See below.
Walt/K5YFW
-----Original Message-----
From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:digitalradio@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of expeditionradio
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 8:45 AM
To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [digitalradio] ALE in Emergency HF use (Re: Another look at
ALE)
><Walt/K5YFW wrote><
> There has been some discussion about what mode does what
> and what is needed/desired.
> ...
> We have had a little discussion on what the problems were
> during Katrina with digital communications.
> ...An automatic call ability, such as SELCALL, would be very
> nice to have.
> ...
> I believe that the type of operations I was involved in, and
> will be again this hurricane season, are useful in passing
> many if not most types of
> traffic on HF.
Hi Walt,
While Alan KM4BA was setting up stations for Red Cross in the "Katrina
Zone" in Mississippi, several of us in the amateur ALE net maintained
contact with him many times every day. Alan used 100W mobile ALE with
PCALE in a laptop through FT897 and ATU. He used a status reporting
function that is part of the new ham ALE Geo Position Reporting
(ALE-GPR) standard, and it was linked to his GPS to give his location
(similar to APRS). We were able to call back and forth just about any
time of the day or night, get his GPR automatically, link with him
every day on voice... even during the solar storms that happened in
the second week, sometimes with great signals for short time periods
on frequencies such as 21MHz or 24MHz, which was not predicted by any
charts or even the ionosonde maps. Sometimes, during the solar
disturbances, I was able to link with Alan easier from here in
California than were the stations closer to him.
Sounds like a super job.
But things I have to consider are...we must talk to Dallas and/or San Antonio and/or Atlanta. If we have other stations on who can relay that is great. From the Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas Gulf Coast to San Antonio or Dallas is generally a 40M/80M hop and from Louisiana and Mississippi to Atlanta is a 40/80M hop. Between Dallas and San Antonio
to Atlanta is a 20M/40M hop and 40M/80M between Dallas and San Antonio.
Most of our HF stations aren't PC equipped and IF money is available,
we will purchase them. Not only do we need to rely on HF (and don't
have that many General Class of higher licensed individuals), but we also have and extensive V/UHF voice network at each deployment location.
So its more than just a data protocol or even an ALE problem...its an
entire network problem. All our stations need to monitor 20M and 40M during the day and 80M/40M at night. Since we are only using one
frequency per band, making a frequency selection isn't really a
big problem.
The big problem is having Dallas, San Antonio and Atlanta being able
to communicate with any one of 50 or 60 stations in the three or four states involved in a hurricane.
Really, when you get down to it, the biggest strong points of ALE is
the standard itself, since it is becoming nearly ubiquitous built in
to government and commercial transceivers. There are so many EOC,
SHARES, NGO organizations, and government HF stations now that have
ALE built in to their transceivers... in an emergency, the ability to
inter-operate using available HF equipment is a big advantage.
It is true...the ALE standard is there and to operate on a FEMA
or SHARES frequency, both FEMA and SHARES (DoM/DHS) require you to
operate ALE and SELCALL. I don't really know how many NGO or local
EOCs operate ALE...certainly not in Texas that I know of. Also Southern
Baptist and most SA communications don't. I don't know about the
RC. But Southern Baptist are the third largest NGO doing disaster
relief in the nation and I know that we'd better be able to use
ALE and SELCALL to be affective.
From my point of view, if your NGO HF radio doesn't have ALE and
SELCALL build in, you should get one that has it...as you have
mentioned the IC-F7000 or VX-1700 (which needs an add on module for
ALE operation).
By the way, the feature of ALE we use often, is the AMD short
messaging system (Automatic Message Delivery), which is accessed from
the front panel of embedded-ALE transceivers. After making the initial
link contact via ALE, we "negotiate" via the AMD what modes are
available to both sides of the QSO. It is easy then to go to voice or
some keyboarding mode, or do an ARQ file exchange.
That's a good process. I suspect that we will run 50:50 on voice vs. keyboard-to-keyboard but clearly 15-20% of our communications will be 40KB binary files which is the standard size for our report(s). The reports aren't our "device", rather then consist of information that FEMA requires of us. I might mention here that we actually perform 100% of our assigned tasks (and the SA probably 90% of their tasks) while the Red Cross hires out most of their "assigned" (by FEMA/DHS) tasks.
Also, the Red Cross has greater access to federal money that we do since we are a Faith Bases NGO.
When we have a deadline or urgent need to get a report to one of our disaster operations centers (DOCs in Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta or elsewhere), we generally need to get them there within an hour. Some
reports are required by 21:00 and the last report time is 20:00. Even
Satellite Internet E-Mail is worrisome in those delivery crunch times.
Bonnie KQ6XA
Bonnie KQ6XA
Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org
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