Foundations of Amateur Radio

Previously I've talked about one of the often lauded cornerstones of the amateur radio community, namely Emergency Response, and to be frank, I questioned then, as I do now, the reality of this, at the very least, perceived, foundational aspect of our global hobby.

Before you get out the caps lock key, let me assure you that I'm aware of sporadic examples of heroic efforts made by members of our community to save lives that are held up as examples of amateur radio emergency responses.

What I'm questioning is related to our collective effectiveness. We have global and increasing occurrences of wild or bush fires, we have earthquakes and tsunamis, storms, hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons, whatever you call the vortex of destruction, and global news media ensures that we hear about it within hours if not seconds. Social media provides us with mobile phone footage dubbed with expert audio to explain the latest tragedy to the rest of us.

What we don't see is what happens next, while the power is out, the internet is down, mobile phones aren't working anymore and survivors are fighting tooth and nail for their return to normalcy, or at least what's left of it.

It struck me that one thing I never see discussed and haven't ever discussed in over a decade and a half I've been here, is the amateur radio interface with the rest of the world.

A comment I see often is that Internet connected amateur radio, like Echolink, AllStarLink and IRLP, aren't real radio and that real amateurs use RF.

HF radio for the win right?

What do you think the relevance of HF radio is to a family member living in the next town after a disaster, or a parent looking for their lost child?

How do ordinary people benefit from the radio amateur who lives on their street, or the one who travels into the disaster zone?

Ultimately, if we are to take our claimed emergency response role seriously, we as a community of radio amateurs need to consider just what it is that we can offer to the people around us in the case of an emergency.

Might what we offer look like a Wi-Fi base station that's connected to the rest of the world via an IP link that happens to be running on 2m or 70cm during an emergency?

Or could what we offer be described as an Amateur Radio Short Message Service, what about transmitting a DVB-T dashboard that's being updated over LoRaWAN, or a local voice relay service?

Where's the infrastructure, planning, preparation and training for that? Where's the documentation for it? How are we telling the local community about it? How well do we even do outage notifications within our community, let alone outside it?

The point being that there are amateurs who beat their chest about emergency preparedness and, bluntly, have little or nothing to show for it.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't limited to the amateur radio community. For a few weeks I became an aspirant member of a local emergency response team, right until I discovered that their biggest issue was that their user base, the local volunteer bushfire brigades, didn't really know how to use their radio repeater system and my suggestion to go and visit each one on a rotation basis and train them was met with snorts of derision and laughter.

Do you really want an emergency response to be ad hoc? "Oh, sorry, I'm missing a cable and I can't connect this to that, I'll sort it out for next time."

The increased interest in the various "OTA" or "On The Air" pursuits, Parks, Peaks, Summits, Bunkers, Castles, Waterways, Islands, Lakes, Libraries, Lighthouses and Toilets to name a few, are all helping amateurs practice with the "getting on-air and make noise using a temporary installation" part of an emergency response, but few of those activities interact with the general public in any way.

Ironically, the local Wireless Civil Emergency Network, or WICEN, is at least doing some community outreach by providing radio infrastructure to a few local events. It's a start, but still a very long way from interacting with your next door neighbour in preparation for a massive storm and subsequent power outage.

Here's the thing. There's no end-to-end anything. Is ad hoc sticky tape and baling wire really the way you want our amateur community to respond to an emergency?

Is emergency response a fanciful concept, or are there things we as a community could put together to make it reality?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB