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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."
A friend of mine (Randy Cassingham of This Is True ) is a HAM radio operator and he's helped provide communications for emergency responders during disasters near where he lives in Colorado. When the chips are down, it seems that radio hobbyists are ready, willing, and able to help out. It's nice to see that they're getting some positive press.
Hopefully much of this thread will be kudos for Ham radio operators around the world. A lot of them use their powers for good more often than you might think.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I got my first Ham license back in the 1980s. Back then you had to be able to do 20wpm morse code to get to the highest license.
Nowadays they've watered it down so that it's extremely easy to get the licenses. In addition, with the Internet you can basically walk to your computer and email the person you just talked to halfway around the world.
Anyway, in my experience the people left on the airwaves are all at least 60 years old.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
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.
I live in Oregon, and let me say, things are still a huge mess around here. Although I personally didn't need rescuing (although someone I know did!), I must say that the HAM operators are an invaluable asset in an event like this. On the coast, communications are still spotty, if existent at all. There was an article in the Oregonian today about how some places on the coast don't even have 911 service, since all of the fiber links for phones are out, and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.
It's still a mess out here. Lots of roads are still closed - Interstate 5 is closed in Washington, effectively cutting off all transportation between Portland and Seattle. Thousands of cars, and most importantly, trucks, travel[ed] this highway daily. The train tracks are closed too, so there's no amtrak or freight trains. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens... things are improving, but in no speedy fashion.
You mean something like Packet Radio
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Yay! Finally! Someone recognizes I'm important! Now, if only I could get a date... ;-)
Goddess, I just wish there would be a natural disaster and a cute girl for me to save
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.
If one could account for signal distortion/degradation, ham radio sets could conceivably be used for broadcasting files. And I mean as a binary ogg/mp3/aac/flac/whatever, not as audio that can be played by any radio.
It's called Packet Radio, and has been around about as long as the internet itself. In fact, one of the first demonstrations of TCP/IP's versatility was the connecting of a satellite network, a packet radio network, and the ARPANet. This happened back in 1977.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Actually, I prefer D-Star ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR ) over packet radio.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
It's good to see some publicity about amateur radio.
Pretty easy to get your license, too. About a week's worth of studying will get you on the air. The ARRL (American Radio Relay League) has a ton of info about getting licensed.
It's exciting that you can IM someone through the internet and have it appear in a couple milliseconds........but how about sending a transmission through the air to someone on the other side of the world at the speed of light using something half the size of your laptop and an antenna as long as that crazy cat-5 wire you have stretched across 3 rooms?
73 de KB3OOJ
Myself, I stick mostly to slow but useful 1200 baud AFSK on VHF. When you're passing things like short text messages, telemetry, and position reports, you don't NEED huge amounts of speed. What you need is a system to get the most critical information to where it will do the most good. And 1200 baud has a big advantage in that you can use it over damn near anything that'll pass a voice signal. You can fit an entire modem and protocol stack in a $2, 8-bit microcontroller, too - no fancy ASICs or DSPs needed (see my link below).
As for the long-distance HF communications people usually associate with ham radio, there's PSK-31 which is a very robust and efficient mode designed for keyboard-to-keyboard use. It's slow, but works when almost nothing else does. It can be encoded with the above-mentioned MCU (I do that for propagation beacons and such) but most people just use a sound card and PC.
Pactor III and other modes give you speeds suitable for email on the HF bands, and they're used for that quite a bit.
Ham radio in emergency situations is less about fancy toys, though, and more about having people with the training and knowledge to be able to use them, and to improvise when things go wrong. That's another reason I stick with relatively low-tech stuff - I'd rather build low-cost devices that can be kludged into doing all sorts of useful things than to focus on finicky, expensive, cutting-edge stuff that's going to fall apart when the fecal matter hits the air circulating device.
Yes, there are a lot of crusty old guys on the radio. But keep in mind that ham radio is what nerds did BEFORE computers and Slashdot, and a lot of them remember that spirit, even if they've fallen behind the curve a bit in technology. There's also a growing number of young hams developing exciting things like GNU Radio, and the open source philosophy is increasingly prevalent in the community. I'm certain that in the next decade open source will be THE major driving force in the hobby.
In the end, it's really just a return to the hobby's roots. There's always been a great deal of information sharing and experimentation, but much of that spirit has dwindled in recent years because of the aging population and the increasing complexity and manufacturing costs associated with modern gear. Open source software, plus DSP, FPGAs, fast computers, and software-defined radios, as well as increased ease of collaboration and access to contract manufacturing are swinging things back the other way.
Think of it this way - a weekend's worth of dedicated cramming can get you a license that grants access to some rather large chunks of spectrum, often with relatively little in the way of restrictions on how you use it. That's the sort of resource that corporations spend millions for - look at the 700 MHz auctions going on now. That license gets you a huge radio frequency playground that's not only wide open for experimentation, it NEEDS active experimentation and exploitation or it will be taken away and auctioned off to the corporations. Don't wait for Google's Android to save wireless communications from the likes of AT&T - go develop an open replacement for a proprietary mode (start with Pactor III or D*Star's AMBE codec), or start a solar-powered 802.11b backbone, or SOMETHING.
Hell, just to make things interesting - I'll send one of my OpenTracker+ kits, free, anywhere in the world, to anyone with a Slashdot account that already exists as of today who gets a license before the end of February 2008. It may not be everyone's thing, but A) it's free and B) it comes with source code. Email scott@argentdata.com.
These advantages are shared by computer-generated modulation schemes such as PSK31, which theoretically fits into 31 Hz (though in practice many signals are distorted and splatter over more spectrum than that) and which can be decoded when it's too faint to be heard through the noise.