One thing about HAM that I didn't see in perusing the comments is how many tools HAM operators have developed that integrate with the internet. There are a bunch of tools that let you start out on HF and hit a receiver or repeater that puts your traffic into the internet. In an environment with the right kind of repeaters you can hit the internet with a handheld (Puerto Rico likely has had it's repeaters decimated with all other towers). On HF you can go around the world to hit a link to the internet. I imagine the Red Cross and ARRL will be selecting an HF mode and band to take the shortest hop they can into more modern data systems.
The secret sauce in HF is that unlike the web, conditions matter to the operator. Things like sunspot activity, the position of the day/night line, if you are near water etc. can greatly affect your ability to successfully communicate.
DXpeditions, which are trips HAMs take with their gear to try to hit very distant stations are often based in island locations because HF tends to propagate significantly better with the antenna is near water as opposed to irregular ground.
I would just say to all of you who are into tech as I imagine HN readers to be, to give HAM a try. A lot of us are old and HAM sites regularly feature a list of "silent keys" because so many of the hardcore operators are dying off. Yes it's a bit antiquated but the younger generation will be able to marry all the amazing things you've invented to HAM to serve populations where the new tech either hasn't gone or gets knocked out as in the current crisis. For so many of you engineers it will be easy, like dusting off your first Circuits text. Yes, the regs are a drag to learn but I bet the average HN reader has done things that are way more challenging.
DXpeditions aren't based in island locations because HF propagates better over water, they're based in island locations because those are the locations that people haven't tended to log, as they're entities that don't have any people (or have people, but no ham operators) living on them and thus need to be "activated" for someone to count them as contacted.
This a lift from a radio club slide on propagation:
Types of Propagation
●Ionospheric waves (sky waves): Main portion of the radiation that leaves the antenna at angles above the horizon
●Tropospheric waves: Radiation kept close to the earth’s surface due to bending in the lower atmosphere (higher HF or lower VHF)
●Ground waves (surface waves): Radiation directly affected by the earth’s surface
- Earth-guided surface wave
- Vertically polarized and absorbtion increases with freq
- **Travels much further over water than over land**
So I agree it’s not the sole criteria for dxers. But they a better chance of hitting some distant stations for QSOs with propagation over water. I suspect it’s why the am stations in the Jersey swamps have their towers over water.
I have both a question and a comment. I got my license (Technician and General on the same day) about a year ago. I have not once pressed transmit on a radio. I guess I don't know where to start. If you have any advice I would like to hear it.
Anyone with an EE background should be able to study up on https://hamstudy.org/ for a few hours a night for a week and pass without trouble.
Older hams willing to teach new hams to do what your asking are referred Robert as Elmer’s. It’s hard to teach throwing tennis ball over a branch to string a dipole in a book. It’s hard to know with big project if you’ve screwed it up without help. The value of an Elmer.
The other and perhaps more modern approach is that hams are prolific content producers. Almost any topic will have loads of good YouTube coverage. Since many hams build there stuff there are a lot of really good answers to questions out there.
Finally, if you have an HT go online and look up local repeaters and program your radio accordingly. Commuting is a good time to hear vhf/uhf folks. When the time is right call CQ and try a contact. It gets easier the more you do it.
1. Find a local repeater and jump in! Before long you'll hear a topic you know about and can contribute to the discussion. I learned about #4 and #5 below like this.
2. Most areas have some kind of daily chat net organized at scheduled times, which is a great time to check in.
3. Keep your radio with you tuned to 146.520 and turned on when you're driving around. Many hams monitor this frequency. Listen in and periodically transmit your call sign and ask for another station to come back. It's exciting to make your first contact without a repeater.
4. Give yourself a reason to use the radio. Look for activities you might enjoy. I got into SOTA. It's an activity where you climb onto nearby mountains and make contacts to score points. If you tune into 146.520 on weekends in the mountains you're likely to hear and participate in some activity there.
5. Consider blending ham with other hobbies, such as radio controlled aircraft or modifying routers to do long range broadband communications.
6. Learn how to use your radio as a scanner. Then learn how to scan the repeater tone frequency so you can chat back when you do find an active repeater. This is a good emergency skill if you're traveling and don't know the repeater frequencies where you're at. (It's important to know the ham frequency ranges on 2m when you do this because there are active and forbidden frequencies right at the edges of what is legal for Hams.)
