Re: [digitalradio] Re: Curmudgions and an idea for digital operation
jgorman01 wrote: Hate to tell you but some of us cranky, bitter, and rude (old) men have simply been there and done that. I certainly saw and worked with some generous kind old man hams in my efforts. (Shared a shelter operation with an 80 year old!!) But did not see hardly any of the same ones that annoy us all on HF there. The rude, cranky, selfish types. For example, do you think a permanently installed ham antenna is going to survive on a roof top when all other commercial grade antennas have been destroyed? This tells me you've not been there, and are missing the point. Yes, ham antennas do survive when properly installed on hospital shelter rooftops. It's the repeaters and high sights which do not. Even in a hurricane. Now if the EOC is leveled, as happened in the county I worked in coastal Miss, all bets are off. The reason hospitals (and such) preinstall antennas is not to support their communications, it's to be able to communicate with ad-hoc shelters relief efforts. IE: With the very volunteers you mention. Most often on 2m, but at times you need HF. No, the HF dipole won't survive. But the coax to the roof, the radial net, the antenna mount, and the HF vertical carefully stored in the closet will. And will go up in 15m. Part of our ability to do emcomm is using our OWN equipment in a portable fashion to replace that which has been destroyed. The other part is the geographic spread of hams in a location. It makes what gets destroyed somewhat random. Relying on prepositioned equipment is no better than public safety doing the same. You've never had to stand outside a large building to get coverage then. Or deal with running coax out a door, around the side of the building, etc. 300' of coax pinched in a door to keep skeeters out rather than a nice clean run of prepositioned coax. I spent quite a bit of time with the head of mtc of one of our local hospital families. He's a good friend, and wanted a joint debrief on what he I both saw at Katrina. His action was to pre-position multiple coax runs, dual band antenna (short diamond type), etc. Common sense stuff. If the need arises he's now setup to communicate with ham volunteers. This means those manning red cross shelters, ferrying relief supplies, ferrying staff, etc. Not hospital business, but community recovery efforts. Have you ever told the ARC or SA they should include commercial radios in their shelter standard inventory? Again, it's clear you've never participated in a large scale relief effort by your questions. ARC has dedicated low band freqs for their primary ops. What they do not have, and will be unlikely to ever afford is radios/gear/ops for every shelter in a large scale disaster. That's where ham's fill the gap. There were hundred's of shelters in Katrina. Each with dozens to hundreds of people in them. 20+ shelters in the single county I worked. Only one of them had communications during the hurricane itself, because a lowly no code tech barely out of highschool had the foresight to preposition his IC-706 and a dual band antenna prior to the storm. As soon as it was safe, he erected HF dipole so he could monitor the nets, and as soon as other ham's arrived they were linked. The others simply were out of communication. No way to get medical assist. No way to get law enforcement. (the two main types of communications assist shelters need) These are all issues some of have dealt with and have experience in. Some of us have lost our predilection with being ham-centric in all things radio related. Let's see, we used: - GMRS - Red Cross low band (for several days I had a Red Cross mobile radio installed in my truck) Again, far afield from digital radio. I had not realized that the digitalradio forum was so anti-emcomm, which is a bit sad, as it's a natural fit. Last post from me on this subject. Have fun, Alan km4ba
Re: [digitalradio] Re: Curmudgions and an idea for digital operation
Guys, You both have valid views. Isn't it more that one is mostly discussing smaller types of disasters, the ones that are the most common, and the other is discussing much larger scale incidents that rarely happen (but they do happen and we may wish to consider preparing for them as best we can)? Mostly it is a matter of degree. How much infrastructure survived? How many hams remain in the area and who are not affected by the situation to the point of not being able to help locally? How bad is the situation? How many resources is government putting into the area? In an ideal world, when disasters occur, there will be enough resources from emergency management to handle any situation. But realistically we know this is not possible. Therefore, volunteers help to temporarily alleviate the shortfalls of at least some of the resources. We hams can lend our assistance to communications shortfalls and even other areas if we wish to do so. While most hams do not participate with emegency groups on a regular basis, my experience has been that many will help the call goes out. It is a lot to ask someone to do this. We saw that recently with our flood disaster her in SW Wisconsin this past summer. There is often a substantial amount of politics involved in any volunteer activity of this type and it turns off many who would otherwise be active. This is more true of amateur radio because in order to be in a leadership position in ARES you must be an ARRL member. That excludes almost 80% of hams. If they live in a Section with different emergency groups, they may be able to find their comfort zone with other groups or agencies. In our Section, we have one amateur radio group, which is a combined ARES/RACES structure. On thing I want to reinforce, is that just because you don't totally agree with each other is no reason to claim that this forum is anti-emcomm. Many of us have this as one of our primary interests and some cases may have been involved in this activity with CAP, MARS, and ham radio, for many decades. 