[wglb]

It is not dead. Ham Radio was vital to the recovery of Helene, particularly in North Carolina.

Major city marathons use Ham Radio where other services are overloaded. For an example, see https://www.hamradiochicago.org/about-us.

Ham Radio was essential to the Red Cross effort in recovery from the 9/11 attacks.

[eddythompson80]

Just to be clear, saying “Vital” is overselling it, but it’s a nice thing to do. Being a ham operator is unpaid volunteer work, so over praise and “thanks” and calling it “vital” is really just being nice to a service someone provided that probably took 10-20 hours of their time for no compensation.

It’s nice for an emergency response team to reach out to a local ham emergency group and just delegate to them “hey why don’t you operate this net on this repeater and let us know if anyone reaches out to you? hit us up on XYZ frequency when that happens? Ok thanks”.

That’s one less task for a busy group to worry about. And if it saves or helps 1 person, then “it was vital in the rescue effort”. Heck, even if it doesn’t do anything “well it saved us from having a dedicated resource to just man a UHF/VHF repeater and keep announcing a net every 10 minutes, so it was ‘vital’ by freeing up 1 team member”

In an emergency situation you can take any person off the street and give them a 5-minute primer on how to operate a radio. That’s really all it takes. They don’t need to know FCC rules, band plans, how radios are made, RF propagation properties, antenna theory, or any of that crap. “Tune to a frequency, push to talk, any questions?”

[amatecha]

"how to operate a radio", so when the station on the other end is like "change to 146.58" they'll definitely rememeber how to do that after a 5min primer during a regional disaster? Or when interference comes in (perhaps from a similarly-5min-trained rando), will they just toss the radio on the table and forget about it? Heck, how many vital comms will the person stomp over by not giving enough time for responses or urgent messages?

Ever listened to nets and comms during disasters? the experience and expertise of the station operators is immediately clear. it's not something the average person can get the hang of in a few minutes.

[eddythompson80]

Non of that really applies to running an emergency net. A remote station isn’t gonna ask an emergency net operator to change frequency. In interference you would just politely ask the interferer to piss off. Most complicated scenario you’ll have to deal with is an asshole jamming you and switching to a backup frequency.

Obviously experience helps, but you can also summarize 95% of what needs to be done in 5 or 10 minutes. And you don’t need 95% of what you usually study or learn for a ham license

[wglb]

> Just to be clear, saying “Vital” is overselling

One of the motivations for the Chicago Marathon group to reach out to the ham club was was that in a previous year a runner died due to inadequate communication. I would call the prevention of that or even less serious health consequences Vital.

> That’s really all it takes.

I would put a strong disagree about this as well.

You are leaving out a lot of the protocol for operation. This takes a bit of training and experience to be able to handle lots of situations, like when to talk, when to listen, and what to do if you are unsure if your communication has been received or not.

[eddythompson80]

That’s the difficulty of it right? We’re just talking about what qualifies as “vital”. Is saving 1 life “vital”? I’m sure you, I, and most people would say yes. What else could you say? But it’s not likely to “move the needle” per se in a broader rescue effort. Ham radio is “vital” in emergency situations in the sense that it “could” help some people. But if it was really a needle mover, why is it left to volunteers and community best-effort to do? Why are we not demanding publicly funded rescue services to hold these roles instead? Because the ROI in terms of moving the needle of a rescue effort is just not there.

An emergency net operated by amateur ham operators can last for hundreds of hours answer 800 questions, 780 of those are “how is it lookin’ out there?”, “any updates when this neighborhood is getting power back”, “this is Victor-Tango-7-Kilo-Kilo-India happy to help out folks if you need anything just holler”. Maybe 15 of someone actually reporting some useful update for a given value of usefulness and maybe 0-1 actual emergency stuff. It gives people with radios a place to vent without tying up actual rescue group resources answering and re-answering mundane questions.

[cdchn]

I've done Ham Radio operator stuff at a major metropolitan marathon multiple times and the Hams are really just there for data collection. Cell phones have no problems operating in ultra-dense environments any more. You could say "what if the phones go down" but in an emergency situation the professionals have their own trunked radios to use.