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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Seems that ham radio (which recently had a bit of backlash here on Slashdot from a few people thinking it was useless, outdated technology), really shined through during the blackouts.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."
....Right, because when the power is out, those power lines sure generate a lot of interference.
Being a slashdotter means never having to say you're sorry when you ostracize a seemingly archaic, yet dependable, technology that shows its worth when all else fails.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Man, what happened to those phones you needed to crank up??
You only need HAM radio once in a while, but there is no substitute for it's low-tech ability to keep communicating.
It is obvious that old methods shine when newer technology fails.
This is why we burn candles during blackouts.
Big deal, lets get on with the other 99.9% of our lives.
The unofficial
... that none of the communications applications mentioned in the article would have used HF radio. HF is used when you want an unreliable, noisy link over extremely long distances. VHF (144 MHz and up) and UHF comms are used for emergency-services work. These services would not be affected by BPL.
HF is pretty much done for as a meaningful communications medium. VHF and UHF are where the action is these days.
...data can never have too many multiple, redundant backups.
Carousel is a lie!
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!
sorry, ran out of space in the subject line...
Many cell towers are equiped with UPSs to work for a couple hours or so, but hardly enough to cover an outage like what we've seen. We've concentrated on building these things cheap. I can't say I blame them -- who expects a two-day-long outage? Even so, many of the backups didn't even work. You could argue that they should have generators for backup, solar panels, gerbil-wheels, or what not, but its our capitalist nature to try and build these things as cheaply as possible.
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.
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
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'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
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)
Shone! Shone! Dear God, 'shined' hasn't been used as a past tense since the 1700s!
So Timothy is a time traveller from the 1700s. That explains a lot of slashdot spelling now that I think about it
Ok, the coffee is kicking in now.
That's what we get for depending on electricity so much. HAM radio is nothing special, without those car batteries and other backup power sources it would have been as useless as a pair of tits on a bull.
Just make sure never to get an electric home environment control system.
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.
An blonde chick ran out of gas one night and a dude pulled over to offer assistance. She got in the car and noticed he had all kinds of radio equipment in the car and several antennas outside. She asked what that was all about. He explained he was a Ham radio operator and he could talk to anywhere in the world from right here in his car. She asked "Anywhere in the world?" and he assured her he could. "Even in Poland?" she asked. "Yes, even Poland." She said "Wow, my mother lives in Poland and today is her birthday. I'd do anything if I could tell her Happy Birthday." He said "You'd do anything?" She said "Yes, anything." So he pulled over on the top of a hill and pulled out his dick and said "Get with it." She grabbed ahold of it and bent over and said "Happy Birthday, Mom."
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.
Pigeons is the answer.
....where the IP stands for Internet Pigeon)
We would have TCP/IP (
Each one would be tattooed with the appropriate packet type and given a little bag to hold a punched card of data.
You would just number your pigeons, give them their cards and let them go.
Routers would just be called "lofts" and the full message could be put together once all the pigeons had arrived by whatever route they felt was necessary.
Requesting a re-transmission of a dropped packet (damned rednecks and their shotguns) would be a hassle though.
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.
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
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.
...and you cause people to not get involved. Less involvement means that the system will fall apart.
If no one is left using the technology because of problems under normal conditions, these people won't be there to save your ass when you need paramedics called and the phones don't work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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
The wired telephone network did really well during the blackout, because it was designed with separate reliable power systems, big batteries, generators, and a concern for reliability; except for a few isolated power problems, the real trouble that wired phones had was that too many people were trying to call so there were some capacity issues. Cell phones have similar issues, but the overloading capacity problems are far worse, and the failure methods aren't as clean, and unlike the wired phone network, there aren't decades of work on how to make sure that "important" users get priority during overloads.
Peer-to-Peer systems scale well, and theoretically they'd do better than centralized problems in some kinds of emergencies, but they have to be designed correctly to avoid the overloading-and-failure problem as well. (For example, Napster scaled really well within clusters, but the earlier Gnutella things run out of indexing capacity after a while.)
So you'd expect Ham Radio to be great, because everybody can talk directly to everybody else once they pick channels, but it's not really that way. When two radios can reach each other directly, and it's an emergency situation, everybody's polite and well-trained enough to prioritize and let the doctors and firemen and police talk to each other and move the idle chit-chat or the "Hi, Marge, I'll be home really late" personal calls to other channels. HF seems to work that way, and CB radio Channel 9 somewhat did, but other CB channels are a total zoo, kind of like Usenet without the scalability. But a large fraction of the cute little handheld ham sets (2m, 70cm, etc.) are repeater-based - there's a repeater up on a hilltop with N channels of transmit and receive which lets the little sets get lots of distance without lots of power, kind of like one big cell site per hilltop. It works really well when it's not overloaded, but its only overflow protection is polite users, and that means that if it's too busy, you can't get through, but the busy signal is friendlier and more interesting. One repeater that got mentioned at ARRL.ORG handled about 500 messages over 20 hours, which is about one call every 2 minutes - not a heavy load.
