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During Blackout, Ham Radio Shined
Mark Cantrell writes "An interesting bit on AP through Yahoo today. Seems that ham radio (which recently had a bit of backlash here on Slashdot from a few people thinking it was useless, outdated technology), really shined through during the blackouts. When the power went, ham radio operators, using battery backup power, were able to help coordinate emergency workers while the cell phone networks were overloaded. For anyone wondering why interference due to power line broadband is considered a bad thing, well, there ya go."
I keep my HT charged up.. and can plug it into 12v car any time.. Our club repeater has 2 APC's on different parts of the equipment to keep it online for hours. We also have the repeater on a backup generator.
If the power outage had hit minnesota, I'd be 30 seconds away from my radio, ready to find out where everyone is, and what is going on.
-KC0NBY
I'm a paramedic in NYC, and when the lights went out, I went straight into work at the hospital.
Before I left the house, I took along my HTX-245 Radio Shack dual band radio ($49 on clearance).
I tried several repeaters, and an operator on one, informed me that the repeater was up on battery power, he was standing by with a working landline, and was available to us for phone calls in case we needed to contact our telemetry physician.
The admins and my boss at the hospital were very impressed, more so when the EMS radios went down, and my HTX-245 600mw radio was our only link that time in the field.
73's N2PDB
Damned illiterates :-)
I have discovered a wonderful
The interference is on the receiving end.
HF can be fairly reliable if you are willing to invest the money in equipment, antennas and trained engineers and operators. If you don't have access to a satellite, it is still a practical means of communication.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
CB is an unlicensed(as in no license by the user, equipment still needs to be certified) service at about 11 meters.
Amatuer radio(ham) has licensed operators that can run on different frequecies and can run much more power if the situation requires it. (Lots as in 4 watts max AM, 12 watts max SSB for CB (I think) and 1500 watts max any mode most places for the ham stuff)
40 Meters (aka HF) was used between the various OEMs and Albany and Red Cross National
Disclaimer
I'm the Queens County Emergency Coordinator of ARES - One of the groups called out. I "work" (2 levels down) for Tom from the article
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
"emergency personel should have access to ham radios."
They have CB radios genius. The trunk mountd units which are in every cop car built in the last 30 years have a range of 20+ miles to a large fixed antenna at the station and 7 miles to another mobile antenna. There is even a set of frequencies set aside for government emergency use only. How do you think they have been communicating during those two days, smoke signals?
A great place to start would be the Http://www.arrl.org site, the is the most well know Amatuer Radio Site around (BTW we are also working on being able to use a title other that "amatuer" as is demonstrated over and over again duing every day activities as well as emergencies) and will hopefully give you a better idea of the scope of what HAM radio has to offer the personally and publicly.
Your missing the point. Ham radio is there for YOU when you need it most. It's not just blackouts, eathquakes, search and rescue, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, biblical plagues, it's so much more.
Almost all the hi tech radio technology you use on a daily basis, has had some direct influence from ham radio. You like WiFi? Who do you think were the primary experimenters in that frequeny range? Who do you think you still share some of that band with?
What's the best way to get some young people interested in technology and have some direct hands on experience building their own gear?
Ever see somebody make a repeater out of 2 battery opertaed hand held radios that can extend the range of other portables for miles? Ham's do that on a daily basis when public service departments (Fire, EMS, Police) don't have the resources to do so.
It's just not widley publicized for some reason.
I guess it makes sense to take pictures of firefighters in bunker gear (I'm not knocking them) than to see some guy hunched over a couple of radios relaying important info.
Please check out www.arrl.org to find out more.
A few sites of interest:
American Relay Radio League
QRZ
Hams do lots of things. Most of the time it's general banter, contacting whoever you can contact. Often times it's used as a telephone replacement, since it's easy (and free) to talk to many people at once (aka conference calling). There's also contesting, if you check out the events calendar on the ARRL site I linked to you'll see a bunch of "try to contact as many people in the allotted time according to these rules" type events. While it may seem silly at times, it gives us practice.
Often times contests require us to run on our own power, give us a limited set of hardware, and the objective is to make contacts. Hmm.. sound like an emergency drill? Hams respond quickly because in all our non-emergency downtime we get practice so jumping on the air in a moment's notice is almost second nature.
It's mostly covered in the article, but the things that set hams apart are:
* We always have our own power
* We know how to conduct ourselves on the radio for maximum efficiency (everyone knows how to take turns reporting etc)
* We know how our radios work so when they break, we can fix them quickly
* We can make damn near anything from a coil of wire and a battery in the middle of nowhere
Yes, McGyver was definitely a ham radio op.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I don't know how anyone could discount HAM radio. You can run it in your car and talk to people thousands of miles away. I am very glad there are still people out there that can communicate over large distances even with no internet, phone lines, or power lines.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
"I'd argue that, instead of relying on grungy old men with ham radios, that emergency personel should have access to ham radios. It'd probably cost a lot less to do that than to create a telecommunications infrastructure resistant to blackouts."
Not everyone in ham radio is a 'grungy old man'. I'm 23, and I'm licensed. My girlfriend at the time I got into Amateur Radio is licensed, she was who got me interested in the field. A friend of mine in his 30's is licensed, a former employer if mine is licensed, and he was the Systems Architect for a communications project of very large scale.
