Ham Radio Operators Are Heroes In Oregon

An anonymous reader writes "We all know the impact that Ham radio can have in emergencies, but that often slips by the public and the authorities. Not so in Oregon, where a day after getting inundated with torrential rains and winds and suffering from the usual calamities those cause, Oregon's Governor called the local Ham radio operators heroes. When discussing how the storm affected communications, the governor stated: "I'm going to tell you who the heroes were from the very beginning of this...the ham radio operators." Kudos to the Oregon Ham operators for helping out in a bad situation, and getting the recognition they deserve."

It's still a mess

[Z80xxc!]

I live in Oregon, and let me say, things are still a huge mess around here. Although I personally didn't need rescuing (although someone I know did!), I must say that the HAM operators are an invaluable asset in an event like this. On the coast, communications are still spotty, if existent at all. There was an article in the Oregonian [oregonlive.com] today about how some places on the coast don't even have 911 service, since all of the fiber links for phones are out, and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.

It's still a mess out here. Lots of roads are still closed - Interstate 5 is closed in Washington, effectively cutting off all transportation between Portland and Seattle. Thousands of cars, and most importantly, trucks, travel[ed] this highway daily. The train tracks are closed too, so there's no amtrak or freight trains. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens... things are improving, but in no speedy fashion.

Re:New form of file sharing!

[corsec67]

You mean something like Packet Radio [wikipedia.org]

Re:New form of file sharing!

[gbobeck]

Actually, I prefer D-Star ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR [wikipedia.org] ) over packet radio.

Flood Pics and Info

[SmoothTom]

Actually, SW Washington state probably got hit the worst this particular time.

Here is a site just put up by the folks there:

http://flood.dothelp.net/ [dothelp.net]

Links to lots of pics and such.

--
Tomas

kudos as well..

[Hillview]

To the governor mentioned, for giving credit where it was due. All too rare these days.

Good job!

[SamMichaels]

It's good to see some publicity about amateur radio.

Pretty easy to get your license, too. About a week's worth of studying will get you on the air. The ARRL [arrl.org] (American Radio Relay League) has a ton of info about getting licensed.

It's exciting that you can IM someone through the internet and have it appear in a couple milliseconds........but how about sending a transmission through the air to someone on the other side of the world at the speed of light using something half the size of your laptop and an antenna as long as that crazy cat-5 wire you have stretched across 3 rooms?

73 de KB3OOJ

Thanks to the Hams!!!

[SmoothTom]

I live north of most of the problems, but have friends right in the middle of the flood disaster in SW Washington state: http://flood.dothelp.net/ [dothelp.net]

Much of the communication is out due to drowned central offices, soaked cables, power outages, and such. Even the remaining working cell towers are in serious trouble, seriously overloaded, and communications is very spotty.

20 miles of Interstrate 5 are closed, with a several hundred mile detour over a mountain range, and the highway will likely be closed for a week, possibly more. Some parts of it were ten feet under water yesterday, and there was a lot of damage to the highway and it's foundation.

In conditions like this, hams with mobile or portable radios, or with emergency generators are often the ONLY communication to the outside.

http://flood.dothelp.net/ [dothelp.net] has a lot of information about the damage, rescue efforts, pictures, etc. (The server itself is OUTSIDE the disaster area.)

Thanks to the hams!!!

--
Tomas

The hobby is growing

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Canada amateur radio is a integral part of almost every city/town. Many radio clubs/societies receive grants from municipal and provincial government bodies to purchase gear, train new members,etc.

A good 1/3 of our members now are under 30. With such a young crew we can invest in and easily learn cutting edge technology to further assist the population in a time of need. We actually run asterisk based voip, video conferencing, instant messaging and of course email between our EOC's (emergency operation centres). Connectivity is done by way of 11Mbps wireless data on the 2.4ghz amateur radio band (non-802.11). We also make use of low speed packet based systems on VHF/UHF for your basic email (winlink: http://www.winlink.org/ [winlink.org] ) and message handling.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[gbobeck]

I don't think HAM can get through the center of the Earth

Why bother going through the center of the Earth when the ionosphere can easily bounce radio waves.

Re:Not Just In Oregon

[kb0hae]

Hi Guys. Try searching on NF5B in your favorite search engine. You will get quite a few results, but a few are links to stories about NF5B and his role in saving lives during Katrina. I am fortunate enough to be a good friend of Richard and Kathleed. This legally blind musician and his Lady (who is wheelchair bound most of the time) are true heros, as are many others who seldome get the press coverage, or the recognition that they deserve. Richard and Kathleed also participate in the Maritime Mobile Service Net. This net is composed of Amateir Operators who give their time and use their radio equipment to help ships at sea, and also others in parts of the world who have no other means of communication except for Amateur Radio. The members of this net have saved many lives, and helped countless mariners communicate with loved ones. I monitor this net when conditions permit.

