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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Ham radio.

It still works, you know?

Also, pagerduty works over wifi...

Radiocommunications Regulations in Canada indicate that “radiocommunications in support of industrial, business or professional activities” cannot be done over ham radio (Section 47, Subsection C, Para iii).

I would imagine using it for running a nurse-doc comms would constitute professional use.

I have my Ham license in America and so it may be different for our maple syrup friends up north. But one thing that is stressed repeatedly throughout preparing for the exam is that when an emergency happens most of the restrictions fly out the door as the emphasis is on helping address the emergency. So I am assuming the FCC equivalent wouldn't be too peeved.

Of course I'm sure this does run the line of if this is emergency or not.

In this case, the option would be to have a whole bunch of care providers in the hospital trained and licensed for ham radio.

May whatever deity you worship help the instructor teaching atmospheric propagation to some of the staff I’ve worked with in the past.

Let's not make ham radio operation out to be some complex Voodoo that requires months of training. You tune your radio to a given frequency and press the ptt button.

Yes sure, there's repeaters, and other details to know about, but tx/rx on a single frequency isn't exactly the rocket science that sad hams make it out to be.

An telecommunications outage, by itself, is not an immediate threat to life or limb to you, and you'd need to exhaust other reasonable options to communicate before that emergency provision comes into play.

(Many hospitals do also have ham radio operators as part of the disaster plans and operate during their drills.)

INAL, contact ARRL for farther questions.

I’m skeptical the FCC would be upset if the alternative is 911 service being unavailable for most of the country.

The alternative would have been to pull the SIM card to access 911 through any available cell network, but not many knew about this.

>works over wifi

even when the internet is down?

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