Does anybody know how well ham repeater towers did for power during the outage? I'm guessing most of them are well-enough designed, with batteries and solar to support most of their needs rather than depending on line power, partly because hams are good at that kind of planning and partly because volunteers would rather not have to drive up some mountain during bad weather to fire up a generator just because the power line went down when they've got better things to do.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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 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...
Interference instantly gone when hams are only really useful.
:)
:)
Hams were the first pioneers of almost all the radio technology you take for granted. You like WiFi? Who do you think tinkered in that frequncy range to begin with? Who do you think you still share that 2.4Ghz band with? Sattelites? Etc, etc.
but they continued to work and emergency personnel went off their powered radio systems anyway. Show me the problem.
Umm, FYI, we lost power to the EMS repeaters for a good 30 mins, twice. Repeaters work off of AC, and if they go down, all the little portable radios that EMS personnell rely on make grat paperweights.
I'm a ham, had a radio that day, and was able to communicate that day at work with a few battery powered repeaters. The operators on the other were ready and willing to help out in any way possible.
Please visit www.arrl.org for more information.
Nice troll BTW.
"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.
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.
I haven't keyed up a radio in a few years, but when my license expires in March of 2004, I'm renewing it.
It's just one of those things - you never know when you'll need it, but you'll be glad you had it...
---
KE6FTH
The interference from power-line broadband is capable of travelling hundreds of miles, from places that do have power. This is A Bad Thing.
HAM requires one to pass an exam to receive an FCC issued callsign, and there are specific rules as to what classes of licenses are allowed as far as frequency, power, transmission type, and the like. HAM radio operators can lose their licenses if they violate the rules, and have their equipment confinscated. The exam for the entry level operator class, "Technician", is 35 questions, and you must answer 26 correctly to pass. It's an easy test, costs $10, and applies your license for ten years before another $10 renewal (for ten more years) is required. There is next a Technician Plus Code class, which gives access to an additional frequency over Technician, and then General, which is higher yet, and more difficult, followed by Amateur-Extra, which is the top license, where you get all HAM-allowed privileges.
CB, on the other hand, has some 40 "channels", is technically restricted in power to something like one watt or somesuch, and simply requires you to get in line at Radioshack to buy the kit. You are in theory not allowed to talk to someone that you know is more than a certain distance away from you, CB is designed for local communcation only. CB is not allowed repeaters, and those that have tried setting up CB repeater networks have found themselves in trouble with the FCC. The "Channels" are set frequencies that CB operates on, not actual raw stuff like HAM operators deal with. HAM operators get a significantly larger piece of spectrum, with stuff as low as 10Hz, and up in the GHz range at the top, with all kinds of pieces in between. CB gets it's one section around 10m or 11m or something like that.
Basically, HAM Radio requires you to follow some rules in exchange for significant privileges, CB is a toy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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..
The simple sad fact is that ham radio is now virtually irrelevant in emergency communications and other direct public service activities. While the non-ham world has embraced analog and digital cell phones, FRS, 802.11, LEO and GEO satellite terminals and the Internet, most of ham radio is still stuck on methods that predate World War 2. And many hams seem perversely proud of it!
The only remaining reason for ham radio to continue to exist (and it's a really important one) is for the utterly unique educational opportunities it provides. Where else can you, as an individual, design your own antennas, build your own radios, conduct propagation experiments, experiment with your own modulation schemes, or participate in the design, construction and operation of a spacecraft? Ham radio has launched many people into productive technical careers, and that has always been its biggest payoff.
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
Now that really is a supprise.
Oh sure Ham's an old technology. Like Unix. Constantly revising the technology by a community connected by the technology. Like open source. Always informmed like Slashdot working together to keep the signal clear.
Many ham ops use Linux and for a good reason the whole Linux community is very much like the Ham packet community.
Today public wifi is a bunch of hacks with repeaters etc but some day a ham will bring out some technology that will make it work on a massive scale.
But people outside the ham community. They don't see it. They look at ham and say "That ugly tower is going to bring down property values" they say "We'll get cancer" they sue and harrass ham ops.
They don't believe a group of hobbyists can do any better than paid profesionals.
Open source and free software communitys live in the same boat.
Hay if brodband over IP interfears with ham packets then what will happen to cell phones, wifi, broudcast TV and radio..
We don't need archaic hams and we don't need open source software. But if you think the alternitive isn't ditching the technology all together your mistaken.
Good bye open source, good bye Linux, Good bye Internet.
Good by Ham, good bye communication inovations, good bye cell phones and yet again good bye Internet.
We can live with out it. Do we want to?
If Ham had a Microsoft there'd be someone saying right now how Ham got lucky.
I don't actually exist.
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)
There wasn't much powerline or RF interference during this particular event...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Ham radio is not licensed for use as a commercial or government service. It is a non-commercial ("amateur") service only.
Plus, most service workers and emergency personnell have radios that have anywhere from zero (auto-trunking) to five (old style VHF/UHF) "channels". Training them to use the open spectrum and coordinate such use is ridiculous. They're responding to an emergency, they won't have time or patience to establish a net and communications protocol.
