View Single Post
  #5   Report Post  
Old March 5th 05, 06:24 AM
Senor Sombra
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Running Dawg not many cars are equipped with CB anymore.
And the range of CB can't be compared to Ham repeaters.

Let me give you a little insight to Amateur Radio Emergency Services
In our county, we have 35 repeaters on 2 meters alone.
Between 440 MHz and 220 MHz there are about 50 more repeaters
Most of these are on mountain tops.

There are probably 5,000 Hams in the county, many familiar with emergency
nets and proper procedures. And many have HF capability on 10 bands. This
gives us communications to all over the world. Don't tell me about the
internet - it will fall apart when a national disaster hits. Ask the guys in
Florida about that one. Cell phones were kaput also.

In our club alone we have 4 repeaters on a 5600 foot mountain.
They cover 2000 square miles of the county very reliably even to 1 Watt
HT's.

During the early part of the Calif fires, the repeaters operated on
commercial power. The fire swept up the Mountain and toasted the power
lines. The repeaters went on battery power for several hours, then started
to die. A crew went up the mountain, put gas generators in place and a
mountain resident refueled them periodically as required. All of our
repeaters were on the air for the full period of the fires 24 hours a day
for about 4 days.

On one repeater alone -- 300 Hams checked in, over 1000 messages were
passed.

This is a lot of communication power and has been invaluable during
earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. RACES assists civil entities with
supplemental communications and ARES works with the Red Cross. They were
extensively used during the Calif fires.

Now this is just one county. Extrapolate that to all 50 states with 675,000
licensed Amateur Radio Operators.

If you want to know what Hams did during the hurricanes or 9/11,
use Google.

Walter Cronkite stated "Amateur Radio is probably the only fail-safe
communications system in the world"

I agree as I charge my deep cycle batteries.

--
Lamont Cranston



"running dogg" wrote in message
...
Any number of other radio services could have "told them the right
escape route". Back when I was a little kid, in the 1970s, every car
carried an emergency CB radio. SNIP