One thing about HAM that I didn't see in perusing the comments is how many tools HAM operators have developed that integrate with the internet. There are a bunch of tools that let you start out on HF and hit a receiver or repeater that puts your traffic into the internet. In an environment with the right kind of repeaters you can hit the internet with a handheld (Puerto Rico likely has had it's repeaters decimated with all other towers). On HF you can go around the world to hit a link to the internet. I imagine the Red Cross and ARRL will be selecting an HF mode and band to take the shortest hop they can into more modern data systems.
The secret sauce in HF is that unlike the web, conditions matter to the operator. Things like sunspot activity, the position of the day/night line, if you are near water etc. can greatly affect your ability to successfully communicate.
DXpeditions, which are trips HAMs take with their gear to try to hit very distant stations are often based in island locations because HF tends to propagate significantly better with the antenna is near water as opposed to irregular ground.
I would just say to all of you who are into tech as I imagine HN readers to be, to give HAM a try. A lot of us are old and HAM sites regularly feature a list of "silent keys" because so many of the hardcore operators are dying off. Yes it's a bit antiquated but the younger generation will be able to marry all the amazing things you've invented to HAM to serve populations where the new tech either hasn't gone or gets knocked out as in the current crisis. For so many of you engineers it will be easy, like dusting off your first Circuits text. Yes, the regs are a drag to learn but I bet the average HN reader has done things that are way more challenging.
DXpeditions aren't based in island locations because HF propagates better over water, they're based in island locations because those are the locations that people haven't tended to log, as they're entities that don't have any people (or have people, but no ham operators) living on them and thus need to be "activated" for someone to count them as contacted.
I have both a question and a comment. I got my license (Technician and General on the same day) about a year ago. I have not once pressed transmit on a radio. I guess I don't know where to start. If you have any advice I would like to hear it.
Anyone with an EE background should be able to study up on https://hamstudy.org/ for a few hours a night for a week and pass without trouble.
I've always been fascinated, but it's not clear -- I believe there's some kind of license required (to be a good citizen), but I've never been sure how to go about getting that.
I've taken the foundation course and am starting my intermediate training this weekend. For me, amateur radio gets very interesting when you start listening out for satellite transmissions, including reaching the ISS.
It's such a fun subject and as you say, lots of aspects to it that would interest most people with a technical bent.
I'm a bit out of the loop on amateur radio these days, but if I remember correctly there was a mass exodus from volunteer radio operators from the American Red Cross to the Salvation Army over the background check issue. Volunteers that were bringing thousands of dollars of their own equipment to help saw it as very unnecessary and insulting. I'm a bit surprised to see they're still requiring the background checks...
edit: I'm also a bit surprised they're requiring a General Class license. That cuts out a huge number of potential volunteers. Are they really using the other frequencies that opens up enough that it's a requirement? Possibly that is a reasonable requirement, but I've helped with disaster recovery simulations, etc. and my Technican Class license was just fine.
ARRL now conducts background checks on ARES volunteers, so the issue is rather moot (in fact ARC and ARRL have an MOU stating that ARRL is responsible for background checks on their volunteers assisting ARC, which presumably applies to this call as well). There have just been too many incidents of people with e.g. sexual assault on their rap sheets turning up working in shelters where there are all manner of vulnerable people. Terrible optics if nothing else.
I suspect the general class requirement is just to cut down the applicants to a pool of more dedicated people. A very real problem with disaster volunteers, if I might be a little harsh especially from the amateur radio side, is "fair-weather responders" who will go through all the training and then not actually deploy. I've also personally found that people with higher class licenses are more likely to be into digital modes which is what they're mostly looking for, but that's getting less true as the equipment gets cheaper (to be honest I've never even seen a packet TNC in person).
I happen to be both an ARC disaster worker and amateur radio operator, but I speak for myself.
I imagine they might want a General license because you won't transmit beyond the island on a Technician license. Just a guess.
