I cannot address the question about 24/7. It just seems obvious to me that some form of 24/7 capability, if not operation, is needed.
For 1) I do not understand your question. The disaster is going to be known but I do not think that is the point. Ham radio often provides the early communication from the area. Let me define a term: Communication disaster - a situation where normal communication channels are overwhelmed. This is useful because it expands the concept to cover situations not normally considered disasters while focusing on the role of hams. Skip Teller just mentioned one of the classics of hurricane shelter communication. I have mentioned the space shuttle Columbia in East Texas. Communicating with cell phone or the commercial radios available to the responders simply was not possible in the Piney Woods. For the first couple weeks only hams using repeaters, sometimes portable, were the only means of reaching the searchers combing the 100s of square miles. It also covers situation like the Houston to Austin MS-150 where 13,000 riders pass through a small town and overwhelm the local cell towers. These are not emergencies the way we usually think of them. They are examples of communication disasters. In the case of the MS-150 it has the potential for being an emergency if a batch of riders all get hurt but cell phones do not work. The evacuation of people from the Texas Gulf Coast for hurricane Rita was a communications disaster. Cell phones were unusable along major stretches of the Interstates and other corridors. The NGOs organizing shelters could not communicate with cell phones to coordinate their activities. None of that is specifically digital communications. The last one and Skip's hurricane shelter situation both could use digital communications. There are other examples from Rita that I have provided previously. For 2), I think part of the pressure for 24/7 is because everyone is now connected 24/7. Twenty years ago if you had relatives in South Carolina going through a hurricane you slept at 3 am because nobody was on the TV giving live reports. Now you can tune to a half-dozen cable channels. The pressure is on all responders to communicate at that pace. Rud Merriam K5RUD ARES AEC Montgomery County, TX http://TheHamNetwork.net -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rick Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [digitalradio] Re: Need to Expand the HF Auto Band Segments Now, the question that I have is when did this 24/7 operation first come about? The first I ever heard was from someone claiming that a speaker at the GAREC (Global Amateur Radio Emergency Communications) Conference said that without 24/7 alerting (or some thing to that effect) HF was of little value. Sometimes people make self serving statements in order to try and build a solution to a non existent problem. This seems to be one of those times. I have been waiting for someone to ask some basic questions: 1) What disaster events occur where the disaster is not known to governments and NGO's outside of the affected area? 2)What exactly do amateur radio operators do when we receive notification that a disaster has begun at some location that is different than we have always done in the past? 73, Rick, KV9U