Do you have a license? Step one is getting your license. QRZ offers "practice" exams online which are literally the questions from the FCC license exam pool [0]. You can rote memorize these questions and answers if you need to. Technician and General are both fairly easy licenses to get. The FCC dropped the Morse (CW) requirement, but this can be a really fun way to get into certain ham bands which are CW-only. Very niche crowd. I suppose the sibling advice I gave is to find a local repeater and just start talking. If you're on the West Coast, I highly suggest checking out the WINS repeater system. It's an internet-connected set of repeaters, so when you hit your local WINS repeater, you're actually going out to most of the west coast and Hawaii. And a few other places. It's always growing. Always super friendly. Well, most of the time it's super friendly.
There was not. I appreciate your helpful attitude toward people on the fence about getting a license, but the parent to my comment was saying "I'm licensed, now what?" And I said ~"I'm in that exact same situation".
But now that we're chatting and you obviously do know your stuff, any pointers for actually putting it to use?
You must have stopped reading at the first couple of sentences, or did you just not see the whole thing about jumping on a local WINS repeater? That wasn't ninja edited in there.
I love the fact that the Baofeng is cheap and I have one myself thinking I'd finally deflower myself on 220 and 70cm. But the rig sits in my trunk unused. I just don't want to use it. The UI is awful. Once programmed some of its users call it the Plastic Fantastic; I don't. No analog squelch knob is still a non-starter.
Try to borrow someone's Icom or Kenwood or Yaesu, listen to the local action, and jump on . Hamming should be fun and it is with a friendlier rig. Try not to let the plastic fantastic turn you off from hamming.
Just buy a Baofeng UV-5R, find a local repeater, and start yakking on the radio. You should have a local repeater which holds semi-regular "nets" (meetings). You can start checking in on those nets if you don't want to start talking right away socially.
Actually, don't believe that. There is some kind of distributor war happening, and you should not trust any claims about which Baofeng distributor model is "upgraded" or has "the latest" chipset, because it seems they all share the same guts, one of the distributors is shipping a marginally newer version of the chipset which makes no substantial difference, and one model which has an extra button or two. Since it's all the same guts, and pretty much the same chipset, the most inexpensive and basic model you can find will be the best choice. There is no point in spending an extra ten dollars for something which offers no actual improvement over another.
I've always been fascinated, but it's not clear -- I believe there's some kind of license required (to be a good citizen), but I've never been sure how to go about getting that.
I bought an RTL SDR just a few weeks ago off the back of getting interested in listening in on various web SDRs (furthermore, the first of which I visited was linked to a HN thread about a Russian numbers station).
Now I can pick up local signals and listen/decode them and get a sense of what the spectrum (in my case between about 60MHz and 2.1GHz for the range of my receiver) is used for.
Running the software on Linux is super simple, a graphical receiver programme such as gqrx is quite nice to play with, and versions exist in most distros package managers.
Further to all of the above, I looked at the RSGB site about UK licensing, and they have example exams for all license levels. The first exam I looked at I self-scored at about 85% without even doing any reading at all - though I have some basic knowledge of electronics (and a tiny bit about radio) already. In the UK there is also OFCOM which manages the local legalities of radio reception and transmission.
Even if you are not in the US, start with the US License! It has the best books and is convertible to many national licenses and it is cheap. Due to the American Volunteer Examiner system, exams can be and are held in many countries around the world. I, for example, passed my Extra Class exam last week in Germany. As soon as the FCC publishes it online, I will show it to the German authorities and get my German license without further exam.
There are 3 classes of license, and each consecutive class gives you more privileges than the last. From least privileged to most:
1. Technician: Access to frequencies that let you contact people in your city.
2. General: Access to frequencies that bounce off the ionosphere and let you contact people all around the world.
3. Amateur extra: Access to more frequencies yet, but none of these frequencies give you abilities past what General can do (worldwide contacts).
I recommend going straight to general. It strikes a good test-difficulty to privileges-granted ratio.
The easiest way to study is to just memorize the answers to all the questions. Yes, that's right: the licensing test question bank is published and it's not hard to memorize the entire thing. This site has flashcards and practice exams: https://hamstudy.org/ If you practice for 15 to 30 minutes a day, you can be ready for your general test in less than a week.
I've taken the foundation course and am starting my intermediate training this weekend. For me, amateur radio gets very interesting when you start listening out for satellite transmissions, including reaching the ISS.
It's such a fun subject and as you say, lots of aspects to it that would interest most people with a technical bent.
So many people think any short, common name must be an initialism or acronym. I have coworkers who talk about their MAC computers, which is confusing when you work in the networking world and MAC does not normally mean Macintosh.
