Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
Kevin, VK3DAP/ZL2DAP wrote:
I believe the following is true (I got it third or fourth hand). Some
years ago, the authorities indicated that hams would not be so heavily
relied upon for emergency communications, "Because all of our officers
now have cell phones." Then came the devastating New South Wales bush
fires. Guess what! The dense smoke rendered the cell phone system
practically inoperable in some vital areas.
-------------------------------
That sort of thing has happened here in the USA several times that I know of
over the past several decades. Not just with cell phones, but with wired
phones as well.
The underlying problem is simple and obvious: no communications system that
is in business to make money can have infinite capacity.
Capacity is one factor, I'm sure, but another big one is the
infrastructure itself. I volunteer at our local blood center which
serves the entire central valley of California from Merced to the Oregon
state line. Right after 9/11, there was a big need for blood in the
NYC/NNJ area. Not for the victims, but for the regular patients since
collections had been disrupted badly. Telephone communications were
nearly totally out, both due to capacity overloads, but also because the
infrastructure itself failed in a number of places (particularly in
lower Manhattan ... a lot of cell sites were on the WTC and adjacent
buildings).
The blood center has had a longstanding agreement with the Sacramento
ARC ... the hams maintain a ham station at their HQ (HF, VHF, UHF), and
in return get to use the very large conference room for their meetings.
The RC fired up the station and made HF contact with a ham in NYC.
BloodSource ultimately ended up shipping them a little over 1,000 units
of blood and blood products via two USAF aircraft out of Travis AFB (all
civilian A/C were still grounded).
This was essentially infrastructure-free communications ... ham and rig
on the left-coast -- ham and a rig on the right-coast -- nothing
in-between. In my 50+ years as a ham, I've seen this on a number of
occasions, and I've concluded that we don't do enough PR with local
agencies and organizations on the fragility of their communications
infrastructure, and our ability to circumvent infrastructure failures if
we and they plan in that mode.
Here in California, we can occasionally see floods in the valley, but
probably our two most famous natural disaster sources are earthquakes
followed by forest fires. Fires often occur in areas without cell
coverage, and regularly take out the repeater sites for public safety
agencies and firefighters. But earthquakes, though far less common than
most non-CA folk think, can do huge damage to comm, power, and other
infrastructure over vast areas.
I don't think we should be competing with cell phones and other
infrastructure-dependent systems. Our forte is rapid deployment of
mobile and portable capability that requires no intervening
infrastructure. Lots of mobiles on VHF/UHF simplex. HF on appropriate
frequencies for longer haul stuff between command centers and agency
HQs. A lot of the ARES and RACES activities I've been involved with
over the years have placed reliance on repeaters, digipeaters, and the
like, all part of the overall infrastructure of course. If/when they
failed, we too were beset with no communications, just like those folks
we were trying to serve.
Include repeaters and infrastructure in emergency Plan A. But like all
good combat troops, we need Plan B as well, and I think we've not done
well at stressing the infrastructure-free aspect of our capabilities to
the served agencies and organizations.
Fred K6DGW
Auburn CA CM98lw
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