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Ham Radio Operators Are Heroes In Oregon
An anonymous reader writes "We all know the impact that Ham radio can have in emergencies, but that often slips by the public and the authorities. Not so in Oregon, where a day after getting inundated with torrential rains and winds and suffering from the usual calamities those cause, Oregon's Governor called the local Ham radio operators heroes. When discussing how the storm affected communications, the governor stated: "I'm going to tell you who the heroes were from the very beginning of this...the ham radio operators." Kudos to the Oregon Ham operators for helping out in a bad situation, and getting the recognition they deserve."
"Anyway, in my experience the people left on the airwaves are all at least 60 years old."
The barriers to entry that kept the hobby purist worked a bit too well.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Cell phones are very convenient, but what gives me peace of mind is knowing my quad-band (70cm, 1.25m, 2m, 6m), wide-receive, submersible Yaesu VX-7R hand-held transceiver is close at hand. If James Kim would have had even a basic Amateur hand-held transceiver with him things would have probably turned out much different.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
That's the problem.
:)
Guys like me (50 years old) don't care to, or are able to, do 5 WPM in Morse code. And as far as that goes, learning Morse never made sense to me anyways, not since the advent of the PC. Hell, I've had an Icom 735 for over 25 years without a license. I like to lurk.
So how do you attract new blood to an activity that's waaay too geeky to begin with? Kids aren't going to bother learning Morse when they can use a program to do the same thing - why would they bother?
So faced with either keeping the hobby "pure" and watching it die out as the oldtimer's keys go silent, or conceding to reality and making membership more attactive to younger folks, which would you choose?
But you're right, it's definitely not the same as it was 20 - 30 years ago.
I dream in binary.
Yeah, they're heroes today, but when Oregon's power utilities decide to start providing Internet over their power lines, turning their electrical grid into one vast RF radiator that wipes out HAM frequencies, we'll have all those all-knowing /.ers declaring HAM radio a thing of the past, that they should get a life, and my personal favorite "Don't worry, when the power goes out, we can turn on your HAM radio sets and save us all, so what's the problem?"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
FWIW, the "ham" in ham radio radio is not an abbreviation. It's just ham.
There's no definitive answer on the matter, but it goes back to the days when ham radio operators had better sets than the old Navy radios (in spark-gap radio days). Amateur radio operators had more efficient radios and were more powerful than the "professional" radio sets at the time, when a Navy radio operator would try to use the frequency his set was tuned for he may hear some guys "hamming it up" on the air. After a while the saying was commonplace and the term "ham" stuck.
Officially it's known as Amateur Radio, but most people just refer to it as ham radio.
"And now you know the rest of the story, good day!"
Also, disasters strike in many different ways. It's conceivable that there might be an occasion where the only viable communications medium you have is boolean (a carrier wave with no microphone or modulator circuit, or hammers and pipes in a cave-in, or whatever.) If that's the case, it's Morse or nothing.
Ham radio operators pride themselves on being able to communicate when absolutely nothing else works, and the world is crashing down (or blowing up) around them. Morse is another tool in the toolbox.
John