EDIT: actually read the fine article, HF voice being one of the requirements. I assume they also want more than the tiny bit of HF that Technician licensees get to use. " Sorry, 10m isn't open, so I can't transmit, and I'm not allowed to use 40m."
I once read that, during a declared emergency, you didn't need a license to operate the radio. I'm pretty sure it was on an official site, though it may have been on ARRL's site.
I am unable to find it, so I'm not sure if it is true any longer, or if it was ever true.
Assuming it is illegal, I wonder how mad the FCC would be - if one followed the rules and it was a real emergency?
This indicates how bad things are in Puerto Rico. None of this is necessary for Texas or Florida. But Puerto Rico has lost most of its infrastructure, and it's an island. They have to get the ports cleared of debris and functioning before stuff can be brought in. They need basic communications just to organize the early stages of recovery.
It's going to be slow. In the domestic US, within three days after a disaster, the Interstates usually have been cleared and trucks are bringing in supplies. Fairly quickly, the big-box retailers like Wal-Mart will be back up and restocked with necessities. Puerto Rico isn't going to be like that. They need what amounts to a military invasion. The military brings its own infrastructure and can cold-start on bare ground if they have to.
Another big problem - the money system is down. No credit card processing. Few ATMs working, and those are mostly out of cash by now. This is the downside of the cashless economy.
Update: Port of San Juan is open, 3000 containers of relief supplies have been unloaded by Crowley Marine alone, but there's too much debris on the roads to get semitrailers out of the port yet. Diesel fuel is in stock at tank farms but not getting distributed because roads are blocked.
Bulldozers and front end loaders will deal with that, but not instantly.
Being a Ham radio operator sounds kind of romantic on paper, but then you try it and realize that 90% of the other operators are curmudgeonly old Trump supporter types. Not really any fun chances for discourse when the person on the other side is pining for the return of Jim Crow laws
The great thing about ham radio is that if you don't like what you're hearing, you can just keep spinning the dial. In my experience (NYC metro area), I hear very little politics on the ham bands. There are also CW and digital modes which tend to draw people with more than five brain cells. I know there are a couple infamous HF frequencies where some reality-challenged folks tend to congregate, but there is much more to the hobby than that QRM.
Perhaps annoyingly you’re spot on. The “local net” near me in London is full of Brexit breathing Farage supporters whining about their XYL. The clubs aren’t any better. It took forever to get my license sorted because of this as well. I was new blood that didn’t want to drink beer, play with black box rigs or bitch about the wife.
So I stick to 40m CW. People just want a QSO or two and then go back to playing with their oscilloscopes and soldering irons. It’s too hard to rag chew on CW.
I've been a Technician for many years. I have worked numerous local responses: parades, athletic events, smaller scale weather disasters. It was really rewarding, especially when a family member was actually participating in the event, and you felt awesome knowing you're keeping watch and helping to direct and dispatch help where needed. I met a lot of folks who were much older and had amazing stories. One in particular drove his RV with his wife down to LA shortly after Katrina and, using a ham radio and bag phone, helped relay a lot of the communications flowing out of the area.
Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M. This unfortunately kept me from ever upgrading and being of use in large scale disasters like this. I can understand to an extent why the licensing is still required; otherwise you will have these spectra flooded with people probably using them for commercial purposes with no regulation to cut them off.
Basic ham communications are still absolutely critical in major disasters. A few others have touched on this, but bandwidth and throughout for communication is increased with the advent of digital interfaces to the radios to the point that you can essentially establish a data connection over the air. Godspeed to those who make the trek.
I went to get my U.S. Technician license (I've had a Swedish CEPT2 license for a long time but never been very active) after studying a bit online, and after passing that they asked if I wanted to try the General test too, since I was already there. I did, and I passed. (Did the same with Extra, but didn't pass that one.)
I would certainly not be comfortable with actually operating a HF rig without doing some prep work, but it seems to me that an active ham would have a reasonable chance of squeezing by the General test if they gave it a chance.
