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Quick questions for you electronic experts regarding communication equipment after an EMP...
1.Can walkies talkies, emergency radios, ham radios, etc. still work after an emp or will they be fried as well? or can they work if they were protected?
2. can you make a cheap, simple faraday cage to protect this stuuff? anyone have a favorite you tube?
3. is it possible to protect vehicles? can older vehicles still work since they do not have all the electronic crap?
The answer to this is always a huge unknown. Electronic equipment of all kinds, tube or transistor, is susceptible to EMP, regardless of what the internet talking heads say. We're talking real EMP, not this poorly understood concept folks think of which isn't much more than a lightning strike in the immediate vicinity. The things that are helpful to know is that the shorter the wiring inside the device the generally better off it will be. That does tend to make small electronic devices look better, but since nobody can safely create an EMP test of representative magnitudes under any sort of controlled conditions, you just never know. As to vehicles, point type ignition systems seem, to the unknowing, to be a better bet, but the weak link is the condensor, which will break down under higher voltage conditions. The wires tend to be less protected from an electrical perspective, so the risk is still there, and a high energy event will burn our less arc resistant contact (points and switches) that were the technology of the time. Modern electronics, however, are designed to have a lot more durability, and even if an EMP environment shuts down a vehicle, lab testing has shown some of them to be capable of being restarted and driven away. Modern car electrical systems are designed to work in a much noiser electrical environment, but since not all cars passed the test, it's still a great unknown. Again, these tests create an EMP pulse a tiny fraction of what's realistic.
As to the question about making a cheap, simple faraday cage to protect your stuff, the simple answer is NO. Our military has spent countless amounts of your money trying to come up with something that removes the risk from all components, and has found that it's simply not possible. I've read enough about this work to know that the raw materials alone can buy a small country, not to mention the even more expensive engineering required, which, because of the lack of solid understanding and realistic testing, is still a crap shoot.