6 ms·

You raise some good points. However, amateur radio has a larger install base than satphones, and isn't dependent on any external equipment that can't be carried

by niftich 10y ago

You raise some good points. However, amateur radio has a larger install base than satphones, and isn't dependent on any external equipment that can't be carried on one's person/vehicle (like a satellite).

walrus01 10y ago
Might want to look into how many local amateur radio clubs' mountaintop VHF / UHF radio repeaters are dependent on the electrical grid continuing to function... They're not as autonomous as they seem at first glance. Shortwave and other bands for longer distance communications are not as dependent upon regional repeaters, sure, but take a look at how many VHF/UHF repeater sites are wired into the same grid as the other telecom things on their hills. Not very many of them have been built as fully off-grid photovoltaic/wind power.
- jauer 10y ago
  So much this and worse. In my state the ARES/RACES people got together and made a "statewide emergency network" of repeaters using local IP for interconnect. Our rural WISP arm provides the IP for several of their repeaters (incidentally we also provide IP to local gov). Our gear: 2-3 days of battery and industrial/carrier networking equipment. Their gear: APC UPS with (optimistically) 45 minutes of runtime powering a old Gateway P2 running WinXP. Maybe 20 years ago they would have been useful, but post 9/11 FEMA/DHS grants have been very good to local emergency comms. My county now has their own towers with a ton of batteries, generator, and 11Ghz/18Ghz interconnect. I'm just not seeing a scenario where their repeaters stay online, traditional comms fail, and we still have enough societal function where you can call for (or provide) help.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    If there is a megascale disaster here (Seattle/Vancouver area), I know who I'm going to for my emergency electricity needs to power communciations gear, and it's certainly not the local amateur radio greybeards... It's the ISP network engineering people who have 'enable' on the core routers for many of the larger regional ASNs and have been collecting things like 40kW diesel generators for their houses, and datacenters with massive fuel storage on site.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      It seems like you've got a chip on your shoulder against hams(greybeards, seriously?). Not all of us live in a major metro area, where I'm at it's ~20mi to a major city so VHF/UHF fits the needs we have. Question, did you participate in Cascadia Rising? Just about all of our local ham club did. We've had some pretty serious things happen down south here over the last few years and the local club has always stepped up. They also do a fantastic job of helping with community communication for events in remote areas that don't have cell coverage. I totally get geeking out over the latest and greatest tech, but that doesn't mean you need to dismiss a whole group of people who would be happy to help in any situation.
      - jauer 10y ago
        (not OP, but since I agree with most of their comments in this thread...) So, I knew a older ham once. Dude owned a commercial tower & paging company. Built his own power supplies because COTS switching power supplies were "too noisy". Gave me one to run our gear at one of his towers before we switched to -48 rectifiers. Awesome guy. Really knew his stuff on anything radio (RF, tower, grounding, etc) Got offed in a stupid employee payment dispute :( Unfortunately most of the hams I know aren't like that. There's a type: generally older men with decent-sized egos who have been around forever and see ham insider tech (winlink, "high speed" data measured in bps) as the end all-be all of comms. They stress how they are first responders doing emergency communications. Throw lights on their cars, etc. Sometimes they've been around long enough to get a seat at the table and then everyone has to work around them. Generally ARES/RACES-affiliated, not SKYWARN. I haven't had any bad encounters with SKYWARN folks... Of course, I'm sure there are a ton of decent hams around that I haven't encountered. Likely because they aren't being obnoxious :) I mean, ham should be entering a renaissance and full of awesomeness doing hobbyist SDR and IoT things but there's so many people stuck firmly in the past...
