#Random
Fixed something which has been bothering me for a few years. Every time there's a emergency/disaster, our local amateur radio airwaves go quiet (typically, because local repeaters stop working). So I've taken over the output frequency on the hour (er... more or less on the hour) to provide status updates to anyone who might hear me. Just so people know someone is out there.
(still have phone/Internet around here, so people still can get info... but it's been bugging me for years no one gets on at all to distribute info--not even for practice or to keep everyone fresh).
#disasters #hamradio
Fixed something which has been bothering me for a few years. Every time there's a emergency/disaster, our local amateur radio airwaves go quiet (typically, because local repeaters stop working). So I've taken over the output frequency on the hour (er... more or less on the hour) to provide status updates to anyone who might hear me. Just so people know someone is out there.
(still have phone/Internet around here, so people still can get info... but it's been bugging me for years no one gets on at all to distribute info--not even for practice or to keep everyone fresh).
#disasters #hamradio
LukefromDC •
During wars and revolutions mesh networks sometimes are built to replace it, but if the emergency is a city burning in wildfire there is no advance warning to build mesh networks. Hams are already in place.
A note on broadcast radio: In New Orleans after Katrina, for a while the only station on the air was a pirate radio station that dedicated a lot of time to providing emergency information. A ten watt transmitter covered half the city before being replaced with a 100 watter of better quality.
It's a lot easier to set up a couple broadcast stations that talk to radios people already have, and for hams to handle the 2-way traffic on hardware they already have than it is to rebuild the internet from scratch when fire and flood strike a city down. Installing a bunch of cell towers, the microwave repeaters or landlines to link them to the main network, and the power sources to feed it all is not something people can easily do on their own.
Even the local police department's Stingrays probably cannot be pressed into service, most of those are 2G only, and I don't know if they are capable of feeding bulk data into a network or just recording what phones are out there and maybe acting as repeaters for the real tower. They are cell site simulators and are not built to be portable full featured cell sites.