Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Emergency Communications and amateurs ...

I don't get it -- why do people on eham and qrz keep battling about whether emergency communcations is good or bad?  Well, apart from "because they can" ...

It seems to me that amateur radio operators have one real strong benefit to offer: If something breaks, amateurs can generally fix it.  If the antennas all get blown off the roof of the police department, who there knows how to repair them?  Who there could improvise one?  Who there could even guess what a quarter wave-length is for 480 mhz?

Exactly.  It's only the people who do this as a hobby and have been through the process of setting up a station who can solve these kind of problems.  And in a disaster, it's going to be those people who get communications equipment working again on short notice.

Do amateurs only have value in operating a communications network? Perhaps in being able to help others out getting their networks working again is a valuable skill?  Or maybe both...

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