My family and I have been in Pennsylvania since Friday. I had to come up to the "BugOut" location to de-Install one of the two Satellite Uplinks from ViaSat, and replace it with Starlink.
The house I inherited/bought after my mom died in 2021 is my "country home" serving as a sort of "Bugout" location about 150 miles west, northwest, of my regular residence in North Bergen, NJ, three miles due west of Manhattan, New York city.
When mom died, she owed a Reverse Mortgage on her house. She had to take that Mortgage to have enough money exist on when I went to federal prison in 2010 because I was no longer available to help support her.
When she died in November, 2021, I ended-up paying off that Mortgage, so I could inherit the house. I took ownership in July, 2022.
At the time, it would have been easier to just put the house up for sale and walk away from it. But mom and her second husband built that house in the early 1980's and it has been in our family more than 40 years.
It is far enough away from any major metropolitan area to be safe if the SHTF, whether from social chaos, economic collapse, or World War 3, so . . . . much to the chagrin of my wife . . . . I opted to pay off the Reverse Mortgage and keep the house. To my thinking it was a great fallback (bugout) location.
Of course, at the time, I had no idea how much work the place needed and looking back, it would have been better to just knock it down and start all over. That's not what happened. Repairs here and there, major repairs here and there, but it's all done now. Clean, safe, comfortable, well equipped and well maintained.
What very few neighbors there are in this very rural area, are far enough a way for peace, quiet, and privacy, but close enough if we need help. The nearby small town has all the types of stores we need for supplies, and the folks up here are very very much nicer, and emotionally normal, than the ones in northeastern New Jersey. IF the small town doesn't have what we need, there's always the city of Scranton, 40 minutes away.
Most readers and listeners know that I converted one of the three bedrooms into a fully-equipped radio studio. I broadcast from here frequently.
Being in a rural area means having to deal with all the things that country life throws at you. The electric utility is a Rural Cooperative and while they do a very good job keeping the trees on the vast, undeveloped land, cut-back to prevent them from falling on power lines, the electric power up here is nowhere near as stable as in NJ.
So early-on in my ownership, (mid-2022) I had to make improvements. First-up, installing a Generator inlet outside the house, and getting a gasoline-powered Westinghouse Generator (12,000 watt - surge to 15,000) to power everything.
In August, 2022, had to install a new Heat pump so the existing forced hot air gas furnace system could be both heat and air conditioning. The gas furnace was old, so replaced that, too.
Turned out that when they installed that furnace they used two existing floor joists as an air "Return" from the house. Air gets sucked into the return, gets put through the furnace/air-handler, is heated, and blown back into the house via the vents in each room. But the floor joists are only 2" x 10" and with the metal plates they installed at the bottom of those joists to act as the "Return" the dimensions of the "Return" were NOT sufficient for 1250 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air flow needed. So the air coming out of the vents was intensely hot because not enough air was moving through the furnace.
This also meant the house took longer to heat, and the furnace had to cycle on more often, which caused my mom to need 300 gallons of propane gas a month in the winter months, to heat the house. Very costly.
So we computed the correct dimensions for the air "Return" ductwork and found we needed to enlarge it considerably. That meant putting in a new "Plenum" at the air intake, and new ductwork for that new Plenum. Big bucks for that, too. Now, thankfully, the house heats and cools properly, and fuel costs are now less than half of what they were.
Next up, in Late 2022, the washer and dryer were on their way out. Had to buy new. Bought LG brand. Very happy with them. But when we took out the old, we found that the drain pipe for the washer, SPLIT in the sub-floor. The entire subfloor beneath the laundry room was flooded with old laundry water! All the floor joists were rotted, and one end was so rotted, it actually broke. From the extent of the rot, that had to have been flooded literally for years.
Oh man. I didn't need this. More work to install new floor joists, tear-out the ruined plywood and put new.
Mom had four cats, and the whole house stunk of cat pee. I HATE that smell. Can't deal with it at all - and I WON'T. I Had to take out ALL the carpeting and padding, repeatedly wash the bare wood sub-floor with specialized enzyme-equipped cleaners and ultimately had to coat it with "KILLS" oil-based primer/sealer to solve that smell issue. Then had to install new padding and carpeting.