I would say technician to general isn't such a big leap. Extra felt like it was a big leap - targeted at electrical engineers. I did all 3 in one day - was trying to prove something to myself I guess. If you're technical and are interested in the subject it'll just take you a few hours to get general and HF so so much fun!!
> Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M.
I suspect you are underestimating your abilities and/or overestimating the difficulty of the test. The test is very structured and you can take advantage of that.
If you are good on the E&M stuff, you can blow a lot of the regulation questions. The tests consist of questions drawn from 10 categories. Here's the breakdown for Technician (T), General (G), and Extra (E):
T G G E
6 5 5 6 Commission's Rules
3 5 5 5 Operating Procedures
3 3 3 3 Radio Wave Propagation
2 5 5 5 Amateur Radio Practices
4 3 3 4 Electrical Principles
4 3 2 6 Circuit Components
4 3 3 8 Practical Circuits
4 2 3 4 Signals and Emissions
2 4 4 8 Antennas and Feed Lines
3 2 2 1 Electrical and RF Safety
(General is listed twice because I made that table just a couple months before the General test was due to be updated, and I now don't remember which column was for which revision. Extra was revised last year so the counts may be off for that too).
For Technician and General you have to get 26 out of 35 to pass. For Extra it is 37 out of 50.
So, for general, you get to blow 9 questions. Even if you miss everything in the rules questions, that's only 5 out of your budget of 9.
Furthermore, the questions in the pool for each category are further divided into several groups. You get exactly one question from each group. The 5 groups in the rules category on the General exam are:
• General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations
• Antenna structure limitations; good engineering and good amateur practice; beacon operation; prohibited transmissions; retransmitting radio signals
• Transmitter power regulations; data emission standards
• Volunteer Examiners and Volunteer Examiner Coordinators; temporary identification
• Control categories; repeater regulations; harmful interference; third party rules; ITU regions; automatically controlled digital station
You can almost certainly pick one or two of those groups and learn enough to answer the questions for those groups without much trouble. For example if you can just memorize the lower and upper frequencies of the major HF bands you'll known enough to answer the majority of questions in the "General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations" group.
If you haven't actually given General a try, I'd recommend going to hamexam.org and/or hamstudy.org, and doing some practice tests. You can also review the entire question pool. I bet you'll find that in a weekend or two of practice in your spare time you'll find you are passing with reasonable frequency, and with a little more time you'll get to the point where you pass enough to be confident in taking the actual test.
If you make an account at those sites they will keep track of stats, and at least one of them, I believe, will give you stats by category and group so you can figure out what areas to concentrate on.
I've seen steady reporting about Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria but it's been exactly that -- "about Puerto Rico" rather than "from Puerto Rico". Everybody seems to think it's bad, but it's really hard to say how bad. I think the major contributing factor to how the situation is being reported is that most of the cell towers (90%?) are out of action, and presumably land lines have also been seriously affected.
The ARC is an non-profit organization supported by a movement of volunteers from all walks of life. It gives resources to volunteers willing to help those in need. Thank god it exists.
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Gandhi said, "You have to be the change you wish to see in the world.". This could not be more true than as a volunteer. A mass response to a disaster of Puerto Rican proportions will be loosely coordinated. Supply chains will operate far from optimal. Volunteers who recognize an inefficiency will either do nothing about it or assume the leadership role required to reduce the inefficiency.
A volunteer experience like this is largely what you make of it. Unlike other entrepreneurial endeavors, the ARC gives you the resources to do something great.
A few people have said that going from Technician to General or General to Extra is difficult. It is not totally easy but I did find a tool when I was studying for my Extra exam (passed). I don't post to much here so if I am out of bounds please let me know and I'll remove the comment. I used a tool called HamTestOnline, https://www.hamradiolicenseexam.com, and it was a huge help. I paid for the service and I am in no way associated with them except as a customer. I worked in technical training for 20 years and this guys system is as good as online training systems we shelled out well into six figures for.
