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Amateur radio will thrive but only relatively speaking - it will still be pretty useless. 1. Without repeaters, which in the best situations only have enough b

Amateur radio will thrive but only relatively speaking - it will still be pretty useless. 1. Without repeaters, which in the best situations only have enough battery for less than a day, you will not be able to reliably communicate farther than 10-20 miles in most circumstances. With handheld devices, only a couple of miles. 2. For repeaters that do manage to stay up, even less than a day, they are usually exclusively for emergency response use only. 3. Anyone you need to talk to has to have a radio. Most people don't. Most people don't even know someone who has one. I looked in amateur radio as a tool for emergency situations and found that its usefulness was pretty limited. If I had a natural disaster in my city and needed to communicate to family in a city 300 miles away, it's pretty complicated and expensive to do so without a repeater, and repeaters can't really be relied upon in situations like that. My state even has a repeater network that accesses most major cities in the state, but given that only a single person can talk on it at a given time, the opportunity to talk to my family over it during a natural disaster seems pretty unlikely.

tlrobinson 10y ago
It might be difficult to have a conversation with your family, but you could almost certainly get a message out to them.
dbcurtis 10y ago
HF needs to repeaters for around the world coverage.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  In the right conditions, with an extra level of licensing, with a lot of knowledge needed, and using extremely expensive equipment. These do no make for a good solution for the average person in the event of a natural disaster.
  - dbcurtis 10y ago
    Wow. Such negativity. I thought we were all techies here. It seemed to be cheap enough for me and work well enough for me when I was 12 years old and mowed lawns to buy radio parts. But I guess actual experience with the technology is trumped by your superior intuition.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - wyager 10y ago
    General class isn't hard. Decent equipment can be had for a few hundred bucks. You're right, it's not good for everyone, but it's good for techies.
- davidcollantes 10y ago
  I don't understand. HF do not need repeaters. I was able to get QSLs from all over the world, with a single quartz crystal, .5 watts, one transistor CW transmitter. The band was 40 meters (7,200 kHz), using a dipole antenna around 30 meters up the ground.
cweagans 10y ago
1. You don't need repeaters. HF is plenty for worldwide communication, and VHF/UHF can handle local communication very well. So in a disaster situation, local volunteers would use VHF/UHF to communicate with some central command. Ideally, that location would have an off-the-grid HF setup, which could be used to relay information into and out of the affected area. 2. This is simply not true. Emergency traffic is prioritized over everything else (by law), but almost every repeater is publicly usable by anyone with a valid ham license. 3. Yes, that's how two way radio communication works. I'd encourage you to connect with a local ham club, or even better, go check out Field Day (http://www.arrl.org/field-day http://www.arrl.org/field-day) this weekend. Literally the entire hobby (as far as the ARRL is concerned, at least) is focused around how to most effectively communicate, no matter what the situation is. As far as using the repeaters directly to contact your family members, this would be one of the situations where you'd need to coordinate with local volunteers to get a message out of a disaster area (if that's the situation you're talking about). It's very possible that you might get to pass the message over the air yourself, but even if you can't, at least you could let your family know that you're safe.
twothamendment 10y ago
1) Handheld range depends on where you are. It isn't uncommon for me to go 10-12 miles without a repeater. Any ham worth anything has more than one battery and many have a small solar setup to charge batteries or charge from a car. I can listen for a week on the same battery. 2) Many repeaters have solar. Some in my area aren't on the grid and I don't recall them going down. 3) Yes, you have to have a radio. I hope so. If everyone had one it would end up like the cell networks in an emergency. 300 mile is a challenge. I'm happy being able to talk in my community and my wife. I won't be able to talk to extended family because if distance and that pesky problem that they don't have radios, but knowing I can find out where my wife and kids are and let them know where I am - that is priceless.

tlrobinson 10y ago

It might be difficult to have a conversation with your family, but you could almost certainly get a message out to them.

dbcurtis 10y ago

HF needs to repeaters for around the world coverage.

whamlastxmas 10y ago
In the right conditions, with an extra level of licensing, with a lot of knowledge needed, and using extremely expensive equipment. These do no make for a good solution for the average person in the event of a natural disaster.
- dbcurtis 10y ago
  Wow. Such negativity. I thought we were all techies here. It seemed to be cheap enough for me and work well enough for me when I was 12 years old and mowed lawns to buy radio parts. But I guess actual experience with the technology is trumped by your superior intuition.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- wyager 10y ago
  General class isn't hard. Decent equipment can be had for a few hundred bucks. You're right, it's not good for everyone, but it's good for techies.
davidcollantes 10y ago
I don't understand. HF do not need repeaters. I was able to get QSLs from all over the world, with a single quartz crystal, .5 watts, one transistor CW transmitter. The band was 40 meters (7,200 kHz), using a dipole antenna around 30 meters up the ground.

cweagans 10y ago

1. You don't need repeaters. HF is plenty for worldwide communication, and VHF/UHF can handle local communication very well. So in a disaster situation, local volunteers would use VHF/UHF to communicate with some central command. Ideally, that location would have an off-the-grid HF setup, which could be used to relay information into and out of the affected area. 2. This is simply not true. Emergency traffic is prioritized over everything else (by law), but almost every repeater is publicly usable by anyone with a valid ham license. 3. Yes, that's how two way radio communication works. I'd encourage you to connect with a local ham club, or even better, go check out Field Day (http://www.arrl.org/field-day http://www.arrl.org/field-day) this weekend. Literally the entire hobby (as far as the ARRL is concerned, at least) is focused around how to most effectively communicate, no matter what the situation is. As far as using the repeaters directly to contact your family members, this would be one of the situations where you'd need to coordinate with local volunteers to get a message out of a disaster area (if that's the situation you're talking about). It's very possible that you might get to pass the message over the air yourself, but even if you can't, at least you could let your family know that you're safe.

twothamendment 10y ago

1) Handheld range depends on where you are. It isn't uncommon for me to go 10-12 miles without a repeater. Any ham worth anything has more than one battery and many have a small solar setup to charge batteries or charge from a car. I can listen for a week on the same battery. 2) Many repeaters have solar. Some in my area aren't on the grid and I don't recall them going down. 3) Yes, you have to have a radio. I hope so. If everyone had one it would end up like the cell networks in an emergency. 300 mile is a challenge. I'm happy being able to talk in my community and my wife. I won't be able to talk to extended family because if distance and that pesky problem that they don't have radios, but knowing I can find out where my wife and kids are and let them know where I am - that is priceless.