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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Seems that ham radio (which recently had a bit of backlash here on Slashdot from a few people thinking it was useless, outdated technology), really shined through during the blackouts.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
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
...data can never have too many multiple, redundant backups.
Carousel is a lie!
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
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.
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.
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
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
II. It's the most dependable emergency communcation network in the world.
III. It requires practicaly NO INFRASTRUCTURE!
IV. It's CHEAP (total cost to implement, see III)!
V. It's reliable. It will be operational when all other methods of long distance communication fail.(See II)
VI. It's democratic.
VII. It is the first worldwide hacker community.
IX. It teaches science and technology without being onerous.
X. It is altruistic (people use their rigs to provide emergency communications for people who could care less about ham radio).
XI. Unlike commercial broadcasting, it serves the community at all times.
Those are just a few of the many reasons I admire and apreciate ham radio operators. We should all fight to preserve a portion of the spectrum for the use of these fine folks.
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.
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.
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)
You only need HAM radio once in a while, but there is no substitute for it's low-tech ability to keep communicating.
Another great thing about plain old analogue radio is that it can be implemented using discrete componets in a military-grade package for around 20 lbs. Repariablilty of such a solution is far superior to integrated electronics.
Might not make a difference under normal circumstances, but when faced with things blowing to bits right and left you sure are glad you don't have to locate IC637247 (random name there) to repair the damn thing!
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
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.
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!