At least where I live, the vast majority of hams you encounter both in person and on the airwaves are grumpy aging boomers who are actively hostile to new people.
Goodbye Amateur Radio, you won't be missed.
Goodbye Amateur Radio, you won't be missed.
Most of the hobby is not prepared to help with emcomm. And I think you (and a lot of people) overstate how helpful amateur emcomm is. In the past couple decades, local officials have gotten pretty good systems for getting high priority traffic out of the local area (which is what HF was previously for).
Amateur volunteers relaying things in the local area are helpful in keeping disaster logistics running smoothly. Radio skills are not a big part of it, for the most part.
I'm a teacher and passionate about radio. I don't know how to get my students into radio and make it into a good experience for them. They're way too likely to face hostility, racist political rants, etc. So I haven't pushed on it.
There are still lots of old guys in these parts of the hobby, but ones open-minded enough at least to learn new things, and I've not had any issues with them despite having a distinctly female first name.
WSPR is the best place to start, in my opinion - lots of results for really low capital investment (5W is high power), really lending itself to DIY.
Licensing is ultimately going to be important to transmit, etc.
WSPR is amazing, but there's a certain "so what"-- I can send a packet over there, too, via the public internet. Radio doesn't make sense to kids anymore: like they really don't get it.
As for emergency preparedness... No. Hams don't really play a role anymore. Satellite texting/Starlink, digital repeaters for agencies, generally available idiot-proof radios are all things that would have to fail. There's a reason that the volunteer SAR team near me just buy off the shelf stuff from Motorola instead of trying to recruit Hams. Even in some sort of failure like that, I would rather have an air band or marine band radio than a Ham radio.
Our local CERT makes big use of amateur emcomm. But it's the non-critical stuff: neighborhood liasions to go out and spot things, or volunteers in a truck to relay supply needs at peripheral stations.
It's a parallel line of communications (with a separate set of humans making a judgment of what's important to escalate), which is useful when administrative and decision-making capacity is constrained. And it has different failure modes, which is nice, too.
Even little things: visible volunteer patrols by amateur operators for fireworks laws violations just helped my city tamp down the normal dozens of fires to only two and hastened the firefighting response.
As a counterpoint, I once was involved with a backcountry emergency where, at a certain point, it made sense to have a non licensed person on a radio. We actually had the local grump hop on and tie up the frequency chastising them for using the radio. That felt very in line with the ham community.
Sure, Hams can provide utility in an emergency, but Hams also like to overstate just how essential they are in these situations (scroll up for evidence).
Volunteer fire patrols are great and all, but an independent radio network for the volunteers is not exactly required, or providing anything a cell phone can’t
Cell phone networks will be down or at capacity when disaster hits.
Public safety networks will mostly be up, but they only have so many officers, etc.
> As a counterpoint, I once was involved with a backcountry emergency where, at a certain point, it made sense to have a non licensed person on a radio. We actually had the local grump hop on and tie up the frequency chastising them for using the radio. That felt very in line with the ham community.
I have said some negative things about the community here, but I haven't seen anything like that. We all pass an exam that makes it clear anyone can use any frequency in an emergency, and we all also should know that we can let unlicensed people under our supervision use our radio in non-emergencies. (With some exceptions).
> but Hams also like to overstate just how essential they are in these situations
That was my original point that you replied to, but your response felt too strong: I believe there is definite utility from emcomm, but it is not essential.
Ham EMCOM is mostly useful for relaying "Bill Jones says he's okay"-type traffic but otherwise it's just a LARP.
I don't think amateur is very useful for most SAR-- it's odd that you guys keep bringing it up. You guys can provision for typical needs; amateur is a benefit because of its elasticity.
> but otherwise it's just a LARP.
Don't be a dick. I think CERTs are important, and amateur radio is the lifeblood of CERT in many areas.
Doctrine here in Santa Clara County is that it's for things like:
- getting initial information and assessments from earthquakes in the first 20 minutes (a couple hundred people trained popping on nets saying modified Mercalli numbers and reporting the most urgent needs for assistance near them).
- coordinating distribution of relief supplies ("we need 100 more flats of water bottles at site GR2")
- medium priority traffic between hospitals when other communications systems fail (coordinating transfers, etc)
- handling all the low priority traffic from large festivals and events to keep primary communications systems clear (so a town's EMS dispatch doesn't need to talk about boo-boos, and so that event organizers don't need to try and talk through police dispatch)
- additional eyes and ears for police and fire
- locating anyone (inadvertently or deliberately) disrupting emergency communications
Would stuff be OK without the above? Sure. But it works a bit better with all that.
I would pull out satellite messenger to text people that I'm okay.
I have thought about getting Starlink for internet but it is too expensive for just disasters. I'm hoping they come out with smaller, cheaper dish. But Starlink would be perfect for command posts. Or for city to setup communication centers for the public.