You probably know at least one ham radio operator, who probably has some old Kenwood radio somewhere waiting for a need to be used. I don't drive around with five antennas on my car, there is an antenna cable coming into the passenger compartment, but the mount sits in the trunk with the antenna so I can put it up if I feel that I need to use it. I keep good batteries near where I store my radios, and I have one VHF HT for quick use, and one all-mode HT for when real problems hit.
And besides, are you going to train all of the emergency personnel on how to use the equipment and proper ettiquite? It's not exactly rocket science, but there are enough emergency personnel who would rather worry about learning how to keep critically injured people alive and let someone else do the talking that I'll gladly be one of the 'someone else'.
And two hours on a cell tower you say? I can go days on a set of batteries on my 2m HT, and a full day on the all-mode, if I have to, and I have enough power to go miles without any relay. I think that's pretty good odds for an extended blackout.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You should educate yourself on what really happens in disasters like this. Hams are well organized to be deployed in these situations. The emergency personel not only get access to the equipment but also to people trained to operate them and coordinate in a very orderly way, not only with other hams but with various emergency services as well. Actually many more emergency responders are trained hams than I suspect you realize, but those who are not would not be very effective in knowing everything they needed to operate a station without causing additional problems. Check with your local Emergency Management people and they can tell you if they would rather have hams helping or access to some radios (hint: the cops, fire departments, paramedics and other emergency responders already have radios, but hams still make very important contributions).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hams aren't allowed to talk about business on the air (unlike CB radio or some of the other mobile bands), because that got in the way of the FCC's New Deal views of how they wanted to regulate the quasi-nationalized airwaves and monopoly telephone and radio broadcast companies, and they're not allowed to use encryption (it took a long time before even ASCII was officially recognized, because it's a Code that's not Morse) because Foreign Spies might use it, and I think you're still not even allowed to use Bad Language because it's a broadcast medium (that doesn't totally suck, because it is more polite, but since you can lose your license, it still sucks.)
CB radio used to be semi-censored and did require licenses, and was limited to 5 watts which was usually a moderate distance in those days, but the FCC lost control of it during the 1970s flood of truckers and low-cost radio hardware, in spite of it being a very limited band. So some guy in Florida with a kilowatt linear ham amplifier could blow out CB radios across half the country... And you can use walkie-talkies with very limited range - the non-licensed FRS stuff pretends to go two miles, but you're supposed to have a license to use the GMRS channels which pretend to do 5-7 miles.
The ARPANET had its Acceptable Use Policies against non-official use, and its unofficial very flexible policies that you could talk about anything you want _except_ business, and about official government-or-university-research-related business, but companies that had Arpanet connections and UUCP connections couldn't technically relay email between them unless it was AUP-permitted email. So as the Internet evolved, and had the connectivity to be much more useful than dialup UUCP mail, it was very hard to tell whether you could legally send somebody email about business that your company was doing with their company, because it might be crossing AUP-censored territory. Eventually the Commercial Internet Exchange was formed to let normal businesses use Internet connections, especially email, without violating those laws or policies. But that worked because network connections use wires and fibers that can connect private entities, even if you use TCP/IP on them, while Ham Radio uses the nationalized radio spectrum so it can't escape (unless you wanted to use ham radio technology in metal pipes or something silly like that.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One service that hams provide quite often that EVERYONE benefits from is skywarn. In threatening weather hams known as spotters keep on the lookout for tornadoes, high winds, hail, etc. and report it from several locations at once. A almost real time of localized weather can be attained. Whenever you hear the weatherman say that spotters seen a funnel cloud or a tornado touchdown, they are talking about hams.
"I'd much rather have a REAL backup system than spend money reducing power line interference for HAM radio operators."
This isn't real?
Looks pretty organised to me. RACES (for HAM Radio) and REACT (for CB et al.) have been organized for quite some time. They provide coordinated relay of information when a natural disaster (or worse) occurs. They're usually up and running within minutes, and they listen for emergency transmissions from other operators, to forward to the right authorities. Sounds like a good system to me...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Another fact which hasn't been noted here, are all the digital modes being used on HF. Technics like PSK31 and other modes, can get signals through even under noisy conditions. Ham radio is not about old grumpy men using CW, but an interesting field for experimenting with technology. Some licensed amateurs frequently use packet radio, satelite links and other interesting and/or obscure methods like moon bouncing. Ham radio is still alive and kicking, just try to be a bit more open-minded and check out the technology before you dismiss it.
Click the Clicky thing!!!1!!one!!1!11
Even if the cell phone networks switch to alternate power and microwave linking, there's no coordination to minimize interference - indeed, no mechanism to do so. Everybody tries to call, and the system chokes.
...de K5ZC
It did exactly that during the power outage. In fact, there were more than a few news stories about people using good old-fashioned pay phones because the cell network was unusable.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
All else didn't fail. Some cell phone networks were still up.
...de K5ZC
None of the ones I had any experience with - and yes, I was in the area that evening - were usable. They were too jammed...just like they were on 9/11 (and yes, I was there then, too).
Cellphone networks, like all telephone networks are designed on the premise that only a fraction of their capacity will be in use at one time. During a disaster, that assumption crashes in flames, because *everyone* wants to call and let someone knoe they're all right.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
A few old/new words:
swam/swimmed
dreamt/dreamed
burnt/burned
snuc k/sneaked
The list goes on and on. The point is, I for one embrace anything that makes life easier for us. Damn Noah Webster for locking in spellings a hundred years ago!