Man woman wild, in Montserrat. Stupidity!

Just seen the program on the discovery channel. Besides the normal points in the show where you wonder if they have lost their freaking mind, the last part of the show was just painful to watch as a radioman.

A word to the wise. Just because you were a special forces radioman in the military doesn’t mean you know what the F##$ you are doing when you try to make a radio.

Just a hint…. That is not the way you make a spark transmitter. Don’t waste your time trying to do what he did. The way he made that “spark transmitter” was totally idiotic. Even if the car battery was fully charged it wouldn’t be a functional transmitter in any way, shape, or form. The only thing productive it managed to do is… keep him occupied, where he couldn’t do anything else stupid.

Where she is looking for a car battery, and finds the “wires with clippy things on them” you can see various electronic equipment on the shelves around her. You may also find a radio transmitter or something to build one if you actually know what you are looking for!

In any house that has been abandoned in the last 20 years, you will find electronic stuff it. Finding electronic stuff is the primary fist step to building any usable form of radio transmitter that will get you help in the modern world. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find a complete 2 way radio very easily if you knew what the heck you was looking for.

The first thing you do is look through the village to see if you can find any structure that has signs of an old antenna tower or mast structure on it.

Down by the harbor there will be buildings with marine radios in them, to communicate with ships at sea.

Main community buildings on islands like that will have a communications room that has showave, longwave and maritime communications systems in them to allow the city to communicate with the outside world.

And a portion of the normal houses will also have shortwave communications equipment in them because people like to keep in contact with the outside world in general.

Granted, a lot of the stuff may be long gone in those buildings, but in any place where lots of radio equipment has been used for a long time, you will be able to find something that other people have overlooked, or just plain ignored. It may be a shortwave transmitter in the bottom of a box with a bunch of other junk on top of it, that they put away when they bought a newer model. Or it may be a handheld marine radio that someone left in the glove compartment of a car when they abandoned it. There will be stuff, you just have to be smart enough to find it.

The subject of generating electricity is a whole other thing. Just take a permanent magnet blower motor out of the heater in one of those old cars. Also, there is often light plants that are installed in island villages to run radio equipment and the like. but I digress.

Shows like that just make my head hurt.

This is a youtube version of the program



The radio stupidity starts at 35 minute mark

37:20 is where she finds the battery.

Bonus point if someone can find the time point where they are standing within arms reach of an oil lantern and just ignore it! If you can find a lantern just sitting around, I am sure you will be able to find oil to put in it, and a lighter or matches somewhere to light it with. They are all usually in close proximity. Butane lighters did exist in 1996. And I have lighters and matches that old, that still work. In my kitchen cabinet I have a box of matches from 1999, that two out of three still lit when I tried some of them last year.

Ahhh yeah - I've seen this show a few times.

Mrs. Frogs is usually wanting to bash the guy's head in about 15 mins in for the way he talks down to his wife and the way he comes across..

This show is such a joke.

In a real survival situation, without cameras following you around, these two would die in a fortnight. The outdoors is a great way to test compatability between partners. These two make a terrible team, and survival would be difficult with the woman bitching and complaining, and the old man being a dick.

The only way to film a survival show is the way Les Stroud did it. One man, his own filming equipment and ten days outdoors. That was a great informational show.

It's been months since I've watched that channel, perhaps a year or so, but I am familiar with the show.

The funny thing is...I can see the woman quite clearly, but cannot see the man at all, in my mind's eye.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up on spark transmitters.

Alert us when the show with the black dude who tries to elude sky net returns, ok? Eldon someone....

Originally posted by W3RLIED2
This show is such a joke.

In a real survival situation, without cameras following you around, these two would die in a fortnight. The outdoors is a great way to test compatability between partners. These two make a terrible team, and survival would be difficult with the woman bitching and complaining, and the old man being a dick.

The only way to film a survival show is the way Les Stroud did it. One man, his own filming equipment and ten days outdoors. That was a great informational show.

edit on 14-7-2012 by W3RLIED2 because: Sp

YES!

Les Stroud is the best.


edit: honestly, i wouldn't mind at all if he had a camera guy following him, as long as he promised to not sneak candy bars from him Lol.

Originally posted by davidmann
It's been months since I've watched that channel, perhaps a year or so, but I am familiar with the show.

The funny thing is...I can see the woman quite clearly, but cannot see the man at all, in my mind's eye.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up on spark transmitters.

Alert us when the show with the black dude who tries to elude sky net returns, ok? Eldon someone....

hey now that i think of it, how come there is no black guy version of Les Stroud??


i don't think i remember seeing a black guy survivor dude show?

that would be so cool, because it would be a different person, someone completely different from the usual white guy survivor personality.

im not being racist in any way, im just saying it would be pretty cool.


