On Feb 29, 9:14�pm, Klystron wrote:
wrote:
Klystron wrote:

But what if they are transporting several people - say, a
young family that was in a serious auto accident?
Or suppose they were
transporting desperately-needed medicines, blood, etc.,
during an
epidemic?

If you want to COMMANDEER something, re-read my previous
post. It
doesn't matter if there are 99 people in the ambulance, they are all
having heart attacks and the ambulance is on fire.

However, if
the ambulance breaks down, they can't commandeer your
car. For a
government agency to seize private property
(a category that includes
repeaters, transceivers, etc.) for their own use, they
must have a
declaration of emergency, declaration of martial law,
or, in individual
cases, a court order.

I'm not sure what the ultimate legality is, in a case like that or the
others I described. I suspect that government folks would not
seize
private property for emergency use unless they were
desperate, because
of the possible liability.

� �Look for definitions of terms like "declaration of emer
gency,"
"martial law" or "disaster area." This is heavily traveled territory -
we don't need to reinvent the wheel, here in this newsgroup.

The main point is that there has to be a clear and defined life-and-
death emergency.

But there's also the point of who can declare an emergency? Can the
EMTs say that the ambulance breakdown is an emergency?

OTOH, would you want to have it on your conscience
that a person or a
family died because you wouldn't let the ambulance
folks use your car
when it was desperately needed?

� �See bottom paragraph.

OK

I don't think the FD person wanted the repeaters.
He said they could
use the frequencies, not the repeaters. And the frequencies
are public
property, after all. An amateur or club might own the
repeater but
they don't own the frequencies.

This makes it a completely different situation from the commandeering
of private property.

Further complicating the situation is the fact that
many if not most
amateur radio repeaters aren't installed on the
owner's property.

� �If you put your shoes in a locker at the gym, are they
still YOUR
shoes?

Of course - but if someone needed them in a life-and-death
emergency....

There's also the question of contract provisions as part of the rental
agreement. Shoes in a locker are different from permanently installed
radio equipment requiring power and radiating RF.

Like the situation of the broken-down ambulance, would any
radio
amateur want it on his/her conscience that a building
burned down, and/
or people died, because s/he wouldn't let the
emergency service people
use an amateur radio repeater in an emergency
when it was desperately
needed?

� �There is a bit of difference between a civic minded ama
teur
radio
club voluntarily making its facilities available and a government
employee with an inflated sense of entitlement believing that
he can
seize whatever he wants to seize whenever he want to seize it
because
fires and sick people in ambulances are really, really important.

Of course - but what if the emergency really does meet K2ASP's double-
prong test? That is, it's a real life-and-death emergency, and there
are no other facilities available that can do the job?

As KB9X points out, the quoted person who said "everything we do is
life-and-death" was way out of line, and not representative at all.
But what about real-life situations that meet the two-prong test?
Granted they are very rare, and most of us will never encounter them,
but the time to think about them is before they happen.

73 de Jim, N2EY