Martin,

Ben's suggestion of ARRL (American Radio Relay League) is good, but not specific.

May I suggest you contact Eric Olena (wb3fpl@arrl.org) the ARRL Section Manager for Eastern Pennsylvania. He is very likely to have the names of local people who can answer your questions on speed dial.

According to your "New unpaid job" post a few weeks ago, you have the "pleasure" of being in emergency management for your area. I think the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) Emergency Coordinator for your area would be delighted make contact. I suspect you'd both have something to offer the other.

If you want to do research on the web, I suggest the eHAM web site. They have a number of discussion forums that cover the gamut of amateur radio. I tend to do a fair amount of surfing there.

While there have been "advances" in equipment, that doesn't mean your gear is obsolete. In the 'analog' arena, the 'old' gear talks to the 'new' gear just fine.

Dennis

Marty,

Might check out the folks at Chester County ARES/RACES in West Chester. It's an active group and they are very organized around digital communications. They also are well integrated with the Chesco EMA folks.

Andy

Along the lines of getting to know some local radio folks... Coming up June 27-28 is the annual ARRL Field Day weekend for amateur radio. If you have a local ham radio club, they may be participating. There will be folks setting up field stations for both voice and digital ops all over the country, often in some pretty out of the way places. In the past, we have bundled it into a camping trip near a peak that would have good coverage with limited power.

You can find stations that have registered to participate in the 2009 Field Day at:

http://www.arrl.org/contests/announcements/fd/locator.php

You can enter your location, and see what might be going on in your area.

I'd like to just clarify for everyone what I know and have done in ham radio.

I was very active in local clubs and field days, was in ARES and RACES, had portable "Go" kits and all that. I realize now that what put me "off" ham radio was not so much the lack of knowledge or interest, it was that ham radio transitioned from cutting edge global communications tool to local emergency backup system fairly quickly, and more importantly, all of the really cool stuff moved into the commercial area and away from the hobbyist.

I mean, really, when my son can video chat with me from a cheap "netbook" when I'm in Amsterdam, sending text at 9,600 baud isn't really all that thrilling.

Where my interest was/is right now is in building ad-hoc long and short range medium-band interoperable wireless data networks that could replace/augment standard internet infrastructure in an emergency and allow for the use of standardized software such as web browsers & instant messenger clients.

Anyway I'm looking at Winlink and such. Fairly neat stuff, and it's really exactly what I want to be doing with Ham radio.

We're in pretty similar places Martin - the thing that struck me about ham after I got my technician's ticket a couple years ago was, Boy, these guys are a couple decades behind. Second thought as I got more involved with some orgs designing their preparedness efforts for surivivability - particularly comms - was boy, we had better work to keep the wireless network available. With wireless we have SMS and text messaging, the possibility of cell voice traffic at least for those with priority. Without it we lose at least 99% of our responders, with no way to verify availability. The wireless folks have similar thoughts - they have rapid deployment forces to restore the network on a priority basis, generators attached to nodes nearest EOCs, basically they're doing the right things, but they're bounded by commercial interest, not so much by a true emergency signalling capability. I think the government needs to step in and support ($) that effort.

Anyway, they're working on the emergency comms plan in our local Red Cross chapter, and it relies on ham as the fallback - a decidedly last century fallback. I hope we can get folks up and running on some of the newer tools that would allow geolocation, so a central Ham operator at the EOC can at least track who is online and where, and which direction they are moving.

I'm a newly licensed Ham, got my Technician's ticket last year in fact.

I've gotten pretty involved with a local ARES group that works with area hospitals, have worked one "incident" and a couple of non-emergency events with a couple more coming up.

What I've seen is that there seems to be a moving away from using what for lack of a better term, the old fashioned radio gear and methods towards some of the newer digital stuff like DStar. I think that's frankly, a bad idea, here's why. In the case of a serious public emergency event, one in which power is lost in particular, those cell towers that folks have gotten so dependent on are either not going to be working or they'll be so overloaded as to be useless, I'm thinking of things like earthquakes and other natural disasters here. A system like DStar without the use of the net is just a really expensive radio with very limited text capability that requires the use of a laptop in order to get full functionality. That means adding another expensive, power using piece of equipment to the the mix. Which is the reverse of what one wants in an emergency, in my opinion.

In my limited experience responding to communications emergencies what was needed was basic, voice communications between multiple points with a minimum of equipment and fuss. That can be easily set up with some really easy to use Ham radios. The problems I see with focusing on the more esoteric systems is that they're expensive, harder to learn to use and frankly, have more capability than needed for emergency use. I don't need to be able to send a text message halfway around the world at G3 speeds if there's a wildfire burning near me in Los Angeles county but I might need to be able to send a message from a hospital that's lost their power and phone lines due to that same fire as happened just a few months ago here in Los Angeles county. When it comes to the more mundane uses, do I really need a $1000 handheld radio hooked up to a computer which in turn is connected wirelessly to the net thru a server in another state to let race control know that the last runner has passed thru my checkpoint, as I did just last month at a local trail race.