        walrus01 10y ago
        I give the average ham emergency-response person 10 out of 10 points for motivation and enthusiasm, unfortunately, in the modern era IP and packet based emergency communications systems are increasingly much more important than half duplex analog radio channels. They are also seriously hampered by finances - ham projects are a labor of love for the mostly age 45+ males who are the vast majority of the community. I didn't mean to be dismissive or insulting by calling them greybeards, but if you google "ham radio shack" and look at the pictures of people about 9 out of 10 of the people who are seriously into the hobby are older white men who fit a particular demographic niche. It's a much less diverse community than the Internet engineering/IP community as a whole. Not that a NANOG or APNIC meeting has a great deal of female gender representation or ethnic minorities, but the demographic skews a great deal younger. Regarding the finances - projects funded out of peoples' pockets and small funding sources won't be able to build the sort of serious five to six nines reliability networks with significant N+1 redundancy that will survive a major disaster. The amount of money that has been thrown around via the US DHS to local agencies in the past 14 years is immense. Similarly, large ISPs and major telecoms and their infrastructure providers (major IX points, datacenters, colos) have put a metric shitload of money into being able to survive a major disaster. Look at the engineering of the NAP of the Americas in Miami, for instance. In a major disaster I know of at least a dozen ISPs that might lose 75% of their network, towards the edges, as sites run out of battery and generator and fall of the network, but the remaining 25% of the network including their core will remain online for multi-week periods with fun things like 50,000 liter diesel tanks and N+1 2 megawatt generators. The telecom industry has a long tradition of seriously overbuilding stuff to survive disasters. In a serious disaster, small transportable first responder command posts and similar need access to services that can only be delivered over reasonably-close-to-broadband IP services: GIS mapping, sending/receiving photos and schematics, logistics manifests, VoIP with 0.0% packet loss, medical data and a myriad of other things that you can't do by half duplex voice alone.
- webtechgal 10y ago
  VHF LoS (Line of Sight) would work over a distance of about 65 miles (curvature of the earth) and HF/SW pretty much world-wide, I suppose?
  - walrus01 10y ago
    In the real world, dealing with handheld and vehicle mounted VHF/UHF transmitters in the 2.5, 5 and 10W transmit power range, having local repeaters in high places like mountaintops or on top of 200m tall office buildings is extremely necessary for that repeater to cover even 1/20th of the land area of a western US state (WA, OR size).
    - webtechgal 10y ago
      I was referring to stand-alone stations - as in those with a simple GP antenna (VHF) and a half-wave dipole (HF), where there are no repeaters or other external devices involved.
vvanders 10y ago
Yup, also satellites are a limited resource where as ham is completely decentralized. In 5 minutes I can setup my D710 as a cross-band repeater to a VHF <-> UHF allowing anyone who has a $35 Baofeng within ~7mi of me to cover over ~100mi area. Sure sat phones are great but they aren't nearly as good for local communication.