With all that done, the house still stunk. Turns out the cats got the sofa, loveseat, over-stuffed chair, ottoman, all the mattresses and Box Springs, too. ALL of that had to go, Cleaning it was simply not an option it was so ruined by the cats. All of it was replaced.
That first Winter, it became clear, fast, that the windows and doors were all leaking. Did the best I could with silicone and caulking, but the next Spring, 2023, I had to replace all the doors and windows. Got Pella brand doors and windows. More bucks.
As they were doing the windows, they found that one had a leak down into the wood sheathing that forms the exterior wall. It was so rotted that a section maybe 1 foot wide by two feet long, was rotted-out and GONE! Basically, a hole in the wall of the house, covered only by 1" external board insulation and vinyl siding. Had to tear off the exterior vinyl siding, replace that wood sheathing, then put the siding back. More bucks.
The house is a wood frame house and it had a lot of gaps between the cement block foundation and the wood frame of the house. Had to seal all of those because they were allowing rodents access to the interior. The house had a mouse problem. A big mouse problem, especially in the kitchen.
We used traps, caught a bunch, but somehow, even after the foundation gaps were sealed, they were still getting in.
The next Winter, we noticed that despite all the work we did, the Kitchen was very noticeably colder than the rest of the house, still had mice, and the floor in the kitchen was sagging.
So I had a contractor come, (2023) take out all the old kitchen cabinets, all the sheetrock walls, and we found the trouble. Over the years, as the house shifted from Winter frost heaves, and the floor joists sagged, the sub-floor SPLIT under the kitchen cabinets. Had a break that was about five feet long, going from narrow at one end to about a foot wide on the other. You could see right through to the crawl space beneath the house! THAT was how the mice were getting in and why the kitchen was so cold.
So we had to "sister" new joists onto the old, install new plywood sub-floor, then new kitchen cabinets and appliances: Refrigerator, oven, microwave, dishwasher . . . bought all LG appliances. We have that brand in our NJ home and like them. Very reliable in our experience. More big bucks.
With the kitchen re-done and the massive tear in the sub-floor fixed, the kitchen is all good now. No more rodents anywhere in the house and the temperature matches the rest of the house all year.
I recall thinking to myself, "I'm going for my lungs with this house, I should have walked away."
Also found no insulation under the house, and large sections of the "attic" where the insulation had fallen down. Had all that replaced.
When the next summer came (2024), the gutters had to be cleaned from the fall leaves. As a guy went up there to start cleaning the gutters, he almost fell THROUGH the roof. A section had apparently been leaking, rotting the wood, causing it to become "spongy." Had to call a roofer. He took off the ALL the old roof shingles, took off ALL the 1/2" plywood roof, and replaced it ALL with 5/8" plywood and new shingles. Complete new sub-roof and roof shingles. The whole roof. More bucks.
With the Russia-Ukraine thing getting worse and worse, and NATO obviously TRYING to find a reason to go to war with Russia, it struck me that electricity will be a huge problem if an actual WW3 starts. I suspect we WILL be attacked here in the USA, conventional first, and nuclear shortly thereafter.
So I asked my son to spec-out a solar power system for the house. He did. We began buying it last year and installing it bit by bit into this year.
Built a separate, cement block shed to house it all. The system is in and running. It took us MONTHS to be able to afford all the parts, and MONTHS for my son to install it all. It was done earlier this year and is running well.
Pennsylvania doesn't get that much sun, especially in winter, and with all the trees around, the solar panels get what they get. I __won't__ cut down trees to get better sunlight, so my refusal to do that limits what the panels can get, but they do get. So if everything goes to hell in a handbasket, I __think__ I will still have a least __some__ energy. It's all protected by EMP Shields, too, so if they actually do what they claim to do, I should be good.
Aside from the big solar install, 2025 has been quiet. I decided that since the house was all OK, it was time to replace the asphalt driveway and parking lot. The existing asphalt had been down almost 40 years. It was cracked, caving-in at some spots, and its overall condition showed it was "due." So I had that done this year. That was a big expense.
