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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Seems that ham radio (which recently had a bit of backlash here on Slashdot from a few people thinking it was useless, outdated technology), really shined through during the blackouts.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."
My entire internet service has been ham based for years. While the person who runs it is an absolute moron and the service sucks, it's not the technology's fault, it's the guy who runs it. Ham radio isps is the future for anyone who lives where cable/dsl isn't available.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
How would you like a 128k data link to your car:d ex.htm l
http://www.icomamerica.com/amateur/dstar/in
Amateur Radio is cutting edge, the thing that makes it seem obsolete is that they never delete old protocols or modes of operation. For example the same guy may use CW to contact Brazil one night, and an OSCAR (Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) Satellite to contact France the next.
I work for a wireless carrier, we lost less than a dozen towers during the outtage and the DIESEL GENERATORS that support them during power outtages are designed to last at least a week which is fantastic considering everyone else is without power. I think it's great that people still use ham radios, it keeps my grandfather from asking me how e-mail works.
Even though 99 pct of the time no one thinks about ham radio, in a crisis situation, it's usually the one form of communication that is likely to be still working when it hits the fan. In remote areas, it may be the only communication available even in good times.
The reason is that our modern communications are very complex and dependent on things like having reliable electrical power. Most ham sets can run on car batteries and provide nationwide or even global coverage if necessary. Voice, video, and data are all possible with ham radio. Just what you need in a crisis.
When all else fails, run.
Grungy old men? I'm 26, and I got my ham license when I was 21. There are a lot more middle-aged-and-up hams than us young guys, though... Morgan KF4YTR
Couldnt blackberries have done the same job that the hams did here? They performed a similar service during the September 11th attacks in 2001 when everything else was overloaded
Right - and the hams are going to invest thousands of dollars for their own gear, and NOT be able to use it except in an emergency, PLUS they won't be able to train with that gear
Yeah, that makes sense - learn to do something in an emergency situation, instead of working public service events year round, and training "nets" every week.
Your also only thinking blackouts. When they have forest fires out west - how do they do the long haul radio comms? Yep, hams on HF. When there is a hurricane, how do the storm spotting reports come in - Hams on HF - AGAIN. When The shuttle broke up over Texas, what did NASA and the local PDs find was the ONLY thing that worked out in the rural areas. You guessed it - Hams. When they need to do GIS data logging, what did they use? Hams running a mode called APRS
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I think the whole power line thing is a bad idea.
Wireless technologies are more than able to fill this need with the same or less effort.
For all you folks dogging the HAMs, consider the do it yourself hacker nature they represent. Don't we need to nurture and cultivate this kind of thinking given the general law making trends today?
Again, its a bad idea that can easily be solved other ways.
Blogging because I can...
If you leave the fun frequencies (HF, the stuff the Broadband over power interferes with) saturated with noise and even clobber some of the VHF frequencies, who will want to buy equipment for use only when the power goes out. Also consider that while the power was out in some area it wasn't in others. The HAM at the recieving end may hear nothing but static.
A lot of the value that HAM radio provides in an emergency comes from the large number of people who have them who wouldn't if they could only use them when the lights went out. Take away the fun and no will want to bother.
I have also talked with several people who have traveled all over the world in small boats and nearly all agree that the most reliable communications is HAM radio due to the large number of "ears" listening.
many ham radio operators put great effort in training for emergencies and praticipate in mock emergency drills with the red cross and state emergency agencies.. As for Ham radio being outdated, some of the most advanced digital signal processing is now being used in Ham radios.. Some of the top end radios even have two DSPs.. Broadband over the powerlines will cause problems other than just ham radio.. The biggest users of the spectrum that the powerlines will be using is the military and other government agencies.. It could even cause problems with other part 15 devices..
Yeah, okay. I am not sure of any ham radio based ISPs in the US, however, such a thing would be illegal and impractical for several reasons:
First of all, it is illegal to use amateur radio as a commercial service.
* It's illegal to use encryption or voice scrambling over amateur radio. This would make things like https, ssl, and ssh, illegal to use over the service.
* the customers of the service would have to have amateur radio licenses as well as the ISP.
* It is illegal to transmit profanity over amateur radio.
Please moderate this appropriately (down)
You talk about "ham radios" like they are something special - they aren't - they are in fact transcievers just like the kind the cops, military or commercial organizations use. If it wasn't for the vast infrastructure of volunteers it wouldn't be all that better then those frs radios you can get for 5$ at wallmart. Also I'm an Extra Class ham and I'm only 25 - I don't think I'm all that grungy... I'm just a regular guy who can help out - and thats what ham radio is.
:) - thats nothing anyone who is "emergency personel" would even be interested in.
"emergency personel" already have their own repeaters and equipment, but they aren't typically handeling traffic for regular people, non profits, hospitals (especially ones in the countryside) and things that civil servants typically also do. Who can you contact if you want to sent information during an emergency to loved ones and can't use regular communications? Call a ham
in many parts of the world such as Africa and India. Even the Plain-old-telephone service sometimes has to use HF to bridge the gaps. Microwave works ok when you have enough repeater stations, but HF can bridge the distances better.
See my journal, I write things there
I now work for a pretty large and famous computer company known by it's three letter acronym with an active list of a couple thousand known hams. Hams are using (and programming and building) computer interfaces for all sorts of digital modes. We don't wait for you programmers to build it for us. Most of the times it's the other way around. And we're much better programmers, engineers, and technicians than you are because we are in a technical hobby that gives us ways to expand both endeavors - for fun!
So shove your attitude up your bit bucket, Sonny and don't speak about something of which you have no knowledge.
