Carolina This Week: The Grand Strand Radio Club. Gordon Mooneyhan, W4EGM, with the Grand Strand Radio Club, talks with Trey Paul about the role that amateur radios play in the community, especially during the Great American Solar Eclipse back in August.
This ham radio operator could save your life one day. When the Big One hits — and that’s when, not if — you might as well kiss your cellphone goodbye. It’s more than likely emergency officials will shut down all use except for first responders. We’ve already seen the chaos of jammed phones when people rush to check on loved ones during wildfires and debris flows. But a big quake will topple cell towers and that means zero cell calls. That is when you might find yourself thanking Josifek, 75, and the other volunteers who run something launched when William Howard Taft first became president in 1909. These men and women — as well as an increasing number of teens; who knew? — call themselves amateur radio enthusiasts. Trained and licensed, they are the volunteers for our country’s Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service.
Steve C - KE8HXM says
I could see the military being interested in these communications boots – especially for reconnaissance patrols, but they’d need to make the return signals only audible to the wearer, (that 80 db warning would be a very bad thing in this case), via skeletal vibration like the Bone Phones – remember those? It looked like a scarf you draped over the back of the neck and down the front of the shoulders/upper chest. Now they have bone conduction devices that are worn so they are in contact with the occipital area of the skull so this combined with the signal shoes would make nearly silent communications possible. See this example (reportedly the best on the market – and reasonably priced) Motorola makes a temple contact system for bone conduction as well but it is held on the head by the ears. In both systems the ears are not covered which would allow the person using them to hear everything around them as well as the radio traffic. Being a guy with hearing loss I have done some research and have some experience with the traditional hearing aid/audio streaming combination which is similar to that in use by most emergency response personnel, and I can tell you that your hearing focuses on what is coming through the device even though audible sounds can get past the hearing aid. This bone conduction type of device overcomes the drowning out effect of the streaming audio, which is a weakness of those streaming systems – I learned this from my wife when she let me know she did not appreciate having to repeat herself because I had the audio streaming engaged… that was not what I intended when I got the streaming device, but it takes experience to master the nuances of volume control with the stream versus nearby sound sources.
https://www.amazon.com/AfterShokz-Titanium-Open-ear-Bluetooth-Headphones/dp/B018XNGQOE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1465857678&sr=1-1&keywords=aftershokz+trekz&linkCode=sl1&tag=everydayhearing-20&linkId=e8fb5c8c176a44083edfd7e62b291595
Military personnel would most likely use some limited form of Morse like this demonstration shows, although command from a secure rear area could also relay voice orders through this system, in theory anyway. For that matter this would also be useful for civilian police communications as well as other emergency response personnel.
I can also see this being valuable for skiers and climbers – and people who rescue them in avalanche situations.
Now, how much will these cost? I do think this is pretty cool – CW shoes could actually be a lifesaver.