So the house and property are all "good." Finally. Just in time for the world to destroy itself in a coming WW3.
With this being my "bugout" location for the radio show, reliable connectivity to the Internet is a must. The show goes out via a new fiber optic line that the area became equipped with last year. The back-up to that is a cable modem. But since the fiber optic line and the cable lines can both be taken out by trees falling, I also have a cellular data modem as a "fail-over."
But up here, Cellular is patchy. You cannot __reliably __ use a cell phone on my property because mountains to the west and to the east, block the available cell sites. The cellular data modem has an external antenna on the roof of the house, so it gets reliable connectivity.
I also had two separate ViaSat satellite uplinks: a personal one for the house and its telephone, and one for the radio show. But ViaSat's satellites are 24,000 miles away from earth and there is very considerable "Latency" between the time the dishes atop the house signal to the satellite and the time the satellite acknowledges that request. 768 ms.
That's OK for editing this website, but it is totally unsuitable for streaming audio to do a live show. The software that makes the streaming connections simply cannot accommodate 768ms latency. So in the past, if everything went out and I had to rely on the ViaSat, I could edit this website, or upload an archive, but would not be able to do a live show. STARLINK changed all that.
STARLINK (Elon Musk / SPACE X) are low-earth-orbit satellites. Maybe only 100 miles or so above the planet. But STARLINK wasn't available to this part of Pennsylvania until about a year ago. I ordered it months ago, and it arrived, but we didn't install it until this weekend.
I turned off one of the ViaSat satellites, the one for the Radio show, and took down its dish. The picture above at the top of this article shows the removed dish laying on the ground outside.
ViaSat doesn't want the Dish back, but they DO want the "Transceiver" which was mounted on the arm of that dish. So we had to take the dish down to get the transceiver out. Here it is, removed from the end of the dish arm:
ViaSat sent a box with prepaid UPS shipping label, to return the Transceiver, Satellite modem, its power supply and ethernet cable. I have 30 days to return it all or they hit me with a charge for $300.
Here is all their stuff, packed up into the box they sent, to be shipped back:
We put the STARLINK up yesterday and much to my chagrin, the antenna has to be aimed to the NORTH/NORTHEAST. Uh oh. Trees. Big trees. Not just on my property, but on the neighbor's property, too.
So we put it in. Their system indicated the dish had to be turned 38 degrees, which was how we found out it needed to be point north/northeast.
Once correctly aimed, we got signal. But the system detects the physical interference from the trees and as such, we are NOT getting full 100 Mbps down, we're only getting around 47 down and around 10 Mbps up. But the latency is only 30ms. We are also seeing sporadic packet loss.
Even at this reduced functionality, it is actually BETTER than what I had from ViaSat, and $57 a month CHEAPER than ViaSat!!!!!
So with this better latency, it APPEARS that I will be able to use STARLINK for live streaming audio. We'll test it later today.
All this has been done with an eye to surviving the troubles that many of us see coming.
With the political left-wing now engaging in insurrection in some areas of the country, having tried to assassinate President Trump - TWICE -- having now murdered Charlie Kirk, shooting-up TV stations, Weddings, and lord knows what else, and with ICE agents coming under attack, social chaos is spreading here in the US.
With the federal government spending the nation into Oblivion, and printing money to pay its debts, the national debt has already risen to $37.5 TRILLION, which they can't pay. So some type of collapse is mathematically certain with them. A collapse of government finances will lead to all sorts of additional chaos.
With the Russia-Ukraine conflict heading into the collapse of Ukraine's army, NATO is urgently trying to find n excuse -- or MAKE ONE -- to enter the war.
I have been doing all the work up here in PA, to have a safe, clean, comfortable and hopefully secure place to ride out the troubles and still do this website and radio show.
My plan is to be able to operate when everyone else is offline and off the air, for lack of planning.
I earnestly want to be able to continue broadcasting the facts; especially the facts that the so-called "mass-media" simply doesn't report.
I need YOUR help to do that.
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