On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:21:40 EDT, Michael Coslo wrote:

What I have been seeing recently is that people who are already working
in emergency operations have been getting Technician licenses, and
intend to commandeer repeaters as needed during emergencies.

Our district-wide ARES/RACES groups have several repeaters licensed to
members so no "commandeering" is necessary. In addition, we routinely
test simplex paths between our served agencies in case repeaters go
down for any reason.

Even in our area, whole groups of folk have been getting licensed in
this reverse manner. We have ambulance drivers, paramedics, comm center
staff. I suspect in the near far term, we won't be getting in the door period,
unless we become some kind of semi professional unpaid volunteer.

We've kicked this around too. All of our active members have been
"vetted" by the state police for RACES ID cards and most of us carry
Sheriff's Office entry passes (picture ID, not law enforcement officer
credentials) that are necessary to get into facilities where the SO
provides security.

We've also kicked around the situation where in our hospital we have
to go through the Emergency Room entry area to reach the EOC, and the
ER docs and nurses are empowered that if during an emergency/lockdown
they see anyone in the ER whom they do not recognize they are to have
security detain them for interrogation. For that reason those of us
who serve hospitals also have hospital picture IDs issued by the
security department.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

I think a new class of Ham is inadvertently coming about - that
of the quasi-professional ham - one who is employed in a field that
occasionally calls on them to use their amateur radio license in pursuit
of their work. Note that the FCC has upheld this as legal IIRC.

Most, if not all of our served agencies have ruled that in a "real"
emergency, the employee does his or her regular job, not serve as part
of the Amateur Radio teams. We have MOUs with the served agencies
that we will provide the necessary comms if their regular comms become
unavailable.

The only exception is with the HEARTNET role as the secondary backup
for the inter-hospital ER status and reporting system carried on 800
MHz with a primary backup of 155 MHz, and if both of those
"commercial" services go down, the 146 MHz simplex net is used by ER
personnel who are licensed hams. We have no problem with that because
the traffic that would be handled is very medical-specific and
decisions have to be made "on the fly" over the radio, and it's better
to have the RNs do it than to have to pass messages through
non-medical personnel.

The major downside of all this is that as Emergency ops move toward this
mode, the question arises of why they would be using amateur radio to
perform the function at all - they might as well have their own system
on their own frequencies, that they alone use.

And they do. We are the "whenever all fails, we are still there." And
the "modern" 800 MHz systems are virtually useless when things get hot
because of either system hardware failure or priority public safety
traffic making the system unavailable to "lower on the ladder" users.

A very small payback for the privilege of using the spectrum that we
get.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

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

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