Using a Wireless Network for Personal Emergencies?

An anonymous reader asks: "A friend asked me this today and as I began to think about an answer I realized it made for a perfect Ask Slashdot question. His question was: 'Now that our illustrious Attorney General has gone as far as to suggest that families put in place an emergency communications system between themselves, I'm shopping for the right solution. I think RIM because it allows me to enter text and to rely on the pager network rather than the cell network. But the last that I looked, it was still impossible to do without my own server. Enlightened Ones: what suggestions might you have that would allow us to each have something in our pockets and is most likely to be fault tolerant to a messy event?' Having had the experience of using my Crackberry in NYC on 9/11 as the only stable means of contact, I too wonder whether this is the next big thing? So I turn the question over to you at Slashdot -- If you were in need of a hand-held, wireless data device and wanted to use a data network which was likely to survive, what would you use? Which arcane pager or emergency information networks were designed for survival? What if you wanted it to easily work with POP email? How about for reasonable data rates?" Assuming we are not quote to the point of a truly fault-tolerant network, what would need to happen for it to become reality? Which provider is close to putting something like this together?

Comments

Amateur Radio

[drdink]

One option is getting amateur radio licenses. One of the prime purposes of amateur radio is to be able to communicate and help the community during an emergency. Depending on what license class you go for, you can communicate locally or globall.. It also depends on your equipment. You can do voice, CW(morse code), packet, etc...

You can't raelly go wrong with an amateur radio license. Not only does it give you a failsafe communications method (assuming your transceiver has batteries), it also gives you a new hobby. You get to tinker with electronics, broadcasting, and radio equipment. It is a great learning tool for understanding computers better.

For more information, I suggest you check out the American Radio Relay League website. You might want to check and see if your local area has any amateur radio clubs that you can go to and ask more detailed questions.

Re:What!?

[friedegg]

From Ridge's recent speech to announce our movement to code orange:

One of the thoughts that I would just simply share with you, it's probably not a bad idea to sit down and just arrange some kind of a contact plan, that if an event occurred you want to make sure you can -- the family wants to get in touch with one another. That's not a bad thing to do to prepare in advance of any kind of emergency, whether it's a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Doesn't take a great deal of time. And I think it would make family members a lot more comfortable if they knew they were able to get in touch with one another in the event something happened.

Find out what the Israelis use. (GSM I think)

[chrestomanci]

I read somewhere that many Israelis use their GSM mobile phones to tell each other that they are OK when there is a terrorist outrage. The article said that they would usually make very short calls as soon as possible after the incident before the network jams, or send text messages.

Seeing as Israel suffers more emergencies of this type in an average month, than most countries do in a decade I would think that would be a good place to seek advice or experiences.

I hope this helps