There are many unsung heros among the ranks of Amateur Radio operators.

Re:New form of file sharing!

[Rorschach1]

Up to 802.11b speeds are in general use - mostly using 802.11b equipment, in fact. Megabit range data links aren't uncommon for microwave frequencies.

Myself, I stick mostly to slow but useful 1200 baud AFSK on VHF. When you're passing things like short text messages, telemetry, and position reports, you don't NEED huge amounts of speed. What you need is a system to get the most critical information to where it will do the most good. And 1200 baud has a big advantage in that you can use it over damn near anything that'll pass a voice signal. You can fit an entire modem and protocol stack in a $2, 8-bit microcontroller, too - no fancy ASICs or DSPs needed (see my link below).

As for the long-distance HF communications people usually associate with ham radio, there's PSK-31 which is a very robust and efficient mode designed for keyboard-to-keyboard use. It's slow, but works when almost nothing else does. It can be encoded with the above-mentioned MCU (I do that for propagation beacons and such) but most people just use a sound card and PC.

Pactor III and other modes give you speeds suitable for email on the HF bands, and they're used for that quite a bit.

Ham radio in emergency situations is less about fancy toys, though, and more about having people with the training and knowledge to be able to use them, and to improvise when things go wrong. That's another reason I stick with relatively low-tech stuff - I'd rather build low-cost devices that can be kludged into doing all sorts of useful things than to focus on finicky, expensive, cutting-edge stuff that's going to fall apart when the fecal matter hits the air circulating device.

Yes, there are a lot of crusty old guys on the radio. But keep in mind that ham radio is what nerds did BEFORE computers and Slashdot, and a lot of them remember that spirit, even if they've fallen behind the curve a bit in technology. There's also a growing number of young hams developing exciting things like GNU Radio, and the open source philosophy is increasingly prevalent in the community. I'm certain that in the next decade open source will be THE major driving force in the hobby.

In the end, it's really just a return to the hobby's roots. There's always been a great deal of information sharing and experimentation, but much of that spirit has dwindled in recent years because of the aging population and the increasing complexity and manufacturing costs associated with modern gear. Open source software, plus DSP, FPGAs, fast computers, and software-defined radios, as well as increased ease of collaboration and access to contract manufacturing are swinging things back the other way.

Think of it this way - a weekend's worth of dedicated cramming can get you a license that grants access to some rather large chunks of spectrum, often with relatively little in the way of restrictions on how you use it. That's the sort of resource that corporations spend millions for - look at the 700 MHz auctions going on now. That license gets you a huge radio frequency playground that's not only wide open for experimentation, it NEEDS active experimentation and exploitation or it will be taken away and auctioned off to the corporations. Don't wait for Google's Android to save wireless communications from the likes of AT&T - go develop an open replacement for a proprietary mode (start with Pactor III or D*Star's AMBE codec), or start a solar-powered 802.11b backbone, or SOMETHING.

Hell, just to make things interesting - I'll send one of my OpenTracker+ [n1vg.net] kits, free, anywhere in the world, to anyone with a Slashdot account that already exists as of today who gets a license before the end of February 2008. It may not be everyone's thing, but A) it's free and B) it comes with source code. Email [e-mail].

Low bandwidth, high noise resistance

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

These advantages are shared by computer-generated modulation schemes such as PSK31, which theoretically fits into 31 Hz (though in practice many signals are distorted and splatter over more spectrum than that) and which can be decoded when it's too faint to be heard through the noise.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[JK_the_Slacker]

Funny how I've seen PSK-31 (a digital mode) work perfectly without a detectable (to my Field Day trained ear) signal. Morse may be better than voice... but a computer can outdo a human ear.

Note that I say this as a computer scientist and as a ham radio operator myself. I'm not suggesting that Morse is obsolete or useless... just that it's not automatically the best thing ever. The wonderful thing about this hobby is that it breeds innovation. From the earliest days of ultra-wide-bandwidth spark gap generators to a complete packet transceiver the size of an Altoids tin, the world of amateur radio, and the amateurs that have built it, is nothing short of amazing. However, if we really want to bring life back in this hobby, we need to stop all the infighting and think. We need to look at each operating mode honestly and attempt to appreciate the merits and the shortcomings of each of them. For every great thing you can name about the code, I can name another mode that does it better. But that's not what the hobby is about.

In response to the article, good on the Oregon hams, and congrats to them for getting recognized. They deserve it.