73, Rick, KV9U Alan Barrow wrote: jgorman01 wrote: Hate to tell you but some of us cranky, bitter, and rude (old) men have simply been there and done that. I certainly saw and worked with some generous kind old man hams in my efforts. (Shared a shelter operation with an 80 year old!!) But did not see hardly any of the same ones that annoy us all on HF there. The rude, cranky, selfish types. For example, do you think a permanently installed ham antenna is going to survive on a roof top when all other commercial grade antennas have been destroyed? This tells me you've not been there, and are missing the point. Yes, ham antennas do survive when properly installed on hospital shelter rooftops. It's the repeaters and high sights which do not. Even in a hurricane. Now if the EOC is leveled, as happened in the county I worked in coastal Miss, all bets are off. The reason hospitals (and such) preinstall antennas is not to support their communications, it's to be able to communicate with ad-hoc shelters relief efforts. IE: With the very volunteers you mention. Most often on 2m, but at times you need HF. No, the HF dipole won't survive. But the coax to the roof, the radial net, the antenna mount, and the HF vertical carefully stored in the closet will. And will go up in 15m. Part of our ability to do emcomm is using our OWN equipment in a portable fashion to replace that which has been destroyed. The other part is the geographic spread of hams in a location. It makes what gets destroyed somewhat random. Relying on prepositioned equipment is no better than public safety doing the same. You've never had to stand outside a large building to get coverage then. Or deal with running coax out a door, around the side of the building, etc. 300' of coax pinched in a door to keep skeeters out rather than a nice clean run of prepositioned coax. I spent quite a bit of time with the head of mtc of one of our local hospital families. He's a good friend, and wanted a joint debrief on what he I both saw at Katrina. His action was to pre-position multiple coax runs, dual band antenna (short diamond type), etc. Common sense stuff. If the need arises he's now setup to communicate with ham volunteers. This means those manning red cross shelters, ferrying relief supplies, ferrying staff, etc. Not hospital business, but community recovery efforts. Have you ever told the ARC or SA they should include commercial radios in their shelter standard inventory? Again, it's clear you've never participated in a large scale relief effort by your questions. ARC has dedicated low band freqs for their primary ops. What they do not have, and will be unlikely to ever afford is radios/gear/ops for every shelter in a large scale disaster. That's where ham's fill the gap. There were
RE: [digitalradio] Re: Curmudgions and an idea for digital operation
Jim, That yourself, family and property are supposed to come first, even in ARES. It is common sense that a volunteer operator is not going to be focused on their activity if they are worrying about all the other issues. Rud Merriam K5RUD ARES AEC Montgomery County, TX http://TheHamNetwork.net -Original Message- From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of jgorman01 Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 3:32 PM To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com Subject: [digitalradio] Re: Curmudgions and an idea for digital operation Rick, My family comes first, my property second, friends and neighbors third, and ham radio last. If I had a choice of going to my son's practice or a drill, my son would win out. Tough cookies if the emcomm folks don't like my attitude. Jim WA0LYK
Re: [digitalradio] Re: Curmudgions and an idea for digital operation
Hi Jim, One of the prime directives of the ARECC Courses is that you and your family and their safety come first before others. That group was violating basic common sense and emergency recommendations that have been developed over a long time. You don't want someone distracted with personal issues in such an environment. Those of us who have served in the military did enough of that! We do have some very peculiar people these days in leadership positions of various emergency groups who act very elitist and who claim that only hams trained by them or who have taken extensive courses are of much value. Needless to say, most of us know this is absurd since most of the skills can be learned on the job. I have been surprised how poorly some of the trained hams compared at times to those who had more practical knowledge. This does not mean I do not recommend training. I have taken several of the FEMA courses and all three of the ARRL ARECC Level courses. The FEMA courses are of very limited value for most of us. It does not hurt to have an overall understanding of the naming conventions of the different levels and the various horizontal positions, but it is very difficult to even remember the material for the exam. And it does not always match up with other services, such as the miltary, but it is what they have decided will be the terminology so we must follow it. The ARRL courses were fairly good, and there is some leeway in the decision making processes although I really felt that the material could easily be compressed into two courses instead of three. I also would like to see the ARRL material freely available to everyone, just like the FEMA material is available. I have lobbied my Division Director to do this without even a response. I know they want the money for the coursework, but I would never pay for the courses if they had not been subsidized. I realize that depending upon your ARRL Leadership position, different Levels are mandatory, but I often wonder if they are having many sign up for the courses at their own expense. The digital material included in the course work is helpful although it had not really covered the transition toward moving digital in the current direction. I could tell that some of my mentors were not fully supportive of that. As far as accepting government money, that is something that is not always easy to come by, but if we can get some grant money, we are more than willing to make suggestions on how to spend it. The equipment belongs to government in our case, and that has helped us a great deal with our repeater which because of its county emergency support, also has a fabulous location and long term emergency back up power. 73, Rick, KV9U jgorman01 wrote: Rick, Good posting. I don't know how many times to say it, I'm not against volunteering and using ham radio for emergency communications. However, for me ham radio does come after several other things. I don't think some of the emcomm folks understand this. For the folks that went to the South and helped with Katrina, more power to them. I'm glad they didn't have family or job requirements so they could go there for what was obviously a quite long period of time. To make snide remarks about the, I'll call them middle age hams, that didn't go is an indicator to me of the mindset. Some years back I went to a meeting about joining an ARES group. Let me tell you, they didn't want volunteers, they wanted conscripts. To the point of even saying they expected us to leave our families to fend for themselves at times. I threw the sign up form in the trash and never looked back. My wife would have come home and smashed all my radio gear if she had been there. My family comes first, my property second, friends and neighbors third, and ham radio last. If I had a choice of going to my son's practice or a drill, my son would win out. Tough cookies if the emcomm folks don't like my attitude. The whole point of the thread to begin with was not about doing emcomm work, it was about whether accepting government money to buy ham gear was a good thing. Somewhere the thread got off track. Jim WA0LYK
