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#31
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On 10/24/2011 11:35 PM, Patty Winter wrote:
In , Steve wrote: Developments in technology have reduced the need for what we can offer. Mother Nature still reminds us that our fine technology is at her pleasure, but not often. Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed in the role of ham radio in disasters. At a panel discussion about the future of amateur radio at Pacificon (the ARRL Pacific Division convention) a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that all four speakers--including officials well informed about both national and international trends--said that hams will soon play almost no role in disaster communications. I knew that other services were getting stronger, but I didn't realize that the prospects were going to change that dramatically for us that soon. [snip] But there was also discussion of satellite phones that can be set up in minutes basically by pressing a button, and of on-the-fly data networks. The hardest part of keeping our hobby relevant is that we must admit there is sometimes nothing we can do. Elected officials are much more likely to spend money for commercial solutions recommended by their subordinates, than for a volunteer force they cannot quantify or inventory. Sometimes we get help from emergency responders: municipal budget battles are harder-fought now, and civil servants are more receptive to the idea of "free" help, but hams have to be realistic about what is possible and what is not, and there are too many among us (I was once one) who feel that we're an irreplaceable link in a communications chain that no longer exists. It's up to us to adapt to the system that is in use now, and to become a part of that system which its "owners" grow to depend on. Once we earn that trust, we'll have allies in higher places, but there's a lot of catching up to do before that happens. From what I heard at the convention, the best hope for helping amateur radio thrive is getting back to its roots of innovation--in particular, by getting hams involved with the Maker movement (and vice versa). In fact, I think the League has something up its sleeve about that. If it works, it could help keep us in the good graces of those who dish out frequencies and make rules about antennas. I know little about the "Maker movement": according to Wikipedia, it's a Do-It-Yourself paradigm that has a magazine at its center. I applaud the concept, but I'm old enough to be cautious when counting chickens that haven't yet hatched, and I hope that those in charge of keeping our society intact after a disaster are hard-nosed about what is possible and what is not. As much as I might like to fantasize about being the ham who saves the day by making a homebrew rig work with homemade batteries, I know that the last thing any disaster preparedness professional wants is a single point of failure, be it man or machine. It's nice to watch someone make a cabinet on TV and think "I could do that", but it's quite another to hold a router or to arrange a dovetail fence: it's important to have a "can do" attitude, but we need to bring "we already did that" experience to the table as well. In the past, long-distance disaster communications meant you had to have ham operators. Those days are gone: planning or preparing for a day when hams have to do-it-all-ourselves is self-defeating, because it invites both criticism of our capabilities and hard questions about whether we're trying to be members of a team or "Lone Rangers" out to grab a lot of glory and ride off into the sunset. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I think our hobby is still in the "Denial" phase of dealing with this crisis. We need to accept that the communications world has changed, and adapt ourselves to the current technologies and the current methods before we'll be taken seriously again. Bill, W1AC -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly) |
#32
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On 10/25/2011 8:18 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
In the past, long-distance disaster communications meant you had to have ham operators. Those days are gone: As I see how Amateurs are currently looked at by public safety people: The cost, both in materials and in time for public safety spectrum is very high. The amateur bands are a ready pool of "FREE spectrum" if it's approached correctly. The same holds true for full time employees for "just in case." And Amateurs are a ready pool of "FREE employees" as the need arises. Now, here's where the problem lies. ESPECIALLY in the event of an emergency. The health and law enforcement types do NOT want some fool running around thinking he's a cop. (Or a paramedic). Nor do they want to deal with some buffoon that's really proud of the "kit" he's thrown together out of cobbled swap meet leftovers. And they most certainly do NOT want people with ego problems. What they want are people that follow instructions, that have RELIABLE equipment and if it's a group of people, that they can all work together as a team. Jeff-1.0 wa6fwi -- "Everything from Crackers to Coffins" |
#33