Too lazy to create a sig...
For most of the effected areas, coordinating service attempts with local line workers would NOT HAVE ACCOMPLISHED ANYTHING. He was talking about a backup system for the grid, one that wouldn't have allowed the failure in the first place. More likely, they worked with emergency personnel (as it says in the article) helping those in need because of the blackout, not people fixing the problem. I think you're confusing "proactive solution to prevent problem" with "fixing problems as they happen". A "REAL backup system" would kick in and [hopefully] be subverted before RACES ever caught wind of this.
--- What
You have summarized the sentiments I was trying to get across in my post the last time this subject came up (and you did it much better than I did or could).
Ignorant people criticize things they don't understand. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your views) hams look out the ingorant folks too. The people who wouldn't notice if hams were gone are going to be the first ones bitching when the chips are down and you need emergency service coordination or a backup for emergency communications. They will be the ones asking "Why doesn't our government have a backup plan?" Well, despite the best laid plans, backups sometimes fail and our government (local and federal) is notoriously short sited in spending the money for such things (Gee, do I have to give examples of this?) Hams fill the gaps quietly and much better than government ever could.
It is nice to know that hams are covering our collective asses and doing it for free and little to no recognition. As TitaniumFox stated, listen to the local repeater when the next severe storm comes in. You'll get better information quicker than what you ever hear from your local news or on NOAA weather radio. The hams are the ones out there reporting what the talking head on the news station is telling you. The talking head is getting their info from trained spotters who do this work for free to save your ignorant butt. And those trained spotters are almost always amateur radio operators.
Gee, sounds like some of these "hobbyists" may have more to offer the community than most Slashdot posters. (Go look in the mirror).
I'll stop my rant. "73" to those who know what the hell I am talking about.
How's that? My phones (both land line and cell) were both working fine during the whole thing. Couldn't get through to Detroit Edison, though!
KG4ULP here. Two days after I got my ham radio license (August of last year) my wife and I went camping in western North Carolina in a rather remote area. A day into our trip my car wouldn't start - it seemed to be either a fried alternator or a dead battery. A fellow camper who unsuccesfully jumpered my car had a cell phone but could not hit a tower. The park ranger's office was a few miles away, so there was nobody local to help unless I bummed a ride off somebody the next day (and the ranger's office was open). I had a local repeater programmed into my newly-acquired handheld and nervously identified myself and told the two guys who were chatting on the repeater my predicament. They were extremely friendly and put our minds at ease and helped us out - the next morning a guy who worked in a garage in the nearest town paid us a visit and it turned out my 5 year old car battery had shorted out. He put in a new battery, charged us like $50 for the battery plus house call, and my wife and I could go back to enjoying our vacation.
That's just a small example of ham radio helping out in a (albeit non-emergency) predicament. I never travel without my handheld and it's very rare that I'm in a location where I can't hit a repeater. Hams by their very nature are eager to help and if given the choice of a cell phone or HT for an emergency, my choice would be the HT. Many hams are trained for handling traffic in emergency situations - see earlier posts about ARES and RACES.
Like many reading this I am a technology nut who is heavily reliant on the Internet for both work and play. But there simply is nothing like radio as a method of communication. Radio waves can travel just about anywhere in the atmosphere, which is a medium which can't be broken like a wire, and simple transmitters and receivers are cheap and easy to use. The only exception to that is the HF band in which signals are bounced off the ionosphere for long-distance communication; solar activity can completely wipe out that mode of communication, but it is rare.
It should be emphasized that ham radio operators love to tinker and experiment and in many examples cutting-edge type experiments that started on ham radio have turned into mainstream technology. That is something that the average slashdotter should appreciate.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
They have 'em. But even volunteers, or "auxillary" as some are known, still have to go through much of the physical, mental, and background checks normal cops go through. They attend an "academy" but its not as long as normal police training. Usually you only see auxillary cops during big events, natural disasters, etc. Here in VA they call them down to the beach when the streets are literally overflowing with drunken, violent, college students ( imagine "freaknik" in atlanta, just in VA ) ...
heres some info on the Va Beach Auxiliary police
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
One thing that I havn't noticed anybody mention... Cell phones cannot talk to each other. They MUST have radio access to a cell tower. You can be standing next to someone and their phone will NOT talk to yours unless both of them can receive the signals from a tower.
As was made painfully obvious when hurricane Andrew ripped through South Florida, cell towers will not work when they become "horizontally polarized" (laying on their side)... I was down in the Homestead area for 3 weeks after "A-day"... I worked with the local police, EMS, Red Cross, National Guard, Salvation Army, and countless number of simple people who lost everything and were desperate to contact their loved ones outside of the disaster area, to let them know they were still alive. In one day alone, I personally sent out over 450 health and welfare messages on the packet network.
Every year North American amateurs have what's called a "Field Day". The purpose of Field Day is to get away from your home, in a local park or some other public place, and operate for 24 hours without commercial power. To simulate emergency conditions. To demonstrate to the public that HAM radio is still very much alive. This past year's slogan was "When all else fails..." When all else fails, I *CAN* take a 5 watt radio and a couple hundred feet of whatever wire I can lay my hands on, and set up a communications station. Can you do that with cellular technology? I didn't think so...
And by the way... After I left Homestead, after 20 days in the area, my cellphone STILL did not work until I got half-way back to Tampa... Yeah... Great technology to rely on when the shit hits the fan...
My apologies for the flame tone of this reply... It just pisses me off when someone who really does NOT have a clue about what they are talking about makes meaningless blanket statements about things they know nothing of... The PHB's absolutely LOVE those types...
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...