David, Who is depending on the Internet as the primary transport mechanism for Amateurs? I don't think that anyone on this list is.
What many of us do is to utilize every means possible to provide communications. There are times when atmospheric conditions make it impossible to use HF. There are times when any repeater will go off the air for some reason. What makes Amateur Radio reliable is the large toolbox that we have available to us. As to the Internet being the first thing lost, that indeed is evidently, since you say, your experience, but it isn't my experience. During the LA earthquakes, Internet access existed. During Katrina, there was Internet access in downtown New Orleans. I'm suspecting that there's still Internet access in Haiti. But then again, catastrophic disasters isn't the only types of emergencies that we provide assistance with. Lost persons, floods, tornados, are example of highly localized disasters in which Internet access is still readily available. For those who do work with emergency communications, the biggest issue usually the last mile communications. In just about any disaster that has occurred, communications has been available within just a few miles of the impacted area. To support this, I've got a portable repeater that I can deploy as close to the disaster area as Internet allows me. At the worse, a D-STAR repeater without Internet is just as functional as a FM repeater. At its best, a D-STAR repeater is a mechanism by which we can remotely talk into disaster areas. Except for disasters in remote areas such as Haiti, existing communications infrastructure is often capable of sustaining much more than the Amateur Radio equipment. Cellular companies have generators and cells on wheels that they can backfill. Telephone Central Offices run off of huge batteries that can sustain long outages. Many public service organizations use communications facilities that are much more robust than ours. So how do we compete, how do we provide extra value? In my opinion, D-STAR gives us an edge up. I know that a lot of state and local government officials also believe so, which is why they've funded a number of deployments. Ed WA4YIH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Holman Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 3:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: New guy Neil, The Internet is a very useful thing. And I am not anti-Internet in any way. I just argue against depending on it as a primary transport medium for amateurs. The words "Internet" and "Security" should never be used in the same sentence unless they are talking about the lack of security on the Internet. The easy connectivity that the Internet offers is a strong lure, but it is also a weakness. There are a number of EComm systems that are doing Internet linking using IRLP/Eckolink to link their repeaters together. And then they say that this will be there in an emergency. Having been through a few of those, the Internet (like electricity, fuel and roads) is usually one of the first things that is lost. Some of the floods they have had in the mid-west have shown that weakness. We are supposed to be more robust than that. We are supposed to work when all that other stuff fails. Packet has suffered from routing issues (something the Internet does as second nature) since I learned about it a long time ago. The lack of routing ability is why I never got into it. It was good for a couple of hops, but past that it was a crap-shoot that you would be able to route your message without a lot of playing around. I believe that had a lot to do with the collapse and the transition to the Internet. Today, should something happen to the Internet, I highly doubt (keep in mind that I am not a packet expert) that a message could get from one side of the country to the other using packet, without putting it on some other mode. That generally means that some manual transaction has to occur. We use packet here in Tucson, but only as a local thing, almost like APRS (with larger messages). I know we can get stuff to Phoenix with Packet, but I doubt that we could reach CA, NM or even Flagstaff with packet from here without some manual intervention if the Internet went away. I will have to ask someone who is much more versed in packet than I am. By the same argument though, if you are running packet over the Internet, it isn't packet "radio" any more, it is email. In that sense, everyone practices packet these days. 73 David, AC7DS
