wrote in message
oups.com...
Doesn't matter about MODE...all good morsepersons know that
all amateur radio SURVIVES all possible emergencies, floats
on water while the hams walk on water...:-)


Of course not Len. Not everything survives; the portable and mobile stuff
will survive far better than the cellphone towers, police towers and even
amateur towers. The smaller towers (usually amateur), however, do have the
one advantage of a much smaller windload to carry.

The biggest difference might just lie in understanding how things work. A
friend of mine with a construction company told me what happened to another
construction firm owner. He had his guys working close to Lake Ontario at
the bottom of a hill. It ended up they would have to work very late to get
the job finished so he told his men to go ahead and use his cellphone to
call their wives and let them know they would be running late (this was some
years ago). Amateur radio would have run into the same problem except that
when you use amateur radio and can only connect to an Ontario repeater (in
Canada), you know it by the Morse id sent by the repeater and there is, of
course, no charge to connect to Canada.

The guy received a long distance phone bill the next month for nearly
$1,000.00!!! Cellphones simply connect to whatever they can. As far as the
telephone company was concerned, he was in Canada calling long-distance to
the U.S. It is up to the user to learn )

I've been involved in exactly two emergency situations. One was on ssb with
Hans K0HB and the other was on 500 KHz. Yes, the cw is old, but the
situation involving Hans can happen at any time. Amazingly, that huge coast
guard tower did *not* survive the typhoon. An hf amateur rig could load a
chain link fence and provide reliable communications.

So, do tell us your experiences with emergency communications and why you
know that amateur radio will always (or never) float.


With all due regards,
Jim AA2QA