Please only relay traffic coming from the disaster area!!
It goes against most of the Amateur Radio community, but it is ludicrous to flood a devestated area with Health & Welfare traffic. It simply will never get delivered and it burdens the overall relief effort.
Better yet, establish an out-of-area contact for yourself and send one message (radio, cell, Internet, etc) out of the disaster area to one person who is safe and sound elsewhere. Then that person can contact everyone else in the family, circle of friends, etc.
The mistake I saw during Hurricane Iniki on Kauai in 1992 came from the demand of those traffic nets to get those HW messages passed. They never were delivered and they sat on packet radio BBS' until deleted.
A lot of these traffic nets thought they were helping the relief effort by sending the HW traffic into the disaster area. Instead, those operators should have stood by and waited for someone on Kauai to come up and pass traffic out of the disaster area. That didn't happen much because most hams on the island went to help either themselves or the American Red Cross.
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It goes against most of the Amateur Radio community, but it is ludicrous to flood a devestated area with Health & Welfare traffic. It simply will never get delivered and it burdens the overall relief effort.
Better yet, establish an out-of-area contact for yourself and send one message (radio, cell, Internet, etc) out of the disaster area to one person who is safe and sound elsewhere. Then that person can contact everyone else in the family, circle of friends, etc.
The mistake I saw during Hurricane Iniki on Kauai in 1992 came from the demand of those traffic nets to get those HW messages passed. They never were delivered and they sat on packet radio BBS' until deleted.
A lot of these traffic nets thought they were helping the relief effort by sending the HW traffic into the disaster area. Instead, those operators should have stood by and waited for someone on Kauai to come up and pass traffic out of the disaster area. That didn't happen much because most hams on the island went to help either themselves or the American Red Cross.