Well, not to be too disparaging, but I seriously wonder what really useful information a person might get by listening to the radio in an emergency situation these days? I have a couple good battery radios, including various transceivers (I've been a ham since 1973), but I'm not optimistic. Anybody have any direct experience, like from the Katrina situation for example? How useful was a battery am/fm radio receiver in that particular disaster?
I lived in the New Orleans metro area at that time, and had an emergency radio (AM, FM, weather bands, and a flashlight).
One of the problems was having no knowledge of what frequencies were locally available on the weather bands; anything else broadcasting emergency data (some broadcasters went back to music almost immediately with no more than sporadic updates) kept spouting the same five minutes of information, most of which was not much help. It took several days to hear a location listing relief supplies in our area. It's not that sources of help weren't being broadcast, but it wasn't being made available nearly as often as the drudgery of cookie-cutter snippets being fed at almost all hours of the day.
When electricity was finally restored in my area, television broadcasts were basically the same except, of course, video footage.
Previous Topic
Index