by niftich 10y ago

walrus01 10y ago

Might want to look into how many local amateur radio clubs' mountaintop VHF / UHF radio repeaters are dependent on the electrical grid continuing to function... They're not as autonomous as they seem at first glance. Shortwave and other bands for longer distance communications are not as dependent upon regional repeaters, sure, but take a look at how many VHF/UHF repeater sites are wired into the same grid as the other telecom things on their hills. Not very many of them have been built as fully off-grid photovoltaic/wind power.

jauer 10y ago
So much this and worse. In my state the ARES/RACES people got together and made a "statewide emergency network" of repeaters using local IP for interconnect. Our rural WISP arm provides the IP for several of their repeaters (incidentally we also provide IP to local gov). Our gear: 2-3 days of battery and industrial/carrier networking equipment. Their gear: APC UPS with (optimistically) 45 minutes of runtime powering a old Gateway P2 running WinXP. Maybe 20 years ago they would have been useful, but post 9/11 FEMA/DHS grants have been very good to local emergency comms. My county now has their own towers with a ton of batteries, generator, and 11Ghz/18Ghz interconnect. I'm just not seeing a scenario where their repeaters stay online, traditional comms fail, and we still have enough societal function where you can call for (or provide) help.
- walrus01 10y ago
  If there is a megascale disaster here (Seattle/Vancouver area), I know who I'm going to for my emergency electricity needs to power communciations gear, and it's certainly not the local amateur radio greybeards... It's the ISP network engineering people who have 'enable' on the core routers for many of the larger regional ASNs and have been collecting things like 40kW diesel generators for their houses, and datacenters with massive fuel storage on site.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    It seems like you've got a chip on your shoulder against hams(greybeards, seriously?). Not all of us live in a major metro area, where I'm at it's ~20mi to a major city so VHF/UHF fits the needs we have. Question, did you participate in Cascadia Rising? Just about all of our local ham club did. We've had some pretty serious things happen down south here over the last few years and the local club has always stepped up. They also do a fantastic job of helping with community communication for events in remote areas that don't have cell coverage. I totally get geeking out over the latest and greatest tech, but that doesn't mean you need to dismiss a whole group of people who would be happy to help in any situation.
    - jauer 10y ago
      (not OP, but since I agree with most of their comments in this thread...) So, I knew a older ham once. Dude owned a commercial tower & paging company. Built his own power supplies because COTS switching power supplies were "too noisy". Gave me one to run our gear at one of his towers before we switched to -48 rectifiers. Awesome guy. Really knew his stuff on anything radio (RF, tower, grounding, etc) Got offed in a stupid employee payment dispute :( Unfortunately most of the hams I know aren't like that. There's a type: generally older men with decent-sized egos who have been around forever and see ham insider tech (winlink, "high speed" data measured in bps) as the end all-be all of comms. They stress how they are first responders doing emergency communications. Throw lights on their cars, etc. Sometimes they've been around long enough to get a seat at the table and then everyone has to work around them. Generally ARES/RACES-affiliated, not SKYWARN. I haven't had any bad encounters with SKYWARN folks... Of course, I'm sure there are a ton of decent hams around that I haven't encountered. Likely because they aren't being obnoxious :) I mean, ham should be entering a renaissance and full of awesomeness doing hobbyist SDR and IoT things but there's so many people stuck firmly in the past...
      - walrus01 10y ago
        I give the average ham emergency-response person 10 out of 10 points for motivation and enthusiasm, unfortunately, in the modern era IP and packet based emergency communications systems are increasingly much more important than half duplex analog radio channels. They are also seriously hampered by finances - ham projects are a labor of love for the mostly age 45+ males who are the vast majority of the community. I didn't mean to be dismissive or insulting by calling them greybeards, but if you google "ham radio shack" and look at the pictures of people about 9 out of 10 of the people who are seriously into the hobby are older white men who fit a particular demographic niche. It's a much less diverse community than the Internet engineering/IP community as a whole. Not that a NANOG or APNIC meeting has a great deal of female gender representation or ethnic minorities, but the demographic skews a great deal younger. Regarding the finances - projects funded out of peoples' pockets and small funding sources won't be able to build the sort of serious five to six nines reliability networks with significant N+1 redundancy that will survive a major disaster. The amount of money that has been thrown around via the US DHS to local agencies in the past 14 years is immense. Similarly, large ISPs and major telecoms and their infrastructure providers (major IX points, datacenters, colos) have put a metric shitload of money into being able to survive a major disaster. Look at the engineering of the NAP of the Americas in Miami, for instance. In a major disaster I know of at least a dozen ISPs that might lose 75% of their network, towards the edges, as sites run out of battery and generator and fall of the network, but the remaining 25% of the network including their core will remain online for multi-week periods with fun things like 50,000 liter diesel tanks and N+1 2 megawatt generators. The telecom industry has a long tradition of seriously overbuilding stuff to survive disasters. In a serious disaster, small transportable first responder command posts and similar need access to services that can only be delivered over reasonably-close-to-broadband IP services: GIS mapping, sending/receiving photos and schematics, logistics manifests, VoIP with 0.0% packet loss, medical data and a myriad of other things that you can't do by half duplex voice alone.
webtechgal 10y ago
VHF LoS (Line of Sight) would work over a distance of about 65 miles (curvature of the earth) and HF/SW pretty much world-wide, I suppose?
- walrus01 10y ago
  In the real world, dealing with handheld and vehicle mounted VHF/UHF transmitters in the 2.5, 5 and 10W transmit power range, having local repeaters in high places like mountaintops or on top of 200m tall office buildings is extremely necessary for that repeater to cover even 1/20th of the land area of a western US state (WA, OR size).
  - webtechgal 10y ago
    I was referring to stand-alone stations - as in those with a simple GP antenna (VHF) and a half-wave dipole (HF), where there are no repeaters or other external devices involved.

vvanders 10y ago

Yup, also satellites are a limited resource where as ham is completely decentralized. In 5 minutes I can setup my D710 as a cross-band repeater to a VHF <-> UHF allowing anyone who has a $35 Baofeng within ~7mi of me to cover over ~100mi area. Sure sat phones are great but they aren't nearly as good for local communication.