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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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