*big black guy shows up* (super deep voice) Hello my name is Mr.Brown ( lol ) and i will be teaching you how to SURVIVE.


FIRST. we gunna cut this tree down.



( this would be such a cool show )

peace.

In my humble opinion the only survival guy really worth watching is Ray Mears...

Respect for the environment and indigenous people, no dramatic music, no jumping from helicopters.

Just Humble, honest and grown up...





Peace

Originally posted by Muckster
In my humble opinion the only survival guy really worth watching is Ray Mears...

Respect for the environment and indigenous people, no dramatic music, no jumping from helicopters.

Just Humble, honest and grown up...

Peace

thanks so much for showing me this person, really cool!

I have done a little google map searching and I think I have found where they were in the program. It is also evident that the moved them from their original location where they arrived at the island to a different place right before the sun went down the first day.

Their beach landing on the pyroclastic flows, and clime up the forested hill along the stream appears to have happened at the great alps water falls.

They walked out of the stream area and magically reappeared around Elberton in a place around 4 miles away. Here is the house where they slept the first night, and where most of the action is centered around.


That grain bin she chases the chickens around at first is in the lower left hand part of the picture. Right where the curved road comes off the U in the road. You can see the road kind of goes around both sides of the bin.

There is a lot of industrial and educational buildings less than a mile or so walk from where they were at. The reason they didn’t go there, is it would of made the situation appear too easy. There is more equipment in those buildings than they would know what to do with.

In all reality civilization is less than a 3 mile walk along a paved road from where they slept the first night.

All in all, it stretches reality to point of being stupid. Which is normal for the discovery channel.....

Originally posted by Mr Tranny
I have done a little google map searching and I think I have found where they were in the program. It is also evident that the moved them from their original location where they arrived at the island to a different place right before the sun went down the first day.

Their beach landing on the pyroclastic flows, and clime up the forested hill along the stream appears to have happened at the great alps water falls.

They walked out of the stream area and magically reappeared around Elberton in a place around 4 miles away. Here is the house where they slept the first night, and where most of the action is centered around.

That grain bin she chases the chickens around at first is in the lower left hand part of the picture. Right where the curved road comes off the U in the road. You can see the road kind of goes around both sides of the bin.

There is a lot of industrial and educational buildings less than a mile or so walk from where they were at. The reason they didn’t go there, is it would of made the situation appear too easy. There is more equipment in those buildings than they would know what to do with.

In all reality civilization is less than a 3 mile walk along a paved road from where they slept the first night.

All in all, it stretches reality to point of being stupid. Which is normal for the discovery channel.....

edit on 15-7-2012 by Mr Tranny because: (no reason given)

normally i don't have wayyy to much of a problem when shows do this, as long as the show is really fun.

i DO prefer the honest and realistic shows where they really take it seriously and try to only survive off nature, instead of looking for radios.

i didn't like it how bear grillz just pulled out para cord every single episode.. but the show was fun.

Les Stroud is pretty cool too, but he should really get a camera person, it looks unrealistically hard.

peace.

It's a television show for entertainment purposes, chill out man....you sound like you're about to stroke out! In the grand scheme of things I don't need to know how to build a radio, I can just wait for you to build one and take it....# like that is what you need to worry about.

First off that is not how a spark gap transmitter works. Second, he is dead shorting that battery. A car battery has between 400 to 800 or more AMPS. Dead shorting it like that is going to send spark every where and could blow the battery up in your face. He says the battery is 15 years old. A lead acid car battery can lose as much as 1% per day at 70*F just from sitting.

Spark gap transmitter

Shows like this could get some one killed.

Originally posted by fixer1967
First off that is not how a spark gap transmitter works. Second, he is dead shorting that battery. A car battery has between 400 to 800 or more AMPS. Dead shorting it like that is going to send spark every where and could blow the battery up in your face. He says the battery is 15 years old. A lead acid car battery can lose as much as 1% per day at 70*F just from sitting.

Spark gap transmitter

Shows like this could get some one killed.

I know, that is why it ticks me off so much. Even if it doesn’t get the person killed, it will possibly cause someone to waste valuable time doing something totally stupid they seen on TV when they could be doing something that would actually contribute to their survival. If they was going to delve into that area, They should have stated the real requirements. That way, someone that doesn’t know enough to build one will see that something like that is actually beyond his capability, and avoid wasting time trying in the first place. That way, he will apply his time to something more useful, something he can actually do himself.

You have to know your limitations. Having a false sense of capability will just cause you to waste your time, or at worst, get yourself killed.