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![]() In article , Bill Horne wrote: On 10/24/2011 11:35 PM, Patty Winter wrote: From what I heard at the convention, the best hope for helping amateur radio thrive is getting back to its roots of innovation--in particular, by getting hams involved with the Maker movement (and vice versa). In fact, I think the League has something up its sleeve about that. If it works, it could help keep us in the good graces of those who dish out frequencies and make rules about antennas. I know little about the "Maker movement": according to Wikipedia, it's a Do-It-Yourself paradigm that has a magazine at its center. I think there is a magazine, but the heart of the movement is the independent workshops across the country. My friend Wayne, KH6WZ, had an interesting article about the Maker community and its implications for amateur radio in last May's _CQ_. As much as I might like to fantasize about being the ham who saves the day by making a homebrew rig work with homemade batteries, I was changing subjects there. I wasn't talking about the Maker community in regards to emergency communications, but rather to technical innovation. As I noted, we're needed less and less in the former, but I think we still have a lot to offer for the latter. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I think our hobby is still in the "Denial" phase of dealing with this crisis. We need to accept that the communications world has changed, and adapt ourselves to the current technologies and the current methods before we'll be taken seriously again. It's happening. We've got people in the amateur radio community who are professionals in developing networking protocols, weak-signal detection software, etc. etc. They're developing software for amateur radio as well as commercial and research applications. Other hams can get involved with projects like those. Patty |
#34
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On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:13:07 EDT, Jeffrey Angus
wrote: What they want are people that follow instructions, that have RELIABLE equipment and if it's a group of people, that they can all work together as a team. Add to that individuals or a team that has been trained in the needs of that agency and been vetted by the agency as suitable. As I keep saying, no one gets into our EOC without agency ID. -- 73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net |
#35
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On Oct 24, 2:37 pm, Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:27:41 EDT, Steve Bonine wrote: Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant carrier of health and welfare traffic. Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications. (The following, while just opinion, is probably a major heresy.) And that minor role is just fine. in the last ten years or so, there has been a major attempt to mutate amateur radio into some sort of official adjunct to emergency communications. And let's just say it has had mixed success. We were looking at background checks, including financial. While the financial part was dropped, it surely set the tone. The emergency types came in fast and hard, and they had no illusions that Amateur Radio was anything else but emergency ops - and if grudging acceptance was afforded, acknowledged that some Hams messed with unimportant stuff like contesting, DX, ane electronic design. But they "knew" exactly what Ham radio was for, and I always caught the undercurrent that they thought most of us were a bit foolish. We still get a lot of that in the discourse. I sat at meetings where some guy from some emergency outfit comes in and tells us that since by nature, everything they do is a matter of life and death, therefore it's always an emergency, that they have unrestricted priority over our repeater system. Basically that our repeater system was now theirs. He was wrong of course, but that's my point. There are people out there who think that way. A local Ham wastrying for a radio check to see if his HT was making it into one of our repeater satellite voting relays a few weeks ago. One of the emergency Op types came back to him, and told him he was coming in okay. Then the testing Ham moved, and his signal got a little scratchy. The EO guy noted the dropoff in clarity, the testing Ham said that it was just his HT he had in case of emergencies. Well, that started the ball rolling. The Emergency guy starts to deliver a 5 minute lecture to the other Ham about how people shouldn't be using HT's for much of anything. The testing Ham noted that he already had a sufficiently powerful setup. But the Emergency Op wasn't done yet. He went on another tirade noting that although he'd only been a Ham for a very short time, his job was to show other Hams that they were technically pretty backwards, and even the older Hams, because it was his "experience" that older Hams just didnn't keep up. He ended with some bizarre comment about how he thinks that his pointing out other peoples shortcomings makes the world a better place. I thought I'd have a little fun with him. I called in, and noted that it was good to have a technically astute Ham on the air, then tried to involve him in a discussion of the technical aspects of our repeater. Turned out the limits of his techical abilities were to get a 50 watt radio, put up a J-Pole, and mash the PTT button. But we can compre anecdotes all day. Then emergency employees were getting technician licenses as an end- around to get employees using the radio instead of volunteers. Unfortunately, many of the employees thought that the amateur frequencies were a sort of back channel for their use. Many were disappointed to find that we had some rules and restrictions. As far as I am concerned, the role of Hams in an emergency situation is that if there is a Ham in the area where the disaster is, he or she might use their station to relay messages into areas that might be coordinating help. That's enough. The idea that we provide someone to fill a seat at an EC is sort of illogical anyhow. Why would the EC not have a trained professional in that seat? Are all the others there unpaid volunteers? If I were running one of these places, I'd have someone filling that seat that I was a supervisor over. |
