I lost my dog and decided to track her, and all the systems I could find (up to $1,000) were either cellular or pretty much line of site. Ham APRS was AMAZINGLY better than anything commercial I could find. It does direct connections for decent range, but also there's surprisingly good APRS coverage using existing repeaters in the areas I hike in. http://aprs.fi allows global tracking if an APRS widget world wide, and trackers that fit in a dog collar are common and don't carry a monthly subscription fee.
It's a much better tool for the job. And unlike personal locator beacons it can also handle short personal messages. And it's far from $1000 (around $300 and the service from $15 monthly) and really portable. For real emergencies a PLB is arguably better (and doesn't require a paid subscription) but you have to be conscious to activate it. The Garmin can send regular breadcrumbs without triggering an emergency so they will at least know where you were headed. If you are conscious it also allows you to communicate with the rescue operators.
Ham radio is great but not meant to be reliable. It's about experimentation with technology and the sport of making long distance connections. It's not about a reliable rescue service even though it is very useful in emergencies.
With APRS I can find my dog, no monthly, and in large outdoor areas APRS has MUCH better coverage than cell.
Trust me, I want to believe. But the only practical use that my wife (KF1J) and me (WT1J) have for our ham gear is in the rare case where I'm on the boat far away from her and out of cell coverage and need to check in via the HF bands. I'm almost never away from cell coverage. For transoceanic stuff, that is still a common case, but it will soon be better served by portable global internet.
The amateur radio tech license is really easy, I'd say about half is common sense along the lines of do no harm, just an evening or two of studying to get enough of the 30 ish multiple choice questions to pass.
You can buy similar in board form, popular among the high altitude balloon communities.
I use one on my dog's collar and my 2m radio will show me an arrow and distance to the dog. As a bonus I can call family/friend and have them check the world wide APRS map to see if the dog has gone near a repeater.
It's also handy to check the weather, there's quite a few weather stations about and in the mountains the local forecast can be unreliable and a weather station that's MUCH closer than the nearest city can provide handy info on quickly changing weather conditions.
Here in Portland, the city puts a lot of effort into emergency preparedness and getting people trained on radio, but the vast majority of people involved are 55+. I have my doubts about how effective it will be in an actual emergency.
I tend to think the effort would be better spent on hardening the existing cell networks, and being ready to deploy public safety LTE, cells-on-wheels or similar. Mass produced consumer tech should enable economies of scale for cell phones that aren't there for ham radios. Full internet isn't actually needed, even just a few independent cells would perform a lot better than the walkie talkies that the CERT teams use.
A lot of ham culture is around emergency comms, and every now and then it's useful. But a single portable starlink dish absolutely destroys what ham can do. It would allow for e.g. 50 people on a local wifi network all taking comms requests from people in an impacted area, and sharing the same digital 100Mbps link to get those comms requests out. Can even be self serve. Ham requires an operator occupying dedicated spectrum, serving one customer at a time.
I mean it's more than questionable, it's tending towards the ridiculous with no well-formed concept of operations. Even in large scale disasters, virtually the only real usage of ham radio has been for 'welfare' traffic ("tell Bob at 212-555-1212 that Alice got out before the fire reached her house").
Cellular providers now have COWs and COLTs for reinforcing networks where the fixed infrastructure has been affected. Iridium phones are easily available. Inmarsat BGAN terminals with high-speed data fit into a messenger bag.
HF radio may be the only game in town if the really-big-one comes (HEMP / similar scenario) but it's just not relevant to either command-and-control or tactical operations in most disaster response scenarios.
After the Katrina hurricane, the FCC mandated that cell sites have at least 8 hours of backup power (which isn't a lot when power can be out for days or weeks), but the industry sued and got the rule replaced with 'self-regulation', with the predictable result:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv9j7/how-big-telecom-kille...
According to the latest report by the FCC, about 28.1 percent of the cell sites in the area impacted by Ida are offline, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without service. Another 354,699 residents in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama remain without landline phone, cable, or broadband service.
https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/2021/08/31/cell-ser...
The FCC report shows that as of 11 a.m. Monday, 52% of 2,759 cellular sites across 31 Louisiana parishes were offline as a result of Hurricane Ida. The majority of the downed towers — nearly 65% — were offline due to a lack of power, a problem that could persist for weeks in some parts of the state. In some cases, cell sites are down due to multiple issues, such as power outages, damage to the network or damage to the site itself.
CoWs can help in a small disaster or providing service at a shelter, but when thousands of cell sites are offline, there's still going to be a lot of people cut off from communication.
