500 meter shooting, Motorola DPS, the closing of the year

Went out to the range yesterday for a bit of trigger time. One of the LMI wanted to do some work with his .308 at 500 meters so I figured I’d tag along. Iwanted to make sure the FAL was functioning properly after I detail stripped the lower and degreased it (and then reset the gas system) and I was curious to see how my CZ did at that distance.

I only fired a couple rounds downrange from the CZ. I had to hold about 5′ high to hit at 500 meters but the resultant group was about 7″ or 1.4 MOA. My goal is  < MOA but Im working on it. My buddy was shooting his Rem. .308 and his tweaked out 7mm Rem. Mag. Results seemed about the same. The FAL functioned fine and dandy. Still gotta get a bipod for it though. ===== Used the long line-of-sight at the range to test out the Motorola radios. I brought two - the Motorola Distance DPS and the smaller hand-grenade shaped Talkabout 5500 series. The DPS was much clearer and louder at long range than the smaller radios. Naturally, Motorola sicontinued the DPS but they can be found on eBay at prices that reflect their desirability. Its a decent FRS/GMRS radio and has a couple handy features...one of which is the ability to use a rechargeable battery pack or 6-AA batts. As I understand it, they also lend themselves quite nicely to being modified for all sorts of FCC-violating goodness. ===== 2005 comes to a close. In the annals of preparedness/survivalism this year will be defined by hurricane Katrina and its resultant pwnage of New Orleans. For the next twenty years, unless theres a greater disaster, this will be the event pointed to in most preparedness texts and survivalist newsgroups. Discount Katrina and the heavy hurricane season, however, and it was a fairly quiet year for the prepared. 2006? Hmmm....my crystal ball is fuzzy but I predict more terrorist-inspired laws/policy changes and abuses. I forsee the backlash against the Patriot Act and current administration reaching a breaking point and a 'revolt' taking place in Washington with many of the terrorism-related laws being reduced/removed/watered down. A guy can hope, right? 2005 saw me getting a few more things done. Re-organized the bunker, completed my acquisition of FAL mags, saw another ten cases of MRE's get tucked away, saw some progress on the radio/communications front, and a host of other small things. In short, forward progress was made. For 2006 I expect at least as much progress. I should probably, at this point, also offer wishes for a happy, prosperous, well-stocked and heavily-armed 2006 to the readership and the, I think, host of lurkers out there. For giggles, I wouldnt mind hearing what you all were doing six years ago today on 12/31/99 when the Y2K thing was still making headlines. Ignored it or sat up all night with your hands on the generator switch? Me, I was sitting in front of my TV in my winter camo with my AR and watching the news at midnight.

19 thoughts on “500 meter shooting, Motorola DPS, the closing of the year

  1. I ignored it. I believed most businesses and services had upgraded in time (my husband is a government-employed computer geek). I just never got into the whole Y2K scare, which is weird since I was sort of nostalgic for the old Cold War survivalism days before the Y2K stuff came along.

  2. I was having a party. Any problems would have showed up in Asia and Europe first, and when midnight rolled through Japan with no problems, I knew we were good to go.

  3. This year saw me get the preparedness bug again. Fortunately it was before Katrina and all I had to do is replenish food stores and organize equipment. There’s still a lot to be done, but does one ever sit down and say: “There I am prepared for everything!”

    This time in 1999 I was at the Mother In Laws as she was at the time living alone. I had a GHB with me and my Delta Elite 10mm (with 5 mags of ammo) and AR which was disassembled and inside the bag with a few magazines and more in the trunk of the car. My clothes were such that I would have looked like any other unprepared schmuck unless you looked closely.

  4. I was working the night shift, as well. Kinda pissed me off that all the management decided they needed to be there on what would have otherwise been a nice, quiet night.

  5. Ah, ’99, the good old days. I think I was drunk as a lord and mishandling recreational explosives.

    A bunch of my coworkers had been employed for years writing automatic y2k code-processing software for Big Important Systems, and it worked really well and was widely deployed. They finished it in plenty of time and it generated all kinds of novel patentry. I was not too worried.

    I did correctly forsee a lot of people reading the perl ‘localtime’ documentation for the first time during that initial month of the year 19100.

    I had a friend who demonstrated her faith in technology by making sure that she was en route on an airliner when the millennium ticked over. I thought that was pretty foolish, and boring to boot, but I guess she got a lot of told-you-so mileage out of it.

  6. Watched Y2K roll through the world with no apparent ill effects and then enjoyed our party, complete with disaster bags with bottled water and chocolate bars. (My company had also been working heavily w/Y2K related stuff for gov’t agencies, so we also had some insight that the world really wasn’t going to come to an end.)

  7. 12/31/99 ?

    I was testing computer stuff at work, and gratitously violating the company’s no-guns policy as I went to test things at a remote building near downtown.

  8. 12/31/99… purchase of AR-15s before the California ban went in to effect. A friend loaned us an AK-47 for the evening. It was the beginning of the gun side of our preparedness.

    Happy New Year everyone!

  9. New Year’s Eve 1999 I was having a LAN party at my apartment with a bunch of geeks who knew the new year wouldn’t crash our computers–but, since this was Salt Lake City, UT, had the key to the food and supplies stockpile Just In Case. 😉

  10. I was having a good time. Like , I watched the news as midnight rolled through the Pacific, Asia, and Europe without trouble and so by late evening felt assured it would be a routine event here.

    On the day, we were fully prepared, stocked, and armed though. And to this day, when non-tech people say “Y2K was exaggerated” I reply “Only because thousands of people like me spent all of ’99 busting our asses to make sure it happened that way.”

    And I spent January 1 laughing my ass off when I learned some of the systems crashed at my stepfather’s not-to-be-named-here government agency. He’d spent the previous 12 months arguing that there was no Y2K problem, and that his office hadn’t taken any action at all.

  11. Both the hubby and I were at work – our different, across town from each other respective works. Mine at a hospital, his at Intel. We actually did have a few minor things fail on the medical end, but overall Y2K was a bust.

    I always thought if I got a babysitter for new years eve it would be for something a little more romantic than minding computers.

  12. I went to a party after dropping off my dogs at a friends house. As silly as it sounds, there was a tiny part of my mind that was worried that That Would Be It. The End of Time. I wasn’t worried about the event itself, but I was struck by how much I regreted not being with my dogs. And ever since I’ve wanted them with me as much as possible, just in case.

    More FAL mags are defintely on the to do list for this year.

    Thanks for all the info/advice, best to you and Kit for the new year!

  13. Dec. 31 1999-Jan. 1 2000, I was at a party. We watched the news as the other side of the world rang in 2000, and nothing happened. So we kept on with the party. It was sort of disappointing actually, the media kept saying planes would fall from the sky and such.

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