> I don’t think that you can argue with this. Let’s avoid confusion by using “amateur radio” when writing about our hobby/service. I’d even urge the ARRL to rethink their use of “Amateur Radio.” Sometimes, it may be OK to use “ham radio,” but it’s just not correct to use “HAM radio” or just “HAM.”
I'm a bit out of the loop on amateur radio these days, but if I remember correctly there was a mass exodus from volunteer radio operators from the American Red Cross to the Salvation Army over the background check issue. Volunteers that were bringing thousands of dollars of their own equipment to help saw it as very unnecessary and insulting. I'm a bit surprised to see they're still requiring the background checks...
edit: I'm also a bit surprised they're requiring a General Class license. That cuts out a huge number of potential volunteers. Are they really using the other frequencies that opens up enough that it's a requirement? Possibly that is a reasonable requirement, but I've helped with disaster recovery simulations, etc. and my Technican Class license was just fine.
ARRL now conducts background checks on ARES volunteers, so the issue is rather moot (in fact ARC and ARRL have an MOU stating that ARRL is responsible for background checks on their volunteers assisting ARC, which presumably applies to this call as well). There have just been too many incidents of people with e.g. sexual assault on their rap sheets turning up working in shelters where there are all manner of vulnerable people. Terrible optics if nothing else.
I suspect the general class requirement is just to cut down the applicants to a pool of more dedicated people. A very real problem with disaster volunteers, if I might be a little harsh especially from the amateur radio side, is "fair-weather responders" who will go through all the training and then not actually deploy. I've also personally found that people with higher class licenses are more likely to be into digital modes which is what they're mostly looking for, but that's getting less true as the equipment gets cheaper (to be honest I've never even seen a packet TNC in person).
I happen to be both an ARC disaster worker and amateur radio operator, but I speak for myself.
ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) is an emergency response group of amateur radio operators. Hurricane wipes out all the phones, but radios still work. ARES operators help with emergency communications until the phones and internet get fixed.
ARC is American Red Cross.
The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) is the main club of amateur radio operators in the USA. There are lots of facets to amateur radio, not just emergency response. There are contests where people try to make many radio contacts (or long distance contacts, or contacts using a certain range of frequencies, etc.), people that just like to chat (known as rag chewing), and serious researchers that develop new modes of wireless communication that may even make it to commercial products. ARRL supports all licensed amateur radio operators in the USA.
MOU is a memorandum of understanding, basically a business agreement.
TNC is a terminal node controller, it's the box that interfaces your digital object (computer or phone) with your analog radio. Many new/expensive radios have built in digital capabilities, but most radios need an audio input.
Just to add another facet: there are folks from other hobbies (like R/C planes) who obtain an amateur radio license because it lets them legally transmit at higher power levels.
Given the negative PR against shelters that threatened to do background checks on all the other people they let into the shelters in the lead up to the recent hurricanes, that's gotta be just a CYA move, no? Isn't there a check that you're not a felon already in the FCC licensing process?
No, felons are absolutely not prohibited from having amateur radio licenses or even being ARRL members.
ARC does not conduct background checks on shelter clients and to do so would almost certainly be found to be against the principle of neutrality, however, shelter clients are asked if they are required to register their location with the government (often because they are registered sex criminals) and there are procedures in place if so (although this is not an easy problem and has caused difficulty in the past).
The most famous felony-ham-license battle I can think of is the Kevin Mitnick incident from the turn of the century... the FCC lost and ended up renewing his license after all.
I vaguely remember some 80s guys getting felony convictions for interfering with police radios and then losing their ham radio license.
Of course the future does not necessarily rely on past events and policies.
> There have just been too many incidents of people with e.g. sexual assault on their rap sheets turning up working in shelters where there are all manner of vulnerable people.
No chance such a person might be trying to help others as a sort of payback to society for his past transgressions, I guess. Or might have such a record because some girl at his school had a morning-after regret and now he has a record that prevents him from doing almost anything else with his time other than volunteer.
Why do you assume that the criminal is 'unrepentant'? If he is released from prison after serving the sentence doesn't it imply a chance for rehabilitation?
Why do you assume a criminal is repentant? Past performance does not indicate future results, but the 5-year recidivism rate for former criminals in the US is nearly 80%, so I think some prudence is certainly in order.
US is a bad example. The way former convicts are treated in the US - their whole lives being ruined and employment opportunities denied - one could argue they are almost deliberately pushed into the life of crime.
The US is the only relevant example here. We're talking about the American Red Cross operating in a US territory. I'm sure folks from other countries do offer to help, but where do you think most of the volunteers for the American Red Cross helping in a US territory are going to come from?
I imagine they might want a General license because you won't transmit beyond the island on a Technician license. Just a guess.