Like I said if posting a link here is bad form tell me and I'll take it down lickety split. Only want to share something I found very useful.
If you don't get your technicians license and have the opportunity to, I think you're crazy. It's something in tech that doesn't get enough love anymore. It's immensely valuable and actually a fun change of pace from SaaS.
It takes about 2-3 hours of studying and you can pretty much keep it for life. KK4PPF. QSL?
My business partner's father (ZL2AL) passed last year and I know he'd be chuffed to see all this HAM talk on HN :-)
He demoed the process to me last time I saw him (back in New Zealand). It was amazing to see the speed with which the he (and the other operators) could relay messages around the world.
He wrote a bit about his many adventures on his blog (http://www.zl2al.com/). I guess there may even be other HAM operators on here that knew him.
I've been a ham since I was a kid. There are so many different, interesting things to explore.
These days I find high speed telegraphy pretty relaxing and meditative, and I have a few ongoing RF projects that keep me going even when everything else seems trend-driven and silly.
And let's face it, radio wave propagation still feels magical. I could go on and on. Glad to see some PR even though it's for a sad reason.
I'd love to help but 3 weeks is a huge commitment and I can't leave my job that long. I think they may get a tremendous response from the retired folks in the ham community. Anyone have data on HF frequencies being used and if remote relay assistance is helpful? Or any other technical data on the effort?
Semi-offtopic, any city-dwelling HAM's out there? I've been thinking it would be cool hobby to get into, but I live in a condo. My father is a ham, and he has this long antenna up in the trees across his yard (must be close to 50m long), for HF I guess (he mostly does CW, AFAIK).
So it seems a bit pointless if all I can do is operate some VHF band equipment with an indoor antenna, or maybe sticking a short-ish antenna out of the window, with a range of maybe of few tens of km's?
What am I missing? If there are city-dwelling hams out there, what do they do?
First time I saw a HAM installation was when I bought a lab power supply on Craigslist. I went to pick it up and the guy lived on the third floor of a 5 story building with his family. One room was entirely filled with radio equipment. Some big cables went through his window and up the building. He told me his landlord was OK with him putting antennae on the roof of the building.
One thing you need to do is to check out if you have roof access and rights to put something on it. Depending on the situation you have with your flat, you could already have all that's needed to be able to put antennas on the roof! For instance, in my country (Poland), being an owner of a flat gives you rights to access the roof and put some small stuff on it.
If you happen to be renting, or otherwise can't use the roof, then you still probably can put a smaller antenna on your window or balcony.
The general principle is this: the higher you can put your antennas, the better.
They do almost nothing to help those affected by natural disasters. All they do is setup shelters and feed people in those shelters. They do not help rebuild.
They do an exceptionally poor job at this. Everyone knows about Katrina. In Houston this year, food sat on loading docks downtown while people starved in local shelters. The American Red Cross ran the main shelter so poorly that the city had to build an entirely new shelter and move everyone there...in the middle of a hurricane.
They don’t need your donations. They have a deal with the federal government where they get reimbursed for whatever they spend during a national disaster. The local American Red Cross chapters do this. The national organization does not provide the resources for this.
If you donate to the American Red Cross, you’re throwing your money away. The money won’t go to the local chapters. It won’t go to rebuild. It won’t go to the victims of the natural disaster. Do not donate to the American Red Cross.
Maybe a better statement would be, "If you donate to the Red Cross then know what your donation is going to support..." Then maybe you can enumerate the complaints and, if wanted, provide citations.
As it is, I think some folks may take offense with you telling them how to spend their money. I, for one, read it as you trying to tell me what I can or cannot do.
Edited to add: I see your dead reply. The difference between my suggestions and your post is that you demand, as opposed to ask. You may notice that I'm making a point of not saying you should do something, but that pointing out that you can choose to do something.
It's received much more gracefully and people are much more open to the ideas when they are asked, instead of when they are instructed. But, it's entirely up to you how you take it and what you decide to do with it.
I've spent years learning to say could instead of should. It has helped me immensely.