#36
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#37
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In article ,
Jeffrey Angus wrote: Now, here's where the problem lies. ESPECIALLY in the event of an emergency. The health and law enforcement types do NOT want some fool running around thinking he's a cop. (Or a paramedic). Nor do they want to deal with some buffoon that's really proud of the "kit" he's thrown together out of cobbled swap meet leftovers. And they most certainly do NOT want people with ego problems. What they want are people that follow instructions, that have RELIABLE equipment and if it's a group of people, that they can all work together as a team. Yup. That's how I see it from here. One of the big changes in the emergency-response community, over the past couple of decades, has been the development of some standardized organization techniques for emergency responders. As I understand it, a lot of these changes grew out of what was learned in California during the response to the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. To put it simply, that event was a Charlie Foxtrot - lots of official emergency responders were activated, from a large number of jurisdictions, and they had a *terrible* time working together under emergency conditions. This was due to a number of factors. Different jurisdictional groups (e.g. city fire, county fire, state, etc.) had different organizational structures (who-reports-to-whom) with different job titles and job descriptions, they referred to their firefighting equipment with different terms (or sometimes with the same term, which meant very different things to different groups), and they had no agreement in advance as to who would be commanding whom. There were multiple different chains-of-command, with each new group trying to coordinate itself with numerous others. Add a large dash of "incompatible radio systems and protocols" to this, and what resulted was a recipe for serious confusion and ineffective use of resources. I believe it's generally accepted that people died unnecessarily, because the emergency responders weren't able to work together as efficiently as was needed. What has come out of this is a reliance on the Incident Command System structure (California has its Standardized Emergency Management System variant, and the Feds have the National Incident Management System). A big part of this involves using a standard command-and-reporting structure, and standardized (pre-defined) sets of resources, which can include communications teams. This way, if one jurisdiction needs some communicators, they can ask another jurisdiction for one or more teams of various types, and have confidence that they can know the capabilities and limits of those teams pretty reliably. Around our county, anybody who wants to be part of ARES/RACES, and actually be deployable even in their own local jurisdiction, is expected/required to be trained in ICS (we have some state-certified instructors who teach classes periodically). Anyone who wants to be deployable outside their own city (a "Mutual Aid Communicator") has to take further instruction in ICS and emergency response (FEMA has some good on-line courses, available for free) and must be qualified by their city EC as having sufficient training and experience, and a suitable "Go Kit" of radio equipment and personal supplies to allow for safe and successful deployment. We've got an advanced training program for our MACs, in which they can demonstrate their qualification for specific sorts of deployment... Field assignment, Net Control positions, Shadowing, Packet, and so forth. As a result, if a city asks for communication aid, and says that they need field operators for deployment at a dozen shelters and fire stations, and Net Control operators for two or three tactical and resource nets, we can deploy people that we *know* can do the job (individually and as part of a team), because they've already demonstrated that ability. The various city and county Emergency Managers appreciate this! Hams who show up "spontaneously", during an emergency, saying "I have a radio and I want to help"... well, most likely they'll be treated like any other volunteer of unknown capabilities and reliability. They'll be sent down the street to the "convergent volunteer" center for classification and possible assignment, just like any other helpful citizen who showed up and (e.g.) offered to fill sand-bags during a flood. If we don't know them, we can't depend on them in a pinch. At best, they might be sent out as a secondary-support operator, to serve alongside one or more trained and qualified team members. In our city, at least, we would *not* send out an unknown operator by him/herself. All of this organization and training takes work - often a lot of it - well in advance of any emergency. If we want to actually be effective, and able to help, it's *necessary*. http://www.scc-ares-races.org/ has a lot of information on our programs... the "Mutual Aid Communicator" pages probably have the best discussion of our training process. -- Dave Platt AE6EO Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads! |
#38
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