Recognition and enhancement of the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communication service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications.

Think of it as part of the price you pay for the privilege of being granted an amateur radio license.

One way to get involved with public service and emergency communications is to join SkyWarn (http://www.skywarn.org). SkyWarn is a volunteer program run by the National Weather Service with more than 290,000 trained severe weather spotters. These volunteers help keep their local communities safe by providing timely and accurate reports of severe weather to the National Weather Service.

Not all of these weather spotters are amateur radio operators, but a good many are, and using amateur radio is a great way to report severe weather. When severe weather is imminent, SkyWarn spotters are deployed in the areas where the severe weather is expected. A “net” is established on one of the local repeaters, and all of the SkyWarn spotters who have amateur radio licenses check into that net. The net control advises the spotters when they might expect to see severe weather, and the spotters, in turn, report conditions such as horizontal winds, large hail, rotating clouds, and even tornadoes.

To become a SkyWarn spotter, you must take a class that teaches you the basics of severe weather, how to identify potential severe weather features, and how to report it. The classes are free and typically last about two hours.

ARES/RACES
Another way to become involved in public service and emergency communications is to join an ARES/RACES group. Although technically these are two separate services—the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) is run by the ARRL, while Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (http://www.usraces.org/) is a function of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) —the amateur radio operators who typically take part in one also take part in the other.

To participate in RACES, you’ll need to to take some self-study FEMA course in emergency preparedness and emergency-response protocols. Classes may or may not be required to participate in ARES. These requirements are set by each individual ARES group. To get involved with either ARES or RACES, ask your local club members when they meet. You can also contact the Section Manager or Emergency Coordinator for your ARRL section. To get in touch with those people, go to http://www.arrl.org/sections and find the section that you live in.

If these formal organizations aren’t for you, you can still participate in public service activities  through your club. Our club, for example, provides communications for a bike tour with more than 1,000 riders and covering dozens of square miles. Our organization is a lot less formal than SkyWarn, ARES, or RACES, but the public service that we provide is just as valuable.

From ARRL HQ:

Do you live in a CC&R-restricted community or participate in EmComm activities? Have deed restrictions / HOA covenants prevented you from erecting amateur radio antennas? Have these restrictions prevented you from full participation in emergency communications activities during disasters?

If your answer is “Yes”, ARRL needs to hear about your experience.

As you are probably aware, Congress has directed the FCC to conduct a study of the uses and capabilities of Amateur Radio Service communications in emergencies and disaster relief. The FCC was directed to identify ” impediments to enhanced Amateur Radio Service communications, such as the effects of unreasonable or unnecessary private land use restrictions on residential antenna installations”. Finally, the study is to make “recommendations regarding the removal of such impediments.”

The FCC has issued a Public Notice – DA 12-523- soliciting input from the public as part of their study. The ARRL is gathering comments from the Amateur Radio community to present as part of its comments on the public notice.

The ARRL is looking specifically for input in two specific areas:

• Recent Amateur Radio involvement in actual emergency communications and disaster relief;
• Specific details about how CC&Rs and other private land use restrictions have impaired licensed Amateurs to participate fully in these disaster relief communications.

If your ability to participate in ARES, RACES, SKYWARN, CERT, or other emergency and disaster relief communications has been limited because the inability to have adequate antennas due to CC&Rs, you are asked to provide that information to the ARRL.

First, we recommend that you prepare a narrative of your exact situation, in as much detail as practical. Some areas for you to consider in writing your story might be:

• Were there alternative properties without CC&Rs in the area you wished to reside?
• What exactly does your CC&R allow / prohibit (please include a copy of the specific wording)
• Have you applied for a waiver of the CC&R with the Home Owner’s Association / Architectural Review Committee but were denied? If so, what was the reason?

To assist you in sharing your information with the ARRL, please visit the special ARRL website built to allow you to readily provide the pertinent information at www.arrl.org/ccr-study-information

This page will present you with an overview of what we are asking and have links to the two forms for you to complete. Please be as factual as you can with the information you provide and please provide only information about events and activities in which you were directly involved.