You are so wrong about the American Red Cross. The ARC is an non-profit organization supported by a movement of volunteers from all walks of life. It gives resources to volunteers willing to help those in need. Thank god it exists.
I'm not going to convince you by arguing on HN but would gladly talk, or at least chat online, about it with you.
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S.. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
I can confidently tell you and anyone reading this that great good came of what was donated, at least to the population served within the jurisdiction I was stationed.
[+] [-] slr555|8 years ago|reply
The secret sauce in HF is that unlike the web, conditions matter to the operator. Things like sunspot activity, the position of the day/night line, if you are near water etc. can greatly affect your ability to successfully communicate.
DXpeditions, which are trips HAMs take with their gear to try to hit very distant stations are often based in island locations because HF tends to propagate significantly better with the antenna is near water as opposed to irregular ground.
I would just say to all of you who are into tech as I imagine HN readers to be, to give HAM a try. A lot of us are old and HAM sites regularly feature a list of "silent keys" because so many of the hardcore operators are dying off. Yes it's a bit antiquated but the younger generation will be able to marry all the amazing things you've invented to HAM to serve populations where the new tech either hasn't gone or gets knocked out as in the current crisis. For so many of you engineers it will be easy, like dusting off your first Circuits text. Yes, the regs are a drag to learn but I bet the average HN reader has done things that are way more challenging.
Have fun!
73
[+] [-] atomicthumbs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cerium|8 years ago|reply
Anyone with an EE background should be able to study up on https://hamstudy.org/ for a few hours a night for a week and pass without trouble.
[+] [-] SomeStupidPoint|8 years ago|reply
I've always been fascinated, but it's not clear -- I believe there's some kind of license required (to be a good citizen), but I've never been sure how to go about getting that.
[+] [-] alex_hitchins|8 years ago|reply
It's such a fun subject and as you say, lots of aspects to it that would interest most people with a technical bent.
[+] [-] brians|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|8 years ago|reply
73
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|8 years ago|reply
edit: I'm also a bit surprised they're requiring a General Class license. That cuts out a huge number of potential volunteers. Are they really using the other frequencies that opens up enough that it's a requirement? Possibly that is a reasonable requirement, but I've helped with disaster recovery simulations, etc. and my Technican Class license was just fine.
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|8 years ago|reply
I suspect the general class requirement is just to cut down the applicants to a pool of more dedicated people. A very real problem with disaster volunteers, if I might be a little harsh especially from the amateur radio side, is "fair-weather responders" who will go through all the training and then not actually deploy. I've also personally found that people with higher class licenses are more likely to be into digital modes which is what they're mostly looking for, but that's getting less true as the equipment gets cheaper (to be honest I've never even seen a packet TNC in person).
I happen to be both an ARC disaster worker and amateur radio operator, but I speak for myself.
[+] [-] mikestew|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: actually read the fine article, HF voice being one of the requirements. I assume they also want more than the tiny bit of HF that Technician licensees get to use. " Sorry, 10m isn't open, so I can't transmit, and I'm not allowed to use 40m."
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
I am unable to find it, so I'm not sure if it is true any longer, or if it was ever true.
Assuming it is illegal, I wonder how mad the FCC would be - if one followed the rules and it was a real emergency?
[+] [-] kw71|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flachsechs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
It's going to be slow. In the domestic US, within three days after a disaster, the Interstates usually have been cleared and trucks are bringing in supplies. Fairly quickly, the big-box retailers like Wal-Mart will be back up and restocked with necessities. Puerto Rico isn't going to be like that. They need what amounts to a military invasion. The military brings its own infrastructure and can cold-start on bare ground if they have to.
Another big problem - the money system is down. No credit card processing. Few ATMs working, and those are mostly out of cash by now. This is the downside of the cashless economy.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Bulldozers and front end loaders will deal with that, but not instantly.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/puerto-rico-port-reopens-but-re...