Originally posted by EyesWideShut
It's a television show for entertainment purposes, chill out man....you sound like you're about to stroke out! In the grand scheme of things I don't need to know how to build a radio, I can just wait for you to build one and take it....# like that is what you need to worry about.

I am kind of split on how to respond to that. It touches two different subjects. And both need to be mentioned.

The first subject touches on the false sense of ability. Just because you can steal a radio, doesn’t mean you can do anything with it. It doesn’t even mean that you will know the type of radio that you need to steal.

Just because you press the button on a magical thing called a “radio” doesn’t mean helicopters will fill the sky. Unless you know what you are doing, it is most likely that no one will hear you no mater how long you scream into the mic.

There is levels of ascension, that people pass through in regard to their understanding. Alternately know as levels of ignorance in the reverse direction.

Lets go from lowest level to highest level… of ignorance.
Joe blow on the street. Wouldn’t know what one even is let alone what he could do with it.
If you know that it is a 2 way radio, you still don’t know what type it is, or how to operate it.
If you know how to operate it, you still probably won’t know what you could do with it, what frequencies to use it on, or even what type of help, if any you could get with it, or even how to get that help.

Basically…. A person that breaks into a house to get a radio won’t know what type of radio to steal even if it hit him upside the head. If he did have the radio he needed, he wouldn’t be able to use it. If he did know how to use it, he wouldn’t know where (what frequencies) to use it. If he did know what frequencies to use it, then he wouldn’t know what he needs to do on those frequencies to get what he needs.

A person could be given/or take a brand new IC7800, and most likely it would be useful as a brick to him. He wouldn’t even know how to transmit with the thing, let alone do something productive with it.

The second subject is the idea of getting what you need by force in a survival situation. It is unlikely that someone will be stupid enough to try that in real life. And if they are, they most likely won’t live long enough to make it around to me. If he does, he won’t be bugging anyone else. That is an idea perpetuated by a lot of survival movies that will just get a lot of people killed that were stupid enough to try it.

All in all… If they tried to steal one, they won’t know what to steal in the first place, let alone what to do with it once they steal it. and they would be taking their own life in their hands for what basically equates to something that will be useless to them, because of their own ignorance.

Originally posted by Mr Tranny

Originally posted by EyesWideShut
It's a television show for entertainment purposes, chill out man....you sound like you're about to stroke out! In the grand scheme of things I don't need to know how to build a radio, I can just wait for you to build one and take it....# like that is what you need to worry about.

The second subject is the idea of getting what you need by force in a survival situation. It is unlikely that someone will be stupid enough to try that in real life. And if they are, they most likely won’t live long enough to make it around to me. If he does, he won’t be bugging anyone else. That is an idea perpetuated by a lot of survival movies that will just get a lot of people killed that were stupid enough to try it.

All in all… If they tried to steal one, they won’t know what to steal in the first place, let alone what to do with it once they steal it. and they would be taking their own life in their hands for what basically equates to something that will be useless to them, because of their own ignorance.

My friend, people don't know how to use half of the things they steal, if it looks like it's of value...they take it. When I was a kid I parked my wrangler outside of the mall with the top off in the parking lot (I never kept anything in it & it was a beater) when I came back out my gear shift knob was missing... MY GEAR SHIFT KNOB!!! I literally laughed out loud, I couldn't even be mad... It taught me a lesson though.

As far as someone being stupid enough to take something by force, it's not stupidity...it's desperation, addiction & hunger that are motivators...and dangerous ones. I'm not any sort of High Speed Low Drag operator, but I'm skilled in a few areas and even I am not naive enough to think I'm superman, go find the most salty teams guy on the planet and give me 2 rifleman and 1 saw gunner that have been deployed and tell them where said operator is, they will hunt him & kill him.

As far as radios are concerned, I see you're a SME , I could hardly program my plugger when I was in and don't ask me about how to program freqs on PRC-119's or the little elves inside it that made SINCGARS work. I'm just learning how to work the radio on my boat lol

As most SME's we tend to be critical of things that we see in movies & television (my wife hates it) , I do the same with weapons & tactics. I can build an AR weapons system from parts and can quote the cycle of operation (firing unlocking extraction ejection cocking feeding chambering & locking) but you don't need to know all that to squeeze the trigger, or to steal one & sell it.

why do they keep putting on these special forces guys and act like they survival specialist seriously. these guys are usually tasked with get in do mission objectives make way to pickup point and get the heck out . they aint trying to live off the land dont get me wrong this show and bear gryills are fun to watch just like the croc hunter why because you keep waiting for them to kill themselves with their stupidity. remember when bear tried swimming in subzero weather to get to other side of lake to log. he got hypothermia instantly and almost died . when any sane person would have just walked the 2 miles around edge of lake.

reply to post by proteus33


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