If you wish to write out the details of your situation in advance, please do so. Then, they can be either uploaded to the website or they can be sent as an email attachment to an email sent to CCRinfo@arrl.org

Keep in mind that the FCC study does not apply to ordinances and zoning laws implemented by the government – such as towns, cities or counties. PRB-1 covers those situations.

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! Congress directed that the FCC provide the report back within 180-days and that clock is already counting. The FCC is only accepting comments for a 45-day period, which will end May 17,2012. In order for the ARRL to collate your information in a common report, we ask that you send in your information no later than WEDNESDAY APRIL 25. If you need more information, please contact reginfo@arrl.org The time to act is NOW!

Dan Henderson, N1ND
Regulatory Specialist

Fierce Homeland Security

In a paper (.pdf) dated Jan. 24, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology says unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4 gigahertz to 5 GHz spectrum, television white space and possibly even 60-100 GHz spectrum could augment the planned national broadband network….In addition, the network should incorporate Internet protocol packet switching technology to permit ad hoc network formation, the paper says. “Use of the Internet Protocols does NOT necessarily imply use of the public Internet,” it emphasizes.

This is just what amateur radio operators do when we set up nets in response to an emergency, although are networks are usually voice-only.  Why aren’t we doing any digital networking? Well, for one thing, there’s currently no commercial equipment available for purchase, and many of those involved in ham radio emergency communications are just not interested in investing the time and money required to get a digital network like this up and running.

I’ll say again what I’ve said before. We need a group like AMSAT that’s devoted to advancing the state-of-the-art in emergency communications. Unless someone really takes the bull by the horns, amateur radio is going to fall farther and farther behind in this area.

Ham radio usage needs fixed

Dear Editor:

Attention amateur radio operators, it is easy to forget where amateur radio is and what we are here for.

First let me give you a story. A man sat in his car out of gas during freezing weather, on January the 29th of this year. He was a Ham operator and he had called several times for assistance. No answer came.

For those of you who know a little about sub-freezing weather, you can go into hypothermia in less than an hour inside a car and it takes 20 minutes outside.

This man never got any help from the radio but his son, knowing he was stranded, walked 5 miles to where he was with a small can of gas that held about a gallon-and- a-half. They made it home safely, no thanks to Amateur radio assistance.

You wonder why I didn’t help that man inside that car … well that man was me. You see, at home I monitor the local repeater, but now I have lost my faith in Ham radio.

People you need to listen up, if were not going to monitor local repeaters of call channels on a 24-hour basis, than Ham radio is not worth saving. Is this the message you want to send to those who are after our frequency?

Amateur radio is for the recognition of emergency communication first, and a privilege to use it as a hobby second -not anything other than that.

Start monitoring those frequencies, and set up a schedule for volunteers on a 24-hour basis. If we are to live up to our name, then we need to listen to those calls of emergency, with your local clubs.

This could have been a bad car accident happening in the early-morning night, with severe bleeding, or worse.

We must not fail those who need us in these times.

I do want to thank the officer who gave my son a ride back with gas, and we did get home safely.

Walter Kernaich
East Liverpool

So, is someone monitoring your repeater?

I became aware of them several years ago, when one of the students in my Tech class told me that he was a Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are encouraging many of their members to get amateur radio licenses.

I recently decided to do a little more digging when an “amateur radio” Google Alert that I get contained a link to the article, “The Skinny on Ham Radio” on the blog The Survival Mom. This is a very good introduction to our hobby.

Here are some more links:

• Radio Survivalist. This site contains links to many different online amateur radio resources for preppers, including information about rigs and antennas.
• Catastrophe Network. This site claims to be the creator of the Standardized Amateur Radio Communication Plan. This plan is downloadable from this site.
• The American Radio Preparedness Net (TAPRN). These folks are the co-creators of the Standardized Amateur Radio Communication Plan. In addition to a number of pages to help preppers set up and operate amateur radio stations, TAPRN conducts several regularly-scheduled on-air nets.

According to the Catastrophe Network website, the plan “outlines a standard set of frequencies that should be used by all preppers following a catastrophic disaster. These frequencies will serve as a meeting point where information about the event can be shared and actions between like minded preppers can be communicated.”

Googling will undoubtedly point you towards more websites, but this should get you started if you’re interested in this aspect of ham radio.