Is ham radio any better on this front? Equipment is bulky and expensive, often requires a large antenna which might be problematic in apartments, requires specific skill (a satellite phone usually "just works") and requires a license before you can legally transmit (granted, in an emergency nobody cares, but I don't know many people who would be happy to spend money on a setup that they wouldn't even be legally allowed to use).
So sure you can blow many $1000s on it, but depending on the hardware and demands you can talk to large repeater network for $60 ish on 2M, and with a bit more skill and testing/certification (A general license) talk to people world wide for a few $100.
Here's a quad band radio great for digital modes like js8call to allow keyboard to keyboard chat over long distances for $80: https://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html
Here's a nice programmable 2M radio for $80: https://www.radioddity.com/products/tyt-uv8000e-dual-band-tw...
Though ham radios are no longer bulky nor expensive - I can hit a repeater 10 miles away from a handheld about as big as half a deck of cards with a 12" antenna.
Cell phone network is very fragile, it's the first thing to go.
During hurricane Maria, cell covereage was the first thing to die and was out for many weeks (months in some areas).
Amateur radio in disaster preparedness is a LARP.
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/pbem/article/563294
https://www.multnomahares.org/
I think the idea is supporting the community in the event of a large scale disaster (specifically the big cascadia subduction zone earthquake).
Of course not, but those volunteers have a very limited role to play in disaster response.
I think a lot of these guys fantasize about being the sole link in and out of a stricken community, coordinating helicopter airlifts and stuff. The reality is much more mundane.
Digital modes, winmail and similar have been heavily used for getting medication to those in need, mostly because some meds need refrigeration and the power grid doesn't have to be down for long for everything refrigerated to go bad.
Also, economy of scale like a single charging standard (USB) with plentiful cheap battery packs and solar panels; almost all having USB A available to plug into. The baofeng only charges through circular plug and dock; you can only charge if you have a battery pack or power source big enough to do mains-style AC power. Not all radios are like this, but it is extremely common. Best I found affordably is a raddiodity R2 (apparently illegal in USA, oops) walki talkie, which has docks that plug in via USB.
Depends on what 'useful' means. When I got my novice ticket as a teen after learning Morse from a paper-tape machine, it was the start of a long, enjoyable technical learning curve. That's what I talked to other hams about, that's what I read QST for.
I experimented with the bands and propagation (day, night, sunspot), tried different antennas and feedlines, different modes. I listened to the old-timer groups rag-chewing on 80 meters; mostly gear-talk. I listened to the utes to figure out how they worked, what they were for. When I got a computer, I had to learn to use interrupts to do baudot <=> ASCII conversion.
FM, repeaters, DXing, contest country-counting, QRP ... all enjoyable as experiments. Hamming began with experimenters, and will continue with them. Beats watching your favorite films chopped up to sell you shit, or listening to FM-autopatch all afternoon.
Basically a dude in a minivan shows up. Puts up a 50 cable. And he is it.
Lots of stories about how someone needed insulin and he would end up connecting to a random HAm in New York, who would email the right people and a few hours later Insulin arrived.
Mostly it was about how to prep a vehicle to have a weeks water , power and other supplies. Was super cool.
I’ll keep my HAM license active, but I rarely use it anymore.
I don’t know how to go about maintaining that group, but it needs to be done. Call it a community service activity if needed.
Maybe low earth orbit satellites will make satellite communications ubiquitous through cell phones, but we're not there yet. (The iPhone 13 was rumored to have satellite capability, it did not, but it sounds like it's technologically possible so we could see it in the not too distant future)
Can't wait for RV Starlink!!
I've been on the wait list for StarLink for 6 months, like you, I'm still hoping for the RV dish.
I ended up getting one of those ReqQLink locator beacons, that has no monthly charge, after my son was running around like crazy during a off roading lunch break, and came too close to cracking his head on a rock.
Even in Silicon Valley, it doesn't take much distance on a mountain bike to get completely out of any cellphone coverage.
QRP? Things like WSPRnet? Events like https://hamvillage.org/dc28.html ?
(they are using Discord... urgh)
Radio is fun and a way to surf the ionosphere!
73
All insanely prone to failure. Power outage is enough, as cell towers don't have backup or only a very short amount. They also don't work without the backbone infrastructure.
Ham these days really is a solution looking for a problem. Probably its biggest advantage these days is how easy it is to get cheap, used ham equipment compared to some of the alternatives.