EDIT: actually read the fine article, HF voice being one of the requirements. I assume they also want more than the tiny bit of HF that Technician licensees get to use. " Sorry, 10m isn't open, so I can't transmit, and I'm not allowed to use 40m."
I once read that, during a declared emergency, you didn't need a license to operate the radio. I'm pretty sure it was on an official site, though it may have been on ARRL's site.
I am unable to find it, so I'm not sure if it is true any longer, or if it was ever true.
Assuming it is illegal, I wonder how mad the FCC would be - if one followed the rules and it was a real emergency?
My understanding is that this provision applies only to "life or death emergencies" which safe and well linking activities are certainly not. I'm having a very hard time finding the actual letter of the law anyway, only various third-hand retellings that such a rule exists. Certainly it is intended only for narrow situations.
This is from the Technician class question pool. It indicates to me that operating outside of licensed privileges in the context of this request for volunteers would not be permitted by the FCC. Since I lost the formatting, the (D) indicates that (D) is the correct answer. Exceeding your privileges as part of an emergency plan is not sanctioned, but for immediate life-threatening emergencies, it is. A lot of people use the term "disasters" vs. "emergencies" to distinguish those meanings.
T2C09 (D)
Are amateur station control operators ever permitted to operate outside the frequency privileges of their license class?
A. No
B. Yes, but only when part of a FEMA emergency plan
C. Yes, but only when part of a RACES emergency plan
D. Yes, but only if necessary in situations involving the immediate safety of human life or protection of property
On an unrelated note, I'm actually not entirely sure if the FCC rules even apply to Puerto Rico, being a territory... Do you know?
Alot of that may simply be covered under the general Criminal Defense of Necessity.
For example it is illegal to break into someone home, but if that home is on fire and you break in to save a resident you have a Criminal Defense of Necessity for breaking in...
Like Wise if you are in an area with no communication and you "illegal" transmit a radio signal for the purpose of obtaining necessary assistance you would have a Criminal Defense of Necessity for breaking the FCC regulations
There is some dispute as to whether the necessity defense is available in federal criminal law (the Supreme Court has dodged a general decision on the point, but always ruled against it specifically being available in the circumstances before the Court in particular cases).
Probably a lot, but the availability of prosecutorial discretion is a very different thing than the availability of a legal defense.
While the defense is enshrined in statute in many states or firmly established in state case law, that's not true in the federal system, where it may exist based on inherited common law, but is neither established in federal statute nor firmly attested in the case law.
Thanks. I think I read similar, though maybe I decided in my head that a declared state of emergency was the qualifier. As it is a declared state of emergency, I'd speculate that that's a life or death situation? I suspect it's more nuanced and subjective than that.
Like you, I searched for the letter of the law and wasn't actually able to find it. It may have been ARRL's site or a forum affiliated with them? It was something I noticed while learning and taking the practice exams.
The bit I found[0] indicates that its only permitted in immediate life safety situations (eg: someone directly dies or is seriously injured if the radio is not used).
Specifically if you want to operate HF phone or in digital modes (CW is allowed in >15m band for techs along with some limited hf phone and digital modes in 10m). Also you can operate marine SSB (which is hf phone) outside of a HAM general license as long as you operate on designated marine SSB channels.
I am not sure it's fair to use services like that for these purposes. Even if you have a permit/license for these services, they aren't for general telecommunications such as thirdparty messages between distant land stations, whether or not a marine or aero station is involved in relaying them.
I suspect that this operation will be using phone and digital modes. CW and 10m are rather small, but interesting and valuable, niches. For this case, CW will be slow and 10m will be unreliable.
Generally, it is easier to join the party by learning to pass the General exam, than waiting for a 10m opening or learning telegraph code :)
You may break the rules in situations threatening life or property (there is an exemption for this), but why send potentally inexperienced technicians INTO a disaster area to drown out potential calls for help when you can send generals or extras who have more understanding and experience?
Communications isn't an all hands on deck problem in the same sense that providing resources and shelter is. Ham nets and repeaters can get traffic jams very easily in a situation like this, so it's better to send a dozen experts than 100 beginners.
This indicates how bad things are in Puerto Rico. None of this is necessary for Texas or Florida. But Puerto Rico has lost most of its infrastructure, and it's an island. They have to get the ports cleared of debris and functioning before stuff can be brought in. They need basic communications just to organize the early stages of recovery.
It's going to be slow. In the domestic US, within three days after a disaster, the Interstates usually have been cleared and trucks are bringing in supplies. Fairly quickly, the big-box retailers like Wal-Mart will be back up and restocked with necessities. Puerto Rico isn't going to be like that. They need what amounts to a military invasion. The military brings its own infrastructure and can cold-start on bare ground if they have to.