Re:Good job!

[gbobeck]

It's exciting that you can IM someone through the internet and have it appear in a couple milliseconds........but how about sending a transmission through the air to someone on the other side of the world at the speed of light using something half the size of your laptop and an antenna as long as that crazy cat-5 wire you have stretched across 3 rooms?

Even better... sending that transmission using less than a watt of power through a homemade antenna to the other side of the world.

73. W9QNY

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[Bartab]

The code requirement for license to operate on radio bands that are considered long distance is mandatory by the treaties that setup a global radiospace for ham radio.

The code-free tech license is in bands that are for all intents (near Canada/mexico border would be the exception) are US only.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[Kadin2048]

The code requirement for license to operate on radio bands that are considered long distance is mandatory by the treaties that setup a global radiospace for ham radio.

The code-free tech license is in bands that are for all intents (near Canada/mexico border would be the exception) are US only.

I'm sorry but that's just wrong. It might have been true at some point but it's certainly not true now. Most of the European countries have dropped Morse completely -- the US was one of the last holdouts. (Probably not the last, but definitely up there.) And the Morse requirements for commercial/marine radiotelephone operators licenses are gone too. There's no international pressure to learn it anymore -- most of the impetus to retain Morse in the U.S. was coming from the ARRL, basically from old Hams who wanted the exclusivity it provided.

Re:Thanks, guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes DHS has a program. You can read about it here.

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2006/10/04/100/?nc=1 [arrl.org]

Re:Not Just In Oregon

[Nefarious Wheel]

I had always assumed that it's a play on words: Radio Amateur, Radio Am, Ham

Another variation is that it's a self-deprecating qualifier. "Ham" as in "Ham Fisted". One's "fist" is the distinctive keying pattern a person has when keying Morse code, and a "ham fist" would be one who's a bit awkward at the key.

Some of these guys were real artists. Try keying "beesnest" in the middle of some text with a speed key. It'll put you off your rythmn, but some folks wouldn't even blink.

Morse is still relevant in bad conditions, too -- you can get a morse signal across where voice or packet won't, especially in a hurricane.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[Nefarious Wheel]

You can still get a message across in the bush with your car horn when you're far from the nearest phone cell, too. Morse can be useful.

Have you ever noticed the dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit of some phones' SMS alarms? Well, that's what it is -- Morse for "SMS".

See? You're still using it.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[josecanuc]

This is why bands like the 80 and 160m bands are morse code only.

This is false. 80m and 160m bands are legal for all modes.

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[afternoon_nap]

Ham radio is alive, even with computers, and that goes for cw and PSK31. If you use a computer for decoding PSK31 (which I do) then why not use the same hardware for decoding cw? I use a computer to decode my cw. I've passed my 5wpm test a few years ago and can copy 10-15wpm. However, with a wife, a career, and kids running around the house I can't dedicate time to improving my cw copy speed. However, for a few bucks at I can make a cw and RTTY keying interface for my computer and let a number of programs key the radio and transmit. I work a lot of DX this way and have a lot of fun doing so. Using the above setup I worked all over the world into places I needed a map to see where they were.

So my workaround is to still work cw, except I use my computer. A very good digimode program is fldigi which is GPLd in linux and ported to FreeBSD by VA3DB (Diane Bruce, who wrote a lot of the IRC code). fldigi has also been imported into DM780, part of Ham Radio Deluxe. Both programs take advantage of protocols permitting the computer to control the radio via a serial interface.

Diane has also created a bootable cdrom full of ham software she's ported to FreeBSD, called HamFreeSBIE. Google it for a download link, as it's always under development.

Hams tinker and homebuild and develop because they can, just like they go to far away places and operate: because they can. We also provide emergency services because we can. And we make stuff work because we can. I have fewer limitations when using ham radio than when I use my cell phone. And I don't have to pay access fees, either. I do this hobby because I can.

If you want to get more insight into what hams are doing with computers and software, check into irc.freenode.net #hamradio and chat. You'll meet some very good developers and users alike, both working to keep ham radio active.

- N4CI

when everything bricks

[p51d007]

People turn to the amateur radio community. Check most cities that have a amateur radio club, and you can bet that once or twice a year, you will see them holding a "field day" where they try, in short amount of time, to contact as many other operators across the world, as a contest, and to make sure their "portability" works. This keeps them in tune, in case of a major disaster, when utilities, such as power, phone, CELLULAR fail. We can get the important messages to the outside world. 73's KB0GNK

Re:Ham's day is over, probably

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, in the USA as of 23 February 2007, there is no Morse code exam requirement for any of the US amateur radio license classes. All that is required is to pass a written exam. Additionally, a 'no code' Technician license has been around since 1991.
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2007/01/24/100/?nc=1 [arrl.org]

Re:New form of file sharing!

