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PC Magazine
November 8 2005

Inside Track v24n19
By John C. Dvorak

The most overlooked participants in Katrina relief were the ham radio
folks. Bush should give them all medals.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, it was reported that over 100 Internet
networks were still down in Louisiana, as well as another dozen elsewhere
that had been in the path of the hurricane. So much for the notion that the
Web is impossible to kill. Hard to have an Internet with no power! WiMAX
and other solutions are useless, too, though I suppose a generator would be
useful for WiMAX. Whatever the case, the most overlooked participants in
the Katrina relief effort were the ham radio folks, who were doing whatever
they could as ad hoc emergency dispatchers, creating their own network
within the system. These dedicated persons pride themselves on their
ability to do worldwide communications under adverse conditions, and the
ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) and its members, as well as others, were
a big part of the aid effort. Of course, since amateur radio is anything
but trendy in today's XBox, gene-splicing world, there was zero coverage of
its contribution in the mainstream press, and these people are not the
world's greatest self-promoters. At least some of us are paying attention.
Good work, guys! Bush should be giving medals to you all

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ARRL COO Testifies on Capitol Hill to Amateur Radio's Value in Disasters

NEWINGTON, CT, Sep 30, 2005--ARRL Chief Operating Officer Harold Kramer, WJ1B, testified on behalf of the League September 29 before the US House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Addressing the hearing topic, "Public Safety Communications from 9/11 to Katrina:

Critical Public Policy Lessons," Kramer reiterated and amplified comments ARRL President Jim Haynie, W5JBP, delivered earlier this month to the House Government Reform Committee. As did Haynie's remarks, Kramer testified on the successful efforts of Amateur Radio operators who provided communications during the Hurricane Katrina response.

"Amateur Radio was uniquely suited to this task by virtue of the availability of HF communications covering long distances without fixed infrastructure," Kramer pointed out in his testimony. In addition to those who responded to support relief agencies in hurricane-devastated areas, thousands more radio amateurs outside the affected area monitored radio traffic and relayed health-and-welfare messages, he said.

Kramer noted that there's been a lot of discussion in recent years about public safety interoperability. "The Amateur Radio Service provides a good deal of interoperability communications for first responders in disaster relief incidents," he told the subcommittee. He said ham radio is able to fill this crucial role because even the "interoperability channels" that exist in most Public Safety allocations are useless when the Public Safety communication infrastructure goes down.

"Interoperability, in short, presumes operability of Public Safety facilities," Kramer said. "While some 'hardening' of Public Safety facilities is called for, there is in our view an increasing role for decentralized, portable Amateur Radio stations which are not infrastructure-dependent in providing interoperability communication on site."

Kramer told Subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton and his House colleagues that Amateur Radio "is largely invisible to both the FCC and to Congress on a daily basis, because it is virtually self-regulating and self-administered," he said. "It is only during emergencies that the Amateur Radio Service is in the spotlight." Also testifying at the subcommittee session was FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, and Kramer said he had the opportunity to introduce himself to the chairman before the subcommittee convened.

Martin also was on hand September 22 when Haynie's written comments were placed into the record of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing on "Communications in a Disaster." Alaska Republican Ted Stevens chairs that Senate panel.

Kramer noted that for the first time ever, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) has provided $170,000 in grant supplements to the ARRL to support the efforts of Hurricane Katrina emergency communicators in the Gulf Coast. The grants to the ARRL's "Ham Aid" fund, enable the League to reimburse some volunteers' out-of-pocket expenses on a per diem basis.

Kramer said he was honored to be chosen to provide the testimony on behalf of the ARRL. "I am proud of Amateur Radio's and our role in the Katrina relief effort," he added.

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HAROLD KRAMER, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, ARRL--THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR AMATEUR RADIO

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNET--COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

"Public Safety Communications from 9/11 to Katrina: Critical Public Policy Lessons"

Washington, DC

September 29, 2005

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the subcommittee, for the opportunity to testify
today on issues related to Public Safety Communications. As Chief Operating Officer of ARRL,

the National Association for Amateur Radio, it gives me great pleasure to provide this statement for the record to the Committee on the successful efforts of Amateur Radio operators providing communications for First Responders, Disaster Relief agencies, and countless individuals in connection with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. As has been proven consistently and repeatedly in the past, long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when communications systems fail due to a wide-area or localized disaster, whatever the cause, Amateur Radio works, right away, all the time. This is not a statement of concern about what must be changed or improved. It is, rather, a report on what is going right, and what works in emergency communications, and what can be depended on to work the next time there is a natural disaster, and the times after that.

