why?
An investigation should be opened.
The Big Picture
Something pretty unusual has been happening over the past 72 hours.
Just look at the number of services that have run into trouble:
The FAA grounded flights across the entire United States after a major failure in its air traffic control infrastructure.
Then as passengers started looking for alternatives, Amtrak's website and app ran into ticket-booking problems. Trains were still running, but booking them became a headache.
Microsoft 365 suffered widespread outages affecting businesses, government agencies and public services.
Even 911 related systems weren't completely spared. One emergency-service provider reported problems with notifications, while reports of 911 disruptions spiked online. There's no confirmation of a nationwide emergency-call outage.
In Japan, the Microsoft disruption also affected port logistics, forcing some container terminals to use alternative procedures.
Workday had its own problems after a disaster recovery test unexpectedly connected backup services to live production databases.
AWS, GitHub, Cloudflare and Claude also experienced disruptions.
And MarineTraffic reported problems with port arrival information.
So we're talking about aviation, railway bookings, emergency-service support, maritime logistics, cloud infrastructure and business software.
All running into problems within roughly three days.
Now to be clear, these weren't all outages of the same scale. Some were relatively minor, and some were knock-on effects of other failures.
And there's no evidence that a coordinated cyberattack or a single underlying cause connects them.
Still, that's quite a collection of disruptions in a very short period.
Coincidence? Possibly.
But it does highlight something worth thinking about: just how much of our everyday infrastructure depends on digital systems that we barely notice until they stop working.
Praying Medic retweeted
I did a job at the FAA air traffic control not too long ago. You would be shocked how old their equipment is. I was amazed they could do anything more than monitor a small airport. We are talking multiple decades of antiquated equipment. It looked like moon landing computers
Praying Medic retweeted
I spent 40 years in electronics testing, and the first rule is always the same: find the single point of failure before it finds you.
Most of the modern workplace just found theirs the hard way. Microsoft went down Thursday afternoon, taking Outlook, Teams, and Copilot with it across 74 countries for more than 12 hours. Nearly 130,000 US users reported Outlook issues at the peak while servers unexpectedly dropped offline, and recovery was still dragging on this morning.
Right as people were still dealing with that, Claude went down around 5 AM ET, locking users out until Anthropic pushed a fix. Nobody has tied the two outages together, and Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyberattack, which almost makes it worse. It doesn't take a coordinated attack to grind business to a halt when email, meetings, and AI tools all bottleneck through a few companies' servers.
When your work email goes dark for a whole day, do you actually have a backup plan, or do you just take the day off?
Praying Medic retweeted
In the field with the X6200 using OpenX6X00 firmware sending a status report using JS8CALL mode with just the radio and 2/10w. 40m NVIS contact
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says part of the reason for today's communication failure is antiquated hardware that Congress has not allocated money to update.
Praying Medic retweeted
Once you understand the incentive, the reason for the behavior becomes obvious: they are importing a left-voting bloc that depends on government handouts.
A prominent example of this in America is Ilhan Omar and her Somali voting bloc in Minnesota, an area which used to be primarily Nordic-German.
Importing voters is a CERTAIN path to a single-party supermajority and has ALREADY happened at the state level in California and New York. It also explains why those states have BANNED VOTER ID in order to accelerate a permanent socialist supermajority, destroying any semblance of democracy.
We stand on the precipice of disaster, an end to America.
Praying Medic retweeted
Long overdue for a hard reboot on how the federal government handles cybersecurity for critical systems and infrastructure . New blood and fresh thinking needed. Hopefully we aren’t too late. Bipartisan issue where progress can be made.
Newbie to handheld radios?
This will get you started.
xitter.gq/prayingmedic/status/20…
Praying Medic retweeted
Outlook is back.
@Microsoft can process 6,000 H-1B applications, but processing your inbox is apparently a tougher assignment.
Praying Medic retweeted
INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESPONSE: "The FBI is on one of its highest alerts right now, and so are the other intelligence agencies, monitoring what’s going on. Their command post is up and running, and I’m sure FAA is in there with them... checking everything that they can right now just to see what the so-called chatter is out there."
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told Bret Baier the FBI's command post is active alongside the FAA to monitor intelligence chatter, adding that an airline source links today's disruption to a recent Cisco software glitch. @Chris_Swecker
