On Oct 24, 2:37 pm, Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:27:41 EDT, Steve Bonine wrote:
Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of
modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed
in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant
carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.

(The following, while just opinion, is probably a major heresy.)

And that minor role is just fine. in the last ten years or so, there
has been a major attempt to mutate amateur radio into some sort of
official adjunct to emergency communications.

And let's just say it has had mixed success. We were looking at
background checks, including financial. While the financial part was
dropped, it surely set the tone. The emergency types came in fast and
hard, and they had no illusions that Amateur Radio was anything else
but emergency ops - and if grudging acceptance was afforded,
acknowledged that some Hams messed with unimportant stuff like
contesting, DX, ane electronic design. But they "knew" exactly what
Ham radio was for, and I always caught the undercurrent that they
thought most of us were a bit foolish. We still get a lot of that in
the discourse. I sat at meetings where some guy from some emergency
outfit comes in and tells us that since by nature, everything they do
is a matter of life and death, therefore it's always an emergency,
that they have unrestricted priority over our repeater system.
Basically that our repeater system was now theirs. He was wrong of
course, but that's my point. There are people out there who think that
way.

A local Ham wastrying for a radio check to see if his HT was making
it into one of our repeater satellite voting relays a few weeks ago.
One of the emergency Op types came back to him, and told him he was
coming in okay. Then the testing Ham moved, and his signal got a
little scratchy. The EO guy noted the dropoff in clarity, the testing
Ham said that it was just his HT he had in case of emergencies. Well,
that started the ball rolling. The Emergency guy starts to deliver a 5
minute lecture to the other Ham about how people shouldn't be using
HT's for much of anything. The testing Ham noted that he already had a
sufficiently powerful setup. But the Emergency Op wasn't done yet. He
went on another tirade noting that although he'd only been a Ham for a
very short time, his job was to show other Hams that they were
technically pretty backwards, and even the older Hams, because it was
his "experience" that older Hams just didnn't keep up. He ended with
some bizarre comment about how he thinks that his pointing out other
peoples shortcomings makes the world a better place. I thought I'd
have a little fun with him. I called in, and noted that it was good to
have a technically astute Ham on the air, then tried to involve him in
a discussion of the technical aspects of our repeater. Turned out the
limits of his techical abilities were to get a 50 watt radio, put up a
J-Pole, and mash the PTT button. But we can compre anecdotes all day.

Then emergency employees were getting technician licenses as an end-
around to get employees using the radio instead of volunteers.
Unfortunately, many of the employees thought that the amateur
frequencies were a sort of back channel for their use. Many were
disappointed to find that we had some rules and restrictions.

As far as I am concerned, the role of Hams in an emergency situation
is that if there is a Ham in the area where the disaster is, he or she
might use their station to relay messages into areas that might be
coordinating help. That's enough.

The idea that we provide someone to fill a seat at an EC is sort of
illogical anyhow. Why would the EC not have a trained professional in
that seat? Are all the others there unpaid volunteers? If I were
running one of these places, I'd have someone filling that seat that I
was a supervisor over.