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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

The one area where it's still relevant is disaster response, but even that is questionable.

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.

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Same here in King and Snohomish counties last time I checked. The SAR teams have been using repeaters. I agree re better cell coverage for that use case, which would include data that could make SAR teams way more effective by e.g. tracking search team coverage in real-time on a single view shared by the entire response.

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.

>The one area where it's still relevant is disaster response, but even that is questionable.

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.

I think you're overestimating the resiliency of cellular networks.

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.

Cellular networks are indeed vulnerable, but he also mentioned satellite phones and BGAN terminals.

Sure, but $600 sat phones with $100/month (for 60 minutes) plans and $5000 high speed satellite terminals are still out of reach of many people -- the people that can least afford to flee to safety after a disaster. So hams still have a role in coordinating local communication to help communications get outside of the disaster zone.

> are still out of reach of many people

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).

The point of ham radio in disasters is not for everyone to have a ham radio (that sounds like a disaster itself), but to have hams coordinate and forward communications. So they could, for example, sit at a community shelter and forward welfare messages to someplace that does have a sat phone (or long distance HF link) to send messages out of the area.

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.

You can talk to your local repeater on a $30 radio that fits in a pocket (and the license is easy to get and super-cheap, like, $15 or so).

Sure, hand held radios start at $30 and at $75-$100 can be pretty nice. State wide repeater networks are pretty common, there's pretty nice ones in Colorado and California that I've used, I'm sure there's many others. Sure an external antenna $30-$200 can really help if you are in a car, house, or even an apartment if you have a patio.

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...

An important piece of modern (4G/5G) cell network design is that cells can have overlapping coverage to provide extra capacity in an area. The top level statistic that 52% of sites were down does not necessarily mean that 52% of the area was out of coverage at that time. It would be very expensive to heavily reinforce every small cell in every neighborhood for a large scale disaster, but would make sense to reinforce enough macro sites with wide area coverage to maintain low bandwidth emergency communications (voice+text) across the entire region.

> Cellular providers now have COWs and COLTs for reinforcing networks where the fixed infrastructure has been affected.

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).

This is in the context of coordinating a disaster response. Just because most people couldn't make a call doesn't mean rescue workers didn't have a signal from a mobile cell tower with a satellite link.

Sure, rescue workers had some connectivity. But typically in a disaster the rescue workers are overwhelmed and a large part of the community is out of communications. A ham per neighborhood can really help get the word out, even for simple stuff like there will be a water truck at the local highschool tomorrow at 2-4pm.

I used to work in SAR. We don't want hams on our networks thanks very much. We have satellite-based phones and data.

Amateur radio in disaster preparedness is a LARP.

Are programs to organize volunteers to help with radio communications a bad idea? We have AROs and ARES and it seemed reasonable.

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).

>Are programs to organize volunteers to help with radio communications a bad idea?

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.

I always assumed that my role as a ham in an disaster would moslty be doing welfare reports (i.e. "tell my mom in Idaho that I'm ok"), and maybe guiding people to local resources like shelters, medical aid, etc. It might be mundane, but that's the kind of things the real first responders aren't going to have time for.

Agreed. Not the stuff of action movies, but welfare checks, coordinating with the community what resources are available, where they are, and what times they are available. Think food, water, etc. But if the rescue workers can accommodate helping a smaller percentage of the population hams can help identify folks in dire need.

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.

economies of scale like the little Baefung (spelling) handheld that you can buy on amazon for 30 dollars and you can listen and talk on ham, GMRS, FRS and Marine bands to name a few?

Economies of scale like the dozens of radios that are within feet of my body right now. Economies of scale like smartphones so cheap that almost every single person over the age of 10 has one, including homeless people. Economies of scale like even if my main phone breaks, I can still power on and use the old one in my drawer from 2014, which is just as compatible with LTE as my new one.

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.

You can listen to any frequency that the Baofeng can tune in, but you can transmit legally only on the ham bands.

Additionally while they work on FRS, they aren't legally licensed to do so.

The newer Baofengs exclude GMRS and FRS i thought?

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