The problem is that there is an attitude amongst a lot of the well, lets call them the more senior Ham operators out there that if you didn't get your license by going to the FCC office and can't tap out CW at 30+ wpm that you are somehow unworthy of using a Ham radio. That attitude filters down and can be extremely discouraging to those newbies who are interested in learning more about Ham radio. There's a very real "if you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you" attitude in some people, luckily there are more Hams that are ready and willing to be of help to both the new folks as well as the general public. If there wasn't I never would gotten my license in the first place.

Yes, BUT remember we have call prioritization and it works. Just because MOST people are blocked, that does not mean ALL. Also, portable cell sites - self-powered and all that - are commonplace nationwide and are typically 5 to 10 hours away from almost anywhere.



My point here is to forget the net entirely and paint the local area with a mesh network as needed/possible and if there's a narrowband connection to a place where the regular network is up, reserve it for emergency traffic only.





And it should be. But in an age where I can walk into a hotel I've never been to 3,000 miles from home, open a laptop, and expect to get a working IP address via DHCP, connect to a WWLAN and then gain access to whatever network services are available, the same level of "minimal fuss" should be available for ham-based emergency WWWAN services.



Of course you don't need a $1000 radio for something like that, when a $150 webcam with WiFi could do far more, including streaming video of the checkpoint to a central location. Or better still, you just put up a RFID sniffer and let the checkpoints be like those automatic toll readers.
And as far as text messages. No you don't need to go around the world..but then again...do you really need to use voice for most routine emergency comms?

Let's face it a - Sony Mylo would be a perfectly good tool for check-ins, basic resource requests, status updates, and the command post could simply observe the flow of messages. Urgent messaging would, of course, be voice based mostly, but there's a lot more to digital comms than sending email to aunt edna.




These are all good points, however, I've been through quite a few more incidents over the last few years, including major river floods and wildfires, and I think that my interest in the more complicated modes is less about field operations as they are command center operations. I was also a fire fighter, and I can assure you that goofing around with a complicated radio is the last thing we wanted - the radio you used while operating was set to conventional, analog mode and there's a darn good reason for that.

That said, I also look at a service like Twitter and how effectively that's been used in the West Coast fire service. I compare the clunky APRS to the more elegant Navizon for the iPhone or the various hideously complex implementations of managing health and welfare traffic as compared to something as simple as a google spreadsheet and I realize that the one thing that Ham radio can bring to the table is Portable, Frequency-Agile, Agency-Agnostic communications gateways for inter-agency and intra-operational command to command operations.

To your point of grumpy old farts not willing to share - that's exactly what I've encountered for 85% of them, including our local ARES/RACES group. Thus far I've found the folks running the Winlink platform to be far more rational and realistic and willing to work with others than some of my local resources.

Great discussion, and it's given me a totally different idea - what we need in an emergency is Wide Area hotspots, meshed and backhauled via ham radio to the next command post where possible.

hmmmm

Over the next week, we'll be helping with a drill to simulate ARES response to an emergency on Cape Cod. They are including resources from outside, adjoining districts, to see how to integrate them. Should be interesting. It's a virtual drill, but, I think doing evercises like this helps shake out the bugs before we have a real incident. I like the idea of checking in volunteers from beyond the immediate drill area to see how well they can be incorporated into the team and what kind of availability of resources we have on short notice. What follows was an invitation with more info.

--------
Subject: South Shore EMCOMM resource net exercise
Hi Ron,
Date: 9 May 2009
Time: 0900-1100 EDST

This basic/low level exercise is sponsored by South Shore ARES.
It is being conducted to simulate a disaster situation on Cape Cod that will require relief operators from our adjoining district. ARES and RACES operators that wish to participate are asked to check in briefly on either the Bridgewater 147.18 repeater or the Fairhaven 145.49 repeater.
EC's and RACES officers can also gather the information from their group and pass it along with a single checkin.

For this exercise, look at your schedule for the next week and provide a date and shift(s) you could be available to deploy to Cape Cod. If you would be unavailable, that is fine too. Just check in or let your ARES EC/RACES officer know. Please plan a 12 hour window. Two hours to travel and brief, 8 hours on shift, and 2 hours to debrief and travel home. For the exercise we are assuming 0800-1600, 1600-2400, and 2400-0800 shifts. No deployments will actually occur.

A brief checkin is all that is requested. The information could also be communicated via Echolink
(*NEWENG) or even via email.

Exercise objectives
-Validate contact information and communicate with Emcomm operators -Exercise the leadership to assemble communication resource information -Net Control/liason to communicate the relief information to the Cape Cod ARES DEC

Cape Cod ARES is also conducting a low power QRP exercise Saturday am 1000-1200. An attempt will be made to voice relay the available relief head count and shifts to the CC ARES DEC.
WINLINK may also be used.

Thank you for your interest in public service.

South Share ARES District Emergency Coordinator Carver RACES officer

Winlink is evil. It never checks the state of the channel before transmitting, therefore it often QRMs existing conversations.

Look at PSKMail for long-distance HF email.

A

HF Winlink IS a PITA

Around HERE (NYC) we have standardized on using VHF winlink on the Flexnet packet network. There are enough redundant nodes, that we don't really have infrastructure worries (Besides, 2 of our guys are people who put up nodes, and have 3-4 spares in their gear)

This gets rid of the evil of HF winlink