In an actualy emergency, there really isn't an alternative. Ham is remarkable in that you can communicate around the world from a 100% self-contained system. You and the other party just need your own equipment and power (generator, etc) and there is no dependency on anything else. Every other solution has multiple (sometimes dozens if not hundreds) of third parties in the dependency chain, if any one of them is down, there's no communication channel.
It doesn't take too much for such emergencies to happen. Hurricane Maria in 2017 knocked out essentially all communications in Puerto Rico for a long time (many months in more remote unreachable areas, a week or more even in the city).
Satellite phones work, if you have one and an active plan. But that's so expensive approximately nobody does. Ham though, works standalone, free.
12V DC is easy to build yourself and is a world wide standard for many things, including amateur radio. There's tons of videos on how to build a 12v battery pack out of commodity batteries for whatever chemistry you are interested in, (LIPO, lead acid, and lithium are common).
It's also popular target for portable solar arrays. You could buy something the size of a picnic blanket and rolls up. Add the solar that outputs 12 dc to a build a 12v battery pack (18650s and 21600s are common) and be able to be on the radio for hours a day, even in pretty challenging conditions.
Generally running a ham radio off of whatever you can find around is much easier than normal equipment because most consumer electronics expect AC (which is harder from batteries, requiring an inverter) of a certain voltage (depending on use case and country) or they have a power cube that has a custom voltage and amperage requirements that changes for each piece of consumer equipment.
USB is helping in this area, it's increasingly common and finding battery packs or solar cells that output USB compatible power is getting easier. But even today there's many logistical challenges, things like connectors (Microusb, mini-usb, usb-c), smarts (usb master, usb client, usb2go, etc), power limitations (different cables and power cubes have different max power), physical connector issues (like say Apple's phones), and various non standard additions to get more than 5V @ 1 amp over a "USB" cable. Wireless charging for phones is a morass of compatibility issues and the "USB" supplies for the chargers often use proprietary signaling, and despite the usb connector use non standard protocols and voltages.
USB is generally more fragile and less flexible than 12v DC. It's much easier for instance to run 4 radios off a single 12V supply than it is to run 4 usb devices off a single USB power source. USB is also trickier, you need for instance some smarts to connect a USB device to a car's 12v battery, granted those parts are common.
Having the closest few dozen repeaters programmed in is common, that way you can have a few for the closest dozen or so metro areas and often includes a state wide repeater network. Having access to these networks can provide a wealth of information from a device is easily hand held, can be worn on a belt, and still works even when the cell towers die. As texas learned, even just a cold spell can have significant impact on the power grid, which of course the cellular network depends on.
If you are having severe weather, fire, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc the ham radio networks typically get really active, people working hard to spread useful information. Often have friends/family/connections to local fire fighters, doctors, nurses, etc that have a really good idea of what's actually going on and how the local services are responding to those challenges. Might want to try listening in on a local emergency net (you can listen to amateur radio legally in the USA without a license).
When comparing what the local TV station broadcasts (and sends out over social media) to the local hams, I've found the ham based info to be significantly more accurate and timely. The news station seems to be focusing on the drama of it all.
YAESU - FT-857D
Is that subculture congregating anywhere on the internet?
I find amateur radio interesting but I have zero interest in rag chewing about the weather or Donald Trump with a bunch of retirees.
And it's particularly discouraged when talking with hams in other countries where the laws may be different.
Ham used to be incredibly useful for global communications, rural areas with no phone service, and a way for people to stay socially connected in remote (or not remote) locations. This isn't needed in the vast majority of cases now.
That has led to most hams active on the airwaves being an older demographic. And the way they try to recruit others into the hobby is obsolete because the need just isn't there. It's a 100% academic exercise, rather than a way to connect with anyone around the world.
There is a newer aspect to ham which is modern digital radio, but most old timers have no knowledge or interest in that. There's a subculture that exists that does amazing work in that space, but it's disconnected from the old-timers that represent the face of ham radio. You'll find this subculture at DEF CON and similar events.
Even the things about ham that are still useful, like the marine net on 14.3Mhz which we used in the 90s for transoceanic sailing is about to become obsolete with affordable internet in the mid-pacific or mid-atlantic becoming a reality. And polar bases are about to get polar orbit Starlink satellites for broadband.
So the hobby really needs to transform it it's going to survive. But the old guard and new world are so disconnected, destruction and recreation may be a better way to think about it.
My wife and I are both ham Extras and we run a cybersecurity company. She's KF1J and I'm WT1J. We're passionate about the hobby, but both see the writing on the wall. Ham right now is a solution looking for a problem.
73.