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March 17th 04, 08:49 PM
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Alun wrote in message . ..
(Brian Kelly) wrote in om: Oh wow! I would think that something like a scientific expedition would want some reliable communication that you can use anywhere and count on at all times, like cell phones. Right witless willie? Uhhh . . don't particularly mean to bust yer stones here JJ but how many dialup cells do you suppose Verizon and/or AT&T or any other telco has up and running in the headwaters region of the Amazon? w3rv I went with a group of scouts to a ski resort (didn't ski, but my son did). They had this marvellous plan to communicate with cell phones instead of moving around the resort together as a group. Guess what? No coverage. Nobody knew where anyone else was for 80-90% of the time. Good lesson for 'em on the frailties of the technologies they think they'd die without. How did we ever survive the throes of puberty without a cell phone glued to an ear? I was the only ham there, so I'm not suggesting that ham radio would have been a solution. However, if there had been some sort of HTs (FRS or the like) that would have worked where cell phones failed altogether. One family did bring a pair of FRS radios and were able to stay in touch. Sure. I live upstairs, another Extra lives downstairs. We use a pair of FRS HTs all the time to communicate with each other. "Mailman just dropped off some for you Bub". They're perefect for comms during "antenna parties", etc. Bugles worked when I was a Scout. Especially chow call. Heh. And yes, there are other solutions to coordinating groups of people that don't rely on radio atall, but once you actually rely on radios they better work. Amen. My point? Even in the absence of a disaster cell phones are not the answer. In an actual disaster situation relying on cellular is foolish. Yes, it may work. Or not ... The last emergency comms gear I'd depend on out in the bush is any kind cell phone or ham gear, simple common sense indicates that both have to completely unreliable when it comes to summoning first responders. And it gets worse than idiotic in the case of this Bonnie nitwit who thinks that some qrp op on a mountain in South America is going to be able to reliably call a ham in North America to launch an S&R operation in SA. Real scientific expeditions, which Bonnie's cave-crawling trips are not, use real emergency comms gear. ELT type equipment on 406.025 Mhz to satellites which are monitored by goverments globally, air band HTs on 121.500 Mhz, etc. w3rv |
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