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A comment on Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi. Parent comment

Re:Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi by Steltek on Friday August 26, 2016 @10:53AM (#12366687)
Ehhh, I'm gonna have to disagree on the HF bit. Ham modes haven't kept up with the times: there needs to be a good and flexible HF packet system in place to enable scale. PACTORIII is proprietary garbage and Winlink seems to be just for email? And neither is very widespread anyway.

Short range, "walkie-talkie" stuff is fine but when you move up to the regional level, it's going to be a super bottleneck. Unfortunately, the majority of hams seem to be content to just do contesting using SSB or CW. There needs to be a huge, directed push to innovate here.

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Re:Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi by LeoPanthera on Friday August 26, 2016 @12:40PM (#12367417)
VHF or UHF to your local internet-connected repeater tower would work fine. It doesn't need to be HF.

Towers can have battery backup, and even in a wide-scale disaster, chances are one of them would maintain an internet connection.

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