Another big problem - the money system is down. No credit card processing. Few ATMs working, and those are mostly out of cash by now. This is the downside of the cashless economy.
Update: Port of San Juan is open, 3000 containers of relief supplies have been unloaded by Crowley Marine alone, but there's too much debris on the roads to get semitrailers out of the port yet. Diesel fuel is in stock at tank farms but not getting distributed because roads are blocked.
Bulldozers and front end loaders will deal with that, but not instantly.
Update 2: Crowley has 10,000 containers stuck at the port, but only 20% of the truck drivers have been located. With cell service down, nobody can call them. Getting Diesel to fuel stations is a problem. 11 tankers are inbound, and 100 fuel trucks have been sent out from San Juan. But damaged gas stations without power can't use the fuel.
Being a Ham radio operator sounds kind of romantic on paper, but then you try it and realize that 90% of the other operators are curmudgeonly old Trump supporter types. Not really any fun chances for discourse when the person on the other side is pining for the return of Jim Crow laws
The great thing about ham radio is that if you don't like what you're hearing, you can just keep spinning the dial. In my experience (NYC metro area), I hear very little politics on the ham bands. There are also CW and digital modes which tend to draw people with more than five brain cells. I know there are a couple infamous HF frequencies where some reality-challenged folks tend to congregate, but there is much more to the hobby than that QRM.
Perhaps annoyingly you’re spot on. The “local net” near me in London is full of Brexit breathing Farage supporters whining about their XYL. The clubs aren’t any better. It took forever to get my license sorted because of this as well. I was new blood that didn’t want to drink beer, play with black box rigs or bitch about the wife.
So I stick to 40m CW. People just want a QSO or two and then go back to playing with their oscilloscopes and soldering irons. It’s too hard to rag chew on CW.
I've been a Technician for many years. I have worked numerous local responses: parades, athletic events, smaller scale weather disasters. It was really rewarding, especially when a family member was actually participating in the event, and you felt awesome knowing you're keeping watch and helping to direct and dispatch help where needed. I met a lot of folks who were much older and had amazing stories. One in particular drove his RV with his wife down to LA shortly after Katrina and, using a ham radio and bag phone, helped relay a lot of the communications flowing out of the area.
Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M. This unfortunately kept me from ever upgrading and being of use in large scale disasters like this. I can understand to an extent why the licensing is still required; otherwise you will have these spectra flooded with people probably using them for commercial purposes with no regulation to cut them off.
Basic ham communications are still absolutely critical in major disasters. A few others have touched on this, but bandwidth and throughout for communication is increased with the advent of digital interfaces to the radios to the point that you can essentially establish a data connection over the air. Godspeed to those who make the trek.
I went to get my U.S. Technician license (I've had a Swedish CEPT2 license for a long time but never been very active) after studying a bit online, and after passing that they asked if I wanted to try the General test too, since I was already there. I did, and I passed. (Did the same with Extra, but didn't pass that one.)
I would certainly not be comfortable with actually operating a HF rig without doing some prep work, but it seems to me that an active ham would have a reasonable chance of squeezing by the General test if they gave it a chance.
I would say technician to general isn't such a big leap. Extra felt like it was a big leap - targeted at electrical engineers. I did all 3 in one day - was trying to prove something to myself I guess. If you're technical and are interested in the subject it'll just take you a few hours to get general and HF so so much fun!!
> Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M.
I suspect you are underestimating your abilities and/or overestimating the difficulty of the test. The test is very structured and you can take advantage of that.
If you are good on the E&M stuff, you can blow a lot of the regulation questions. The tests consist of questions drawn from 10 categories. Here's the breakdown for Technician (T), General (G), and Extra (E):
T G G E
6 5 5 6 Commission's Rules
3 5 5 5 Operating Procedures
3 3 3 3 Radio Wave Propagation
2 5 5 5 Amateur Radio Practices
4 3 3 4 Electrical Principles
4 3 2 6 Circuit Components
4 3 3 8 Practical Circuits
4 2 3 4 Signals and Emissions
2 4 4 8 Antennas and Feed Lines
3 2 2 1 Electrical and RF Safety
(General is listed twice because I made that table just a couple months before the General test was due to be updated, and I now don't remember which column was for which revision. Extra was revised last year so the counts may be off for that too).
For Technician and General you have to get 26 out of 35 to pass. For Extra it is 37 out of 50.
