Guys, No one has ever said that D-STAR and the Internet will completely replace anything. But I will guarantee you that there are disasters during which ANYTHING can fail, including HF.
NOTHING will ever be guaranteed. You cannot rely on anything. The point with D-STAR is that: * Contrary to the belief of many hams, the Internet CAN be counted on during a disaster. Even in an impacted area, there has been pockets of Internet access. * D-STAR can still work if the Internet is down, you just can't connect repeaters. * If the D-STAR's repeaters Internet connectivity is down, then a D-STAR repeater is just as good as any FM repeater * Not all repeaters and towers will get blown away or destroyed. There are towers that are designed to survive most anything. Amateur Radio's capability and fault tolerance is not just HF. Our biggest asset is actually the number of trained radio operators and our diversity of capabilities. And again, there are MANY other Emergency Service events that Amateur Radio operators help out with other than a Cat 5 Hurricane. And no, not even satellites are 100% trustworthy. Immediately after Katrina, there were some solar flares occurring and the sat phones became unusable. The unprepared Amateur Radio operator is the one that comes walking in with a HF radio or a D-STAR radio. The prepared Amateur Radio operator is the one that comes walking in with VHF/UHF FM and VHF/UHF DSTAR and HF and a repeater and 802.11 and computers and satellite and a few other things. From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joel Koltner Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2008 11:58 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [dstar_digital] Re: Limited access Hi Chuck, Good points. Although I think the likelihood of a (successful) large scale attack on the Internet itself is quite small compared the myriad of natural disasters we have every year, it certainly it worth thinking about and planning for. At some point I think you're just back to HF and (for those serving well-funded agencies such as the Red Cross) satellite links, though -- it's certainly a good idea to make sure those are part of a comprehensive emcomm plan. The military worries about these same sorts of problems... they launched their MEECN (minimum emergency essential communications network) plan back in the '60s, and it consists of an almost completely redundant set of all-wireless handsets, mobile radios, pagers, etc. They're still working on it today, hundreds of millions of dollars later! Of couse, they do have plenty of results to show for it -- I guess this really only makes the point that comprehensive emcomm plans are never finished, they're constantly evolving to meet the end-users' needs. (I'm suspect the original 196x MEECN plan didn't call for megabit+ satellite-based digital access, for instance!) ---Joel [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
