Right, that, no doubt, is an excellent idea but it's somewhat uncertain how useful it would be to forewarn people before an earthquake began as often there doesn't seem to be any significant forewarning shakes. Whenever there's a major quake tragedy there never seems to be sufficient warning.

I got the idea that amateur radio could be useful with monitoring the changes to RF transmissions several decades ago after I read a paper that transmissions in the ELF band (3 - 30kHz) were affected by the stresses built up in the earth before an earthquake commenced. These EM effects are thought to be caused by stresses in heavy rock such as granite which generate a piezoelectric-like field and or that distortions of the earth's magnetic field occur around areas under stress.

The ELF band is suggested because it's extremely stable with almost no effects from the ionosphere, thus changes to any RF carrier in this band would be due to fields generated by quakes (and the signal generated by stress buildup wouldn't be lost in the ionospheric noise as it is with higher frequency bands).

My reasoning went thus: amateurs are spread widely across the globe and if they set up a mesh network of ELF transmissions amateur stations could then monitor the mesh transmissions for changes in signal strength, etc. This would be done automatically 24/7. Any deviation would set off a trigger, and given the mesh nature of the network, the location where the path distortion occurred could then be triangulated. It's also my understanding that the EM effects caused by stressed rock can occur days or perhaps weeks before a quake, thus it could be an effective early warning system.

It seemed to me that geological services such as the USGS have probably thought along these lines but haven't done much further research because it would be necessary to set up thousands of monitoring stations across the globe and given that the science is still inconclusive and not fully settled then funding would likely not be forthcoming. That could be solved if amateurs became involved as their stations are already established.

I envisioned amateurs forming a sort of loose partnership between geological services such as the USGS for the purpose (many countries have such a service). Even before any monitoring service was established, radio amateurs could be involved in the research, Establishing experimental tests etc. would be comparatively straightforward given their network of stations.

I passed the ideas by the local amateur group, VK2, where I am on several occasions, the last time was after the 9.1 magnitude quake/tsunami in Sumatra Indonesia on Boxing Day in 2004 but I got little interest which left me somewhat disappointed.

Incidentally, I used to have an amateur license so that's what gave me the idea to link amateurs with geological services.

I still reckon it's a good idea, even if the research is inconclusive (at least there's little doubt that earthquakes do actually cause electromagnetic effects—witness this story (and there are many more such instances), Thus if EM effects exist then it seems logical to me that we ought to be able to detect them as we do with other EM phenomena).