[NGinuity]

Actually.....the 1.2 GHz D-Star modules (the ID-1 for example), will give you the equivalent of ISDN connectivity.

PSK31

[Chembal]

PSK31 uses (you guessed it!) about 31 hertz of bandwidth, though it doesn't have error correction built in to the mode. There is also a related mode (PSK63) that uses 63 hertz of bandwidth with a higher data rate. PSK is indeed a very reliable low-power and low-bandwidth means of communication. Whether you're a ham or a short-wave listener, I highly recommend giving it and the other digital modes a try. Just hook up your radio's audio out to your computer's sound-card, download one of the many digital mode software packages out there, and enjoy monitoring! If you're a ham, hook up a few more cables, adjust your audio level a bit, and you're on the air! I recommend MultiPSK [f6cte.free.fr] as a good software package to get started. It's a bit ugly in the interface but it will work with almost any digital mode on the air. Or, for just PSK and RTTY, give WinWarbler [dxlabsuite.com] a try, from the DXLab suite. It's a much easier to use interface, and is my personal favorite for when I don't care about anything but PSK.

Enjoy!
Brad - N0TCP

When all else fails....

[whoppo]

"When all else fails"... four words that really sum up what amateur radio brings to the community at large.
Many people hear the term "Ham Radio" and can only imagine a long-bearded nerd wearing headphones and shouting "CQ" into a vintage microphone. While that may be an accurate description of some hams, it's but the tip of the iceberg. I personally know hams ranging in age from 6 to over 100, and the individual interests cover the entire spectrum of available operation modes... CW (morse code), RTTY, PSK-31, Packet, SSTV, AM, FM, SSB, the list goes on and on. There are hams in just about every profession imaginable.. students, lawyers, physicians, truck drivers, programmers, home makers, teachers... again, the list seems to never end. Much, if not most, of the communication technology that is taken for granted these days can be traced back to amateur radio and/or amateur radio operators who've applied the knowledge they've developed as hams. Equipment in use today ranges from single vacuum tube transmitters, to microprocessor controlled marvels.. my own shack has a transmitter from the 50's beside a receiver from the 40's, beside a Kenwood TS2000X that covers amateur radio bands from 1.6 MHZ up to 1.2GHz on all modes... about the size of two stacked laptops. Vintage or state-of-the-art, there's plenty of enjoyment to be had. With less than 100 watts of power, I've talked with hams in more than 130 countries from my SUV. No matter where I am, I can communicate with friends and family anywhere in the world... even where there's no power, no cell towers, no visible satellites (oh yes.. there are ham satellites too... and plenty of 'em).

The ability to communicate globally without commercial infrastructure is the key to amateur radio's real value to the world community. When large scale disasters occur, the commercial infrastructure is often impacted. Power is lost, phone lines go down, cell circuits are jammed (until their backup power fails.. then they disappear), simply checking on the welfare of friends and family in the affected areas could be impossible if it were not for amateur radio and the hams that diligently maintain equipment and train to become proficient communicators. From a Red Cross shelter that needs supplies, to a sailboat taking on water hundreds of miles off shore... ham radio has saved the day countless times.

Ok... now that I've spit-shined ham radio, it's only fair to acknowledge the other side of the coin. Ham radio operators are human beings... and as a result of that, there are hams that truly deserve to wear the "Ass Hat" on a daily basis. I've run across foul language, bad attitudes, malicious interference, complete lack of respect and all of the other unfortunate manifestations of today's society. There's no escaping this in ham radio, CB, the Internet, the local pub, school, work... it's a part of living and interacting with other human beings. For these situations I can only offer the suggestion of changing frequency... there's plenty of spectrum for everyone if you're a little patient.

I'm in my late 40's now and have been a ham since my high school days (give or take a year or two). I've tested for technical knowledge, morse code proficiency and operating regulations... I hold an Extra class license... I'm the Emergency Coordinator for my county affiliated with ARES, RACES and County EMA, I'm an ARRL VE and I help proctor license examinations every month. I've had the pleasure of checking the "PASSED" box for new hams as young as 6 years old as well as for folks more than twice my age. My significant other is a coded general class ham and she loves everything about amateur radio. It really has so good much to offer that the bad things pale in comparison. I have no problem with the elimination of the morse code requirements.. most of the new hams that have been able to pass the test as a result are fine operators and contribute immensely to the community (some fall into that other category.. remember... humans) and while I encourage them all to learn mors