So, for general, you get to blow 9 questions. Even if you miss everything in the rules questions, that's only 5 out of your budget of 9.
Furthermore, the questions in the pool for each category are further divided into several groups. You get exactly one question from each group. The 5 groups in the rules category on the General exam are:
• General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations
• Antenna structure limitations; good engineering and good amateur practice; beacon operation; prohibited transmissions; retransmitting radio signals
• Transmitter power regulations; data emission standards
• Volunteer Examiners and Volunteer Examiner Coordinators; temporary identification
• Control categories; repeater regulations; harmful interference; third party rules; ITU regions; automatically controlled digital station
You can almost certainly pick one or two of those groups and learn enough to answer the questions for those groups without much trouble. For example if you can just memorize the lower and upper frequencies of the major HF bands you'll known enough to answer the majority of questions in the "General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations" group.
If you haven't actually given General a try, I'd recommend going to hamexam.org and/or hamstudy.org, and doing some practice tests. You can also review the entire question pool. I bet you'll find that in a weekend or two of practice in your spare time you'll find you are passing with reasonable frequency, and with a little more time you'll get to the point where you pass enough to be confident in taking the actual test.
If you make an account at those sites they will keep track of stats, and at least one of them, I believe, will give you stats by category and group so you can figure out what areas to concentrate on.
I've seen steady reporting about Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria but it's been exactly that -- "about Puerto Rico" rather than "from Puerto Rico". Everybody seems to think it's bad, but it's really hard to say how bad. I think the major contributing factor to how the situation is being reported is that most of the cell towers (90%?) are out of action, and presumably land lines have also been seriously affected.
It's also been nearly a week. In all fairness though, it seems like the airports are either shut down or operating at greatly reduced capacity, so it's hard for reporters to get in.
The military isn't giving up seats on military flights to members of Congress today because they need the space for vital supplies and personnel, which is one measure of how hard it is to get into PR right now.
I just got out of PR Tuesday. I tried to get a ferry to DR to do this exact thing in reverse to get into the mainland and was informed the ferries are all out of service.
I saw an article earlier today about how hard it’s going to be to rebuild the electric grid (effectively REPLACE it because it’s 80% gone) that said that for at least a while the airport didn’t have radar and flights had to be confirmed for landing before they could even take off which was adding a massive delay to any attempt to get to the island.
The ARC is an non-profit organization supported by a movement of volunteers from all walks of life. It gives resources to volunteers willing to help those in need. Thank god it exists.
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Gandhi said, "You have to be the change you wish to see in the world.". This could not be more true than as a volunteer. A mass response to a disaster of Puerto Rican proportions will be loosely coordinated. Supply chains will operate far from optimal. Volunteers who recognize an inefficiency will either do nothing about it or assume the leadership role required to reduce the inefficiency.
A volunteer experience like this is largely what you make of it. Unlike other entrepreneurial endeavors, the ARC gives you the resources to do something great.
A few people have said that going from Technician to General or General to Extra is difficult. It is not totally easy but I did find a tool when I was studying for my Extra exam (passed). I don't post to much here so if I am out of bounds please let me know and I'll remove the comment. I used a tool called HamTestOnline, https://www.hamradiolicenseexam.com, and it was a huge help. I paid for the service and I am in no way associated with them except as a customer. I worked in technical training for 20 years and this guys system is as good as online training systems we shelled out well into six figures for.
Like I said if posting a link here is bad form tell me and I'll take it down lickety split. Only want to share something I found very useful.
Haiti was a far more difficult situation. The death toll was on the order of several hundred thousand people, and Haiti was a difficult place to work in even before that.
They spent 500 million dollars on something and no doubt on many different things, but it wasn't on 4 houses. There's definitely a problem in that we don't know what exactly they spent that money on, and we also have no idea if the stuff they spent it on was actually very effective (it's hard to believe that it was anything other than a great waste, but that may also be true of the very large sums of money spent by other non-profits in Haiti). The narrative that the American Red Cross spent half a billion dollars on a handful of houses is so grossly -- and obviously -- over-simplified that it can't be anything but complete baloney. It makes a great headline though.
(It goes without saying that this is my own humble opinion, of course.)
From a 2015 NPR article [1]: "The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six."
I don't know about you, but that screams fraud to me.
Is the Red Cross supposed to build houses? I was under the impression they focus on temporary, emergency shelter...Sounds more like something up Habitat for Humanity's alley.
If you read the article, they have made several other claims regarding Haiti which simply weren't true. THAT is the problem, not whether or not they are an organization who builds houses.