We "old" (27 years old) hams are able to take this one little slice of responsibility and learn it very, very well. I don't have to worry about crowd control, or CPR, or evacuating the building--all I have to worry about is maintaining a communications link between myself and the net control, and then passing messages back and forth. What I have that the professional emergency responders do not have is the skill necessary to manage the communications should something unexpected happen, such as a jammer on frequency, blocked communications paths, etc.
Do you think that the police captain running the search-and-rescue drill has the spare time to decide whether a small J-pole antenna or a 35 watt amp is the best way to establish contact and maintain it over a period of hours or days?
JD
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.
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
All the technology that you quote apart from satellites requires considerable infrastructure that simply doesn't work or is overloaded during an emergency. Satellite terminals work very well in open country, but they don't like high buildings. A friend of mine had a portable INMARSAT terminal to provide emergency communications. He had to go onto a roof to use it. LEO (Iridium-style) is better, but it still has problems amongst the 'canyon walls' formed by high-rise buildings.
You accuse hams of being stuck in the past. Please remember that the hobby is tightly regulated by the FCC. The fights to even get packet radio accepted took a lot of time.
Yes, the training aspect that you mention is important, but the ability of amateurs to provide emergency support is probably still their best justification for the EM spectrum they occupy.
See my journal, I write things there
I've got a few karma points to burn, and you need to be beaten with a clue stick. I suggest you start with the ARRL.
To call amateur radio operators simply hobbiests does them a disservice. They're licensed by the FCC. Listen on your local repeater the next time some severe thunderstorms roll through. I bet you'll hear a SKYWARN net, courtesy of your local ARES group. What's ARES? This is. They are volunteers that work closely with the National Weather Service. If you're lucky enough to still have an active RACES group in your area, I suggest you go look at that site. FEMA, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the governing body that provides assistance to the local governing bodies, specifically the civil defence bodies that sponsor RACES groups.
Enough examples? No?
Check out an Army or Navy MARS site and note that you can pass a MARSGRAM to any service member, anywhere, through the network of MARS operators. As an amateur radio operator, it was pretty cool to sit (once) at the MARS gateway in Frankfurt, Germany while I was in the Army. More than a handful of messages that came through were on their way to soldiers in Bosnia.
If your metro area lost traditional communications, your local hams would post themselves at the Red Cross, any hospitals, police and fire stations and keep communications going. In fact, this is what they did in New York after the towers came down.
Guess what else. We're volunteers. We don't get paid. In fact, we CAN'T get paid for our radio services. Go read the rules: 47 CFR 97.113(2)
P.S. It says no radio transmissions for hire.
That means every radio operator is out there during emergencies because they want to be. They take an active interest in the community they're serving. They invest in their own rigs and the generators to run them so that they might one day HELP YOU, as well as give them an outlet for their interests. That's a damn sight more dedicated than your whiny, milktoast ass.
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
Sorry, but that sort of illiteracy's bloody annoying.
>> A lot of people seem to say "Its much more valuable to have thousands of people get broadband internet access than to have ham radio....
You're correct to point out the folly of such opinions.
First, it isn't much of a leap to suggest that expanding broadbnd capabilities plays to the financial and employment prospects of many, or most, Slashdot readers. They're hardly an objective, or even thinking, bunch,
Second, DSL or cable access isn't going to do you much good when there's no electricity to power those PC's.
Third, just what are people supposed to do? Climb back into the rubble and send an email to the Fire Department about the tornado that just wiped out their house? Imagining that the Internet can act as a personal communications tool in an emergency is just that: imagination.
All in all, when the lights go out, I'd much rather have a bunch of licensed and emergency trained amateur radio operators around equipped with battery-powered VHF transceivers than a bunch a suburbanites trying to get their AOL client working.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The point isn't to surpass it. The point is to do it because you want to, to see if you can, and for fun.
Think of it as some guy writing yet another editor - what's the point in a world with with emacs, vi etc?.
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
Of course there's NOTHING stopping any emergency personelle from getting their ham license, and in fact many do and then use ham radio very effectively, after they've learned the ropes. But you'd be hard pressed to convince every EMT and fire fighter in the country to add ham radio training to their already busy schedules. And why bother when you have a pool of active hams that can jump into any emergency situation at a moments notice? Why have EMTs fight fires? It does not make sense. Haveing dedicated ham radio operaters makes sense.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Think of all the amateur astronomers whose telescopes became useless due to light polution. It didn't kill off amateur astronomy, but it meant that you had to really want to do it to go for a drive.
That's a stronger analogy than you realize. Lots of people are afraid of the dark, and so they shine light not only where it's needed, but also up into the sky, where it's not needed. Vast quantities of fossil fuels are being turned into greenhouse gasses AND blotting out the sky. Yes, it's nice to have light at night, but it's not necessary to shine it into the sky. Yes, it's nice to have broadband, but it doesn't have to come at the expense of better uses of the spectrum. Light fixtures can direct the light DOWN, and run only enough intensity to show what needs to be shown (to minimize reflected waste), and broadband networking can be run through efficient transmission lines so it doesn't leak so badly.
Now, if we're just going to reassign the entire spectrum to data communications, without regulation, that would at least be logically consistent, though a bad idea. Allowing one special interest to destroy the entire resource is just a bad idea.
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!
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?
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...