The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 1:31 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience by joey
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

If I were in your position, I think I'd have went to ham radio and probably a police scanner first. I know the ham community is pretty serious about helping with disaster response, and it should be high SNR. Good reason to make sure hardware to at least receive that stuff is handy.

Good advice. What happens in my experience (from a weather net) is that the ARES net is called on a local repeaters. Once that happens, things are very ordered. Net control controls who can talk, although if there's an immediate danger of life or property happening and there's no other way to get the message out quickly (they (and you) can even transmit on unauthorized frequencies and modes, but it'd better be a very very clear-cut case of life or property being in immediate danger and there being *no* other way to get the news out), they can talk out of turn. If there's a sufficient lull, net control can let anyone report in their sightings as they see it, but if things get to going too quickly, they'll restructure it. If you listen in, you'll hear status reports from the local authorities (often, they're hams or connected with the ham community, and net control or designated message passers will pass the news.

When the tornado came through south of town here, I was quite well informed about what was going on where, since I was in the weather net.

They can also carry traffic between hams over distance, so it also is good if you need to get a message out; find a ham and have them forward the message (as long as it's domestic; things get more complicated if the hams need to pass the message internationally (generally, the answer is "no, you can't." iirc). It's not done as much anymore with cell phones and pervasive internet, but it's an option.

It's also completely legal to listen in to ham (or any) frequencies; it is only illegal to transmit without having an appropriate license for the frequency you're transmitting on (and the mode potentially, e.g. spread-spectrum methods).

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 2:55 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's also completely legal to listen in to ham (or any) frequencies

Well, in the US, it's illegal to listen to (or manufacture equipment which can be used to listen to, or which can be easily modified to allow listening to) cellphone frequencies. Of course, that law was passed back when cellphones used unencrypted analog transmission and were easily listenable. Usually that means approx 816-902MHz are blocked.

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 5:00 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Fair 'nuff. I think I remember hearing about this, but had forgotten.

HAM radio for disaster information

Posted Sep 16, 2010 18:23 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

What does "the ARES net is called on a local repeaters" mean?

HAM radio for disaster information

Posted Sep 16, 2010 20:17 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

ARES: http://www.arrl.org/ares, http://www.ares.org/

A "net" is a group of hams getting together in a coordinated, formalized way to do something (e.g. chit-chat or get things done such as coordinate in an emergency or help out during a sporting event).

A repeater is a radio device that listens in on one frequency and retransmits what it hears to another frequency. There's much more complexity to it (e.g. CTSS tones to activate it, it doesn't transmit unless someone's transmitting to it, repeaters are often coordinated to prevent interference), but that's the basic idea. There are two reasons to use a repeater that I can think of offhand. One is that it almost always has more power (being fixed and therefore on AC power, it is limited by laws and what the owner can pay, as opposed to handheld (generally transmits up to 5W) or mobile (often in a car, up to 50W) radios) and therefore can transmit further than a handheld or mobile radio. It also can be positioned such that it can reach much much further than a handheld, mobile, or even stationary radio, and as such can be used to go where other radios can't (they're on VHF or UHF frequencies, which are (almost) line-of-sight), and so they can be used to get the signal out of a valley or over a mountain, or just go further than is possible with one's own radio.

HTH!