If you don't get your technicians license and have the opportunity to, I think you're crazy. It's something in tech that doesn't get enough love anymore. It's immensely valuable and actually a fun change of pace from SaaS.
It takes about 2-3 hours of studying and you can pretty much keep it for life. KK4PPF. QSL?
My business partner's father (ZL2AL) passed last year and I know he'd be chuffed to see all this HAM talk on HN :-)
He demoed the process to me last time I saw him (back in New Zealand). It was amazing to see the speed with which the he (and the other operators) could relay messages around the world.
He wrote a bit about his many adventures on his blog (http://www.zl2al.com/). I guess there may even be other HAM operators on here that knew him.
I've been a ham since I was a kid. There are so many different, interesting things to explore.
These days I find high speed telegraphy pretty relaxing and meditative, and I have a few ongoing RF projects that keep me going even when everything else seems trend-driven and silly.
And let's face it, radio wave propagation still feels magical. I could go on and on. Glad to see some PR even though it's for a sad reason.
I'd love to help but 3 weeks is a huge commitment and I can't leave my job that long. I think they may get a tremendous response from the retired folks in the ham community. Anyone have data on HF frequencies being used and if remote relay assistance is helpful? Or any other technical data on the effort?
Semi-offtopic, any city-dwelling HAM's out there? I've been thinking it would be cool hobby to get into, but I live in a condo. My father is a ham, and he has this long antenna up in the trees across his yard (must be close to 50m long), for HF I guess (he mostly does CW, AFAIK).
So it seems a bit pointless if all I can do is operate some VHF band equipment with an indoor antenna, or maybe sticking a short-ish antenna out of the window, with a range of maybe of few tens of km's?
What am I missing? If there are city-dwelling hams out there, what do they do?
First time I saw a HAM installation was when I bought a lab power supply on Craigslist. I went to pick it up and the guy lived on the third floor of a 5 story building with his family. One room was entirely filled with radio equipment. Some big cables went through his window and up the building. He told me his landlord was OK with him putting antennae on the roof of the building.
One thing you need to do is to check out if you have roof access and rights to put something on it. Depending on the situation you have with your flat, you could already have all that's needed to be able to put antennas on the roof! For instance, in my country (Poland), being an owner of a flat gives you rights to access the roof and put some small stuff on it.
If you happen to be renting, or otherwise can't use the roof, then you still probably can put a smaller antenna on your window or balcony.
The general principle is this: the higher you can put your antennas, the better.
> [...] “We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW and co-author on a paper describing the technology.
> Instead, the phone pulls power from its environment - either from ambient radio signals harvested by an antenna, or ambient light collected by a solar cell the size of a grain of rice. The device consumes just 3.5 microwatts of power during use.
> [...] “And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere."
A low energy phone (and WiFi (from a related UW R&D team?)) would be extremely useful in this and future disaster relief scenarios. Furthermore, radio operators who care about the Red Cross may be able to help pull this product through to market.
Probably also worth mentioning Shelterpods and Responsepods for disaster relief deployments to this crowd; they're designed to take a lot of wind and rain:
The satellites over the Caribbean are probably pretty swamped right now, too, and operating at or past their capacity. That's just a wild guess but if these past few weeks wouldn't put them past their capacity I don't know what would.
I'm no longer active, but one of the main attractions to the hobby was how simple everything was. The idea that with some power and a basic antenna, I could talk to a radio built 50 years ago with no more alignment then choosing the same frequency, was always very intriguing to me.
I made these tech flash cards for a group of elementary school kids. I downloaded the questions and processed them with a small python program that generated latex (I can provide the source code if anyone needs it)... They're at http://www.employees.org/~stannous/tech.pdf
The first test is not hard... a couple of 9 year old kids passed it after studying a little.
If you want to actually learn the relevant material, but tailored toward passing the exam, the ARRL books are very good [1] [2] [3].
The exam structure is quite conductive to just memorizing the answers [4], but it is really better if you try to have some understanding so I recommend the books.
You can take practice exams, or drill with flash cards, or review the entire question pools at hamexam.org or hamstudy.org. Make accounts at those sites and they will keep stats on how you do for each subsection of the test questions so you can figure out your strengths and weaknesses.
There are mobile apps for iOS and Android that provide functionality similar to hamexam.org and hamstudy.org.
You can buy books on the ARRL web site that contain every question -- along with the answer! -- to every question you could possibly be asked on the tests.
If you just want to get the license as quickly/easily as possible, get a copy of the book (hell, the question pools are probably even online, I'm sure) and spend a weekend memorizing the answers before you go take the test.
If you want to actually understand the material (which I highly recommend), then spend the extra time to research the questions and answers.