[+] [-] brian-armstrong|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uabstraction|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjsuk|8 years ago|reply
So I stick to 40m CW. People just want a QSO or two and then go back to playing with their oscilloscopes and soldering irons. It’s too hard to rag chew on CW.
[+] [-] FTA|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M. This unfortunately kept me from ever upgrading and being of use in large scale disasters like this. I can understand to an extent why the licensing is still required; otherwise you will have these spectra flooded with people probably using them for commercial purposes with no regulation to cut them off.
Basic ham communications are still absolutely critical in major disasters. A few others have touched on this, but bandwidth and throughout for communication is increased with the advent of digital interfaces to the radios to the point that you can essentially establish a data connection over the air. Godspeed to those who make the trek.
[+] [-] lutorm|8 years ago|reply
I would certainly not be comfortable with actually operating a HF rig without doing some prep work, but it seems to me that an active ham would have a reasonable chance of squeezing by the General test if they gave it a chance.
[+] [-] mmaunder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
I suspect you are underestimating your abilities and/or overestimating the difficulty of the test. The test is very structured and you can take advantage of that.
If you are good on the E&M stuff, you can blow a lot of the regulation questions. The tests consist of questions drawn from 10 categories. Here's the breakdown for Technician (T), General (G), and Extra (E):
(General is listed twice because I made that table just a couple months before the General test was due to be updated, and I now don't remember which column was for which revision. Extra was revised last year so the counts may be off for that too).For Technician and General you have to get 26 out of 35 to pass. For Extra it is 37 out of 50.
So, for general, you get to blow 9 questions. Even if you miss everything in the rules questions, that's only 5 out of your budget of 9.
Furthermore, the questions in the pool for each category are further divided into several groups. You get exactly one question from each group. The 5 groups in the rules category on the General exam are:
• General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations
• Antenna structure limitations; good engineering and good amateur practice; beacon operation; prohibited transmissions; retransmitting radio signals
• Transmitter power regulations; data emission standards
• Volunteer Examiners and Volunteer Examiner Coordinators; temporary identification
• Control categories; repeater regulations; harmful interference; third party rules; ITU regions; automatically controlled digital station
You can almost certainly pick one or two of those groups and learn enough to answer the questions for those groups without much trouble. For example if you can just memorize the lower and upper frequencies of the major HF bands you'll known enough to answer the majority of questions in the "General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations" group.
If you haven't actually given General a try, I'd recommend going to hamexam.org and/or hamstudy.org, and doing some practice tests. You can also review the entire question pool. I bet you'll find that in a weekend or two of practice in your spare time you'll find you are passing with reasonable frequency, and with a little more time you'll get to the point where you pass enough to be confident in taking the actual test.
If you make an account at those sites they will keep track of stats, and at least one of them, I believe, will give you stats by category and group so you can figure out what areas to concentrate on.
[+] [-] dlgeek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curtis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|8 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/NOAASatellites/status/912342036975669254...
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
Hard to say how much of the island they are covering, they are there.
[+] [-] Dowwie|8 years ago|reply
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Gandhi said, "You have to be the change you wish to see in the world.". This could not be more true than as a volunteer. A mass response to a disaster of Puerto Rican proportions will be loosely coordinated. Supply chains will operate far from optimal. Volunteers who recognize an inefficiency will either do nothing about it or assume the leadership role required to reduce the inefficiency. A volunteer experience like this is largely what you make of it. Unlike other entrepreneurial endeavors, the ARC gives you the resources to do something great.
[+] [-] slr555|8 years ago|reply
Like I said if posting a link here is bad form tell me and I'll take it down lickety split. Only want to share something I found very useful.
[+] [-] Havoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tertius|8 years ago|reply
Haiti was not well handled by the big boys...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/americas/united-nat...
[+] [-] ejcx|8 years ago|reply
It takes about 2-3 hours of studying and you can pretty much keep it for life. KK4PPF. QSL?
[+] [-] aidos|8 years ago|reply
He demoed the process to me last time I saw him (back in New Zealand). It was amazing to see the speed with which the he (and the other operators) could relay messages around the world.
