Sunday, August 09, 2009

Ham Radio: Emergency, Survival Communications When Cell Phones & Internet Fail!

What will you do if wake up one morning and you cannot get a cell signal? What about when you sit down at your laptop this evening and there is no Internet signal to be found? Before you reach for the old landline phone, remember, you disconnected it last year.

If you do not have these tools available to you, then how will you communicate to the outside world? If you cannot communicate, then you might as well be blind. However, if you are a ham radio operator, then you will be able to communicate even if the cellular systems and/or Internet networks go down and will likely be able offer your assistance during emergencies.

This is one of the main reasons I got my Technician ham radio license earlier this year. If you are fellow ham reading this article, my call sign is KI6YFT. I recommend everyone getting a ham radio license. The test is not that difficult and it will open an entirely new world to you. Plus, you would be able to communicate with the outside world in the event of an emergency.

So I wondered, as I was following a car with an amateur radio license tag recently, how ham radio fits into today’s world.

It turns out that amateur ham radio operators provide a valuable service to our community. Even in these days of total connectedness, when an emergency happens, often the power goes off and phone lines or cell towers go down. Then ham radio operators come to the rescue...

During Hurricane Katrina, he said, amateur radio was the only method of communication. The Bush administration’s formal report on the catastrophe praised amateur radio:


“Amateur Radio Operators from both the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the American Radio Relay League monitored distress calls and rerouted emergency requests for assistance throughout the U.S. until messages were received by emergency response personnel. A distress call made from a cell phone on a rooftop in New Orleans to Baton Rouge was relayed, via ham radio, from Louisiana to Oregon then Utah, and finally back to emergency personnel in Louisiana, who rescued the 15 stranded victims.”

Source: News-Record.com

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