I don't think it's ever been easier to get a ham radio license.
The test questions and answers are public, so the simplest/cheapest thing is to just read through them all. Aside from that, I think the ARRL puts out some study guides that are a bit easier to digest.
There are lots of practice apps on websites and smartphone apps that give flashcards from the question pool. Some people memorize the answers, but you should look into why the ones you don't know are what they are.
They do almost nothing to help those affected by natural disasters. All they do is setup shelters and feed people in those shelters. They do not help rebuild.
They do an exceptionally poor job at this. Everyone knows about Katrina. In Houston this year, food sat on loading docks downtown while people starved in local shelters. The American Red Cross ran the main shelter so poorly that the city had to build an entirely new shelter and move everyone there...in the middle of a hurricane.
They don’t need your donations. They have a deal with the federal government where they get reimbursed for whatever they spend during a national disaster. The local American Red Cross chapters do this. The national organization does not provide the resources for this.
If you donate to the American Red Cross, you’re throwing your money away. The money won’t go to the local chapters. It won’t go to rebuild. It won’t go to the victims of the natural disaster. Do not donate to the American Red Cross.
Maybe a better statement would be, "If you donate to the Red Cross then know what your donation is going to support..." Then maybe you can enumerate the complaints and, if wanted, provide citations.
As it is, I think some folks may take offense with you telling them how to spend their money. I, for one, read it as you trying to tell me what I can or cannot do.
Edited to add: I see your dead reply. The difference between my suggestions and your post is that you demand, as opposed to ask. You may notice that I'm making a point of not saying you should do something, but that pointing out that you can choose to do something.
It's received much more gracefully and people are much more open to the ideas when they are asked, instead of when they are instructed. But, it's entirely up to you how you take it and what you decide to do with it.
I've spent years learning to say could instead of should. It has helped me immensely.
To be clear, this article is about the American Red Cross (which is not to say that other branches and other NGOs aren't as bad), but if you want to know what your donation is going to support... good luck!
Oh, they are pretty horrible. I was more concerned with presentation than content. I support the idea of educating people about the horribleness of the American Red Cross. I also know it is more effective to do so by engaging then demanding.
People, as a general rule, don't like being told what to do. They respond much better when being asked politely. We didn't develop politeness for no reason, after all. We have all sorts of negative phrases for demanding people.
As I support the idea of making people aware of the problems with the American Red Cross, it stands to reason that I'd like to not sour them on the process of learning about the reasons for the complaints.
For better or worse, society respects a well dressed person with manners more than they do a spittle-flecked zealot. I suspect more people have been turned away from desktop Linux precisely because of this.
It has been very, very socially helpful to learn to not say should and to substitute could. Relatedly, I also try to say I can relate, and not to say I understand. Just a couple of small things completely change how people respond to me.
You could try it in your everyday speech and see if you notice a difference?
You are so wrong about the American Red Cross. The ARC is an non-profit organization supported by a movement of volunteers from all walks of life. It gives resources to volunteers willing to help those in need. Thank god it exists.
I'm not going to convince you by arguing on HN but would gladly talk, or at least chat online, about it with you.
I took a month leave of absence from a programmer position at Merrill Lynch when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S.. I signed up for a disaster response role in the American Red Cross, who dispatched me relatively quickly to a major shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana.
I can confidently tell you and anyone reading this that great good came of what was donated, at least to the population served within the jurisdiction I was stationed.
I don't think this is intrinsically true - a lot of people just don't personally know anyone who desperately needs help. Is it really overall better to be 100% efficient at getting a rich private school a new telescope instead of being 50% efficient at getting people with no safe drinking water a means of access/production of safe drinking water?
The secret sauce in HF is that unlike the web, conditions matter to the operator. Things like sunspot activity, the position of the day/night line, if you are near water etc. can greatly affect your ability to successfully communicate.
DXpeditions, which are trips HAMs take with their gear to try to hit very distant stations are often based in island locations because HF tends to propagate significantly better with the antenna is near water as opposed to irregular ground.
I would just say to all of you who are into tech as I imagine HN readers to be, to give HAM a try. A lot of us are old and HAM sites regularly feature a list of "silent keys" because so many of the hardcore operators are dying off. Yes it's a bit antiquated but the younger generation will be able to marry all the amazing things you've invented to HAM to serve populations where the new tech either hasn't gone or gets knocked out as in the current crisis. For so many of you engineers it will be easy, like dusting off your first Circuits text. Yes, the regs are a drag to learn but I bet the average HN reader has done things that are way more challenging.
Have fun!
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