He wrote a bit about his many adventures on his blog (http://www.zl2al.com/). I guess there may even be other HAM operators on here that knew him.
[+] [-] grandalf|8 years ago|reply
These days I find high speed telegraphy pretty relaxing and meditative, and I have a few ongoing RF projects that keep me going even when everything else seems trend-driven and silly.
And let's face it, radio wave propagation still feels magical. I could go on and on. Glad to see some PR even though it's for a sad reason.
[+] [-] mmaunder|8 years ago|reply
WT1J
[+] [-] jabl|8 years ago|reply
So it seems a bit pointless if all I can do is operate some VHF band equipment with an indoor antenna, or maybe sticking a short-ish antenna out of the window, with a range of maybe of few tens of km's?
What am I missing? If there are city-dwelling hams out there, what do they do?
[+] [-] tinco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
One thing you need to do is to check out if you have roof access and rights to put something on it. Depending on the situation you have with your flat, you could already have all that's needed to be able to put antennas on the roof! For instance, in my country (Poland), being an owner of a flat gives you rights to access the roof and put some small stuff on it.
If you happen to be renting, or otherwise can't use the roof, then you still probably can put a smaller antenna on your window or balcony.
The general principle is this: the higher you can put your antennas, the better.
[+] [-] westurner|8 years ago|reply
http://zello.com/
> Push the button for instant, radio-style talk on any Wi-Fi or data plan.
> Access public and private channels.
> Choose button for push-to-talk.
> [...] available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows PC and Windows Phone 8
...
> Connects to existing LMR radio systems
> All Radio Technologies
> Interconnect conventional and trunked analog FM, ETSI DMR, ETSI TETRA, MotoTRBO, APCO P25 FDMA, and NXDN.
> https://zellowork.com/lmr
They probably need some batteries, turbines, and solar cell chargers to get WiFi online?
[+] [-] kaiwen1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimhefferon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t3h2mas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] txmx2000|8 years ago|reply
They do almost nothing to help those affected by natural disasters. All they do is setup shelters and feed people in those shelters. They do not help rebuild.
They do an exceptionally poor job at this. Everyone knows about Katrina. In Houston this year, food sat on loading docks downtown while people starved in local shelters. The American Red Cross ran the main shelter so poorly that the city had to build an entirely new shelter and move everyone there...in the middle of a hurricane.
They don’t need your donations. They have a deal with the federal government where they get reimbursed for whatever they spend during a national disaster. The local American Red Cross chapters do this. The national organization does not provide the resources for this.
If you donate to the American Red Cross, you’re throwing your money away. The money won’t go to the local chapters. It won’t go to rebuild. It won’t go to the victims of the natural disaster. Do not donate to the American Red Cross.
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
As it is, I think some folks may take offense with you telling them how to spend their money. I, for one, read it as you trying to tell me what I can or cannot do.
Edited to add: I see your dead reply. The difference between my suggestions and your post is that you demand, as opposed to ask. You may notice that I'm making a point of not saying you should do something, but that pointing out that you can choose to do something.
It's received much more gracefully and people are much more open to the ideas when they are asked, instead of when they are instructed. But, it's entirely up to you how you take it and what you decide to do with it.
I've spent years learning to say could instead of should. It has helped me immensely.
[+] [-] Dowwie|8 years ago|reply
You are so wrong about the American Red Cross. The ARC is an non-profit organization supported by a movement of volunteers from all walks of life. It gives resources to volunteers willing to help those in need. Thank god it exists.
I'm not going to convince you by arguing on HN but would gladly talk, or at least chat online, about it with you.
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S.. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
I can confidently tell you and anyone reading this that great good came of what was donated, at least to the population served within the jurisdiction I was stationed.
[+] [-] syshum|8 years ago|reply
I cringe when ever I see People posting links to donate to the Red Cross.
[+] [-] zeep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5752|8 years ago|reply