Gloucester County 4-H club leader encourages ham radio hobby. I liked this article because it didn’t talk only about emergency communications. It quotes Corey Sickles, WA3UUV, president of the Gloucester County 4-H Amateur Radio Club, as saying, “It ties into that whole engineering, how do things work, mindset.”

Museum welcomes “spook” donation. No, this does not have anything to do with Halloween. Instead, it describes the donation to a Coventry (England) Herbert Art Gallery and Museum of a radio “used during the Second World War by one of Coventry’s “secret listeners” to help defend the country…The national treasure was used by the city’s very own secret ‘spook’ – Frederick Arthur Noakes (Arthur) – between 1940 and 1945. He was one of at least four secret listeners in Coventry who were recruited by MI5 for their ability to read Morse code under difficult conditions, use and maintain a shortwave radio and their steadfast ability to keep a secret.”

The KC5FM Daily. Paper.li is a website that lets you turn Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds into online newspapers in just a few clicks. Here’s KC5FM’s paper.

‘UHF’ Connector Test Results. This blog post by John Huggins (I couldn’t find his callsign anywhere on the website) shows the results of his UHF connector tests. He also compares their characteristics to other types of RF connectors. Huggins says,

The stunning result is all the UHF connectors in the test have worse performance than all the other connectors. One immediate conclusion concerning ‘UHF’ connectors is they will function at these higher frequencies, but one must decide if using the PL259 or SO239 is worth it in an age where its deficiencies have been made moot by ALL connector designs since WWII.

Prywatna Wytwórnia Lamp, where DIY meets vacuum electron devices. This blog post describes another guy–this one in Poland–who makes his own vacuum tubes.

Google+ is a lot better site for ham-radio social networking than Facebook.  Give it a try and join us.

09/29/2011

On September 12, at the invitation of White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard A. Schmidt, W7HAS, the ARRL briefed several members of the National Security Staff on the capabilities of the Amateur Radio Service to communicate in emergencies. “The White House is looking for ways that the great work of Amateur Radio operators can continue to support emergencies in the future with particular attention to increased use and dependency on internet based technologies,” Schmidt said. The ARRL presentation, conducted by Emergency Preparedness Manager Mike Corey, W5MPC — along with President Kay Craigie, N3KN, and Chief Executive Officer David Sumner, K1ZZ — focused on Amateur Radio’s current and evolving capabilities to provide Internet messaging connectivity.

Wouldn’t you have loved to sit in on this presentation? Perhaps we can get the ARRL to post the slides to the website someday or maybe even make it the focus of a QST article. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t appear to me that anyone is working on technical advances for emergency communications the way TAPR is working on software-defined radio and AMSAT is working on satellite communications. Maybe (hopefully?) I’m wrong about that, though.

1. It’s basically about….helping people in emergencies. A lifetime interest turned into a lifetime hobby, and now Richard Nielsen is using his skills in amateur radio to potentially save lives in an emergency.
2. What a ham!: Amateur radio operators provide vital communication. In times of emergency, when communications lines are down and power is out, when a natural disaster disrupts telephone and cell phone systems, amateur radio operators, or hams, take to the airwaves to provide vital communication.
3. In age of technology, ham radios can still be vital communication. The ground shaking for a few seconds in Central Pennsylvania was far from a disaster, but having a reliable means of communications is necessary for emergency responders – especially when a real disaster strikes.

I guess it’s our emergency communications capabilities that make the news, but I really wish that newspaper articles would quit emphasizing that over all the other aspects of the hobby.

I also wish that newspapers would stop calling ham radio “old technology.” Sure, amateur radio has been around a long time, but the radios we use today are hardly “old technology.”

As Irene neared landfall in late August, both the ARES and the New York City/Long Island American Radio Relay League (ARRL) supported the Red Cross by staffing the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and supporting shelters in Queens, Nassau County and Suffolk County. While not all shelters required onsite Amateur Radio Operators—a.k.a. HAMS—volunteers were on standby to move their equipment at a moment’s notice.

I especially liked the comment in the last paragraph about fire departments having only one or two frequencies to use.  That seems kind of short-sighted, doesn’t it?