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Phil Kane · June 8th 08, 03:04 AM posted to rec.radio.amateur.moderated

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 23:04:55 EDT, (Mark Kramer)
wrote:

And then the stuff hits the fan and the groups that were going to support
the local hospital and power company and red cross and cop shop and road
department find themselves all trying to use the one or two repeaters
you'd like them to be limited to, while the DStar systems sit silent
because nobody could afford the radios to use them.

One of the several radio clubs which I am a member of maintains a
rather extensive UHF repeater system which usually sits silent except
for about a half-dozen of us during commute hours or when we are doing
some exercise like Field Day. If this was to "go away" (fat chance of
that, knowing the reality of the situation and the folks involved) the
local medical center where I am the Disaster Communications Team
co-manager would be without required ham radio backup. We went to
that arrangement when we found out in a real disaster last December
that the local ARES groups could not accommodate the type of traffic
that we needed because of their own overloads.

Consider the trap that the FCC's first-generation automated Spectrum
Management System fell into some 30+ years ago. It sat on Fire Radio
Service frequencies and reported no activity. Of course not - if
there are no fires there is no radio traffic, and the vast majority of
fire radio activity is with 5-watt on-scene HTs. Similarly, it
reported almost no Railroad Radio Service traffic in New York City -
where the monitoring was done during daytime and the bulk of freight
movements are at night. And to cap it off, it reported continuous
occupancy of a lot of channels in Chicago 24/7, until one of the old
hands at the Field Office listened and found out that it was a
defective electrical device throwing RFI into the air.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net