On Friday 13 January 2006 09:19 am, Mac Newbold wrote: > Today at 12:01am, Oscar Schultz said: > > I'm more interested in the communications part of EP. Most plans I see > > setup a structure around ham radio ops and voice or cw traffic as done <snip> </snip> > The Church is the force pushing ham radio for emergency communication. > There is a calling at the stake (and in some cases, ward) level for > Emergency Communications Specialist. Their calling is to be a ham radio > operator (or work closely with one) to coordinate communication between > the stake and the Church (via the local Welfare Region, generally) in an > emergency. The Church has numerous resources in place to facilitate such > emergency communication, and there's a weekly on-the-air training meeting, > in the Salt Lake area at least, for people serving this way. The church > has radio equipment and operators ready, including repeaters with > emergency power, so that they can maintain effective communication in a > disaster.
True -in my area it is mostly central station flow controlled voice traffic - very low volume - it works but most of the time bandwidth is wasted in overhead - that's the way voice traffic works. > > The guideline on privacy that I heard last time I talked with them (about > a year ago, more or less) was that no names or identifying information was > to be passed on the air. They said that primarily it would be a matter of > identifying the stake for which you were reporting, and giving information > about the current situation and needs and what assistance you may be able > to provide to others. All information about people (members or not) would > be in the form of numbers only - counts of people, totals, and never names > or other personally identifying information. It is too easy to disregard the guideline while trying to do the right thing. The non life-threatening traffic really should be carryed on a RTTY type net just to conserve the bandwidth on the voice net. Converting to digital allows filtering and other content control methods. > > Regarding cell phones, <snip> </snip> http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/news/part97/ see part 97.113.a.5 - once cell phones or FRS or any other radio service becomes available the amateur station is to basically close down. What would interest me would be to setup a station(s) and apps to pass traffic that is very difficult to pass using current methods - basically email, pictures, video, various HTML forms (building inspections, work party schedules, material orders (where do you need a tarp and what size)) - all the "stuff" needed to stabilize/rebuild a region. The bulk of the data is third party and contains too much volume to pass in a voice network. What I see is many NAT'ed local networks (10BaseT?) with multiple nodes. Perhaps 1 per Ward or building (or even 1 per work team - laptop with radio). Each NAT server would connect to the outside world (next up center) via a radio link (2 meter, 440, cw, software radios, ???). The idea is much like how my home network (10 nodes) is connected to the internet via a diald link. With the correct apps the local net could provide level 1 coordination and act as a cache to outside services to coordinate the outflow of area needs and information. A HT/VTer could report simply by selecting a simple html form from a web server on the local server, fill it in and submit it. An Apache script (php?) could process the form data and coordinate emergency/high priority needs. The entire system minus the radio links could be tested and training done almost anytime just be using standard links like modems, lans or wifis. I would love to see a 2 meter or 3 band radio I could connect to a computer via usb or ethernet & tcpip. The big "?" is how to setup the links using plain jane radios or whatever you have or can get. Software radios look very interesting. If one could just get even 36kbaud down a 2 meter link how different things would be. 300 and 1200 baud is a bit limiting. oscar _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