Immediately at the onset of Hurricane Katrina, an all-volunteer "army" of approximately 1,000 FCC-licensed Amateur Radio operators provided continuous high-frequency (HF), VHF and UHF communications for State, local and Federal emergency workers in and around the affected area in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These communications were provided for served agencies such as the American National Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and to facilitate interoperability between and among these agencies; First Responders; FEMA, VOAD (National Volunteers Active in Disasters) and other agencies. Trained volunteer Amateur Radio operators also provided health and welfare communications from within the affected area to the rest of the United States and the world.

Amateur Radio was uniquely suited to this task by virtue of the availability of HF communications covering long distances without fixed infrastructure. During the week of September 7, 2005, the Coast Guard, the Red Cross, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all put out calls for volunteer Amateur Radio operators to provide communications, because phone lines, cell sites and public safety repeaters were inoperative, and those public safety communications facilities which were operational were overwhelmed due to loss of repeater towers and the large number of First Responders in the area. Amateur Radio operators responded en masse: Approximately 200 Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) trained communicators responded to the Gulf Coast within a week after the call. The Red Cross, a week after they issued the call, notified ARRL that they had enough radio operators and Amateur Radio communications facilities. The number of Amateur Radio operators providing communications in the three States, either deployed or awaiting relief duty on-site or at a reserve facility in Montgomery, Alabama, swelled from 800 to 1,000 in a week. Many more thousands of radio amateurs outside the affected area regularly monitored radio traffic and relayed thousands of messages concerning the welfare and location of victims.

The principal reason why Amateur Radio works when other communications systems fail during natural disasters is that Amateur Radio is not infrastructure-dependent, and is decentralized. Amateurs are trained in emergency communications. They are disciplined operators, and their stations are, in general, portable and reliable.

High-frequency Amateur Radio communications, used substantially in this emergency communications effort, require no fixed repeaters, cable or wirelines. Portable repeaters for VHF and UHF communications can be provided via mobile facilities (many Amateur Radio groups deployed communications vans in the Gulf Coast for precisely this purpose) in affected areas instantly. There are now approximately 670,000 licensees of the FCC in the Amateur Service, which assures the presence of Amateur stations in most areas of the country. Emergency communications are conducted not only by voice, but also by high-speed data transmissions using state-of-the-art digital communications software known as Win Link.

As Motorola's Director of Communications and Public Affairs stated earlier this month: "Amateur Radio communications benefit us all by having a distributed architecture and frequency agility that enables you to set up faster in the early phases of disaster recovery and can provide flexible and diverse communications... Motorola believes that the Amateur Radio spectrum provides valuable space for these important communications."

In Mississippi, FEMA dispatched Amateur Radio operators to hospitals and evacuation shelters to send emergency calls 24 hours per day. At airports in Texas and Alabama, radio amateurs tracked evacuees and notified the Baton Rouge operations center of their whereabouts so their families would be able to find them. Amateur Radio operators in New Orleans participated directly in locating stranded persons, because local cellphone calls could not be made by stranded victims due to the inoperative wireline systems in the area. The Red Cross deployed qualified amateur radio volunteers at its 250 shelter and feeding station locations, principally in Mississippi, Alabama and northern Florida.

The local 911 operators could not handle calls from relatives calling in from outside the affected area, so they passed those "health and welfare" inquiries to amateur radio operators stationed at the 911 call centers, for relay of information back to New Orleans to facilitate rescue missions for stranded persons.

Amateur Radio provided a communications link between Coast Guard helicopters and emergency centers because the ambulance crews couldn't contact the helicopters directly. In Texas, Amateur Radio operators worked 24 hours per day in the Astrodome in Houston and the Reliant Center next door, and as well in the Harris County Emergency Operations Center. In San Antonio, at the Kelly Air Force Base, radio amateurs from Montana provided local and national health and welfare communications for evacuees. These examples were repeated throughout the Gulf Coast and in the cities in the southern states receiving large numbers of evacuees.

The Salvation Army operates its own Amateur Radio communications system using Amateur Radio volunteers, known as SATERN. In the Hurricane Katrina effort, SATERN has joined forces with the federal SHARES program (SHAred RESources), which is a network of government, military and Military Affiliate Radio Service (MARS) radio stations. MARS is an organized network of Amateur Radio stations affiliated with the different branches of the armed forces to provide volunteer communications. SATERN, in the Katrina relief effort, received over 48,000 requests for emergency communications assistance, and the affiliation with the SHARES program allows the Salvation Army to utilize Federal frequencies to communicate with agencies directly. This is but one example of the innovative and reliable means by which Amateur Radio right now provides organized interoperability on a scope far beyond that now being planned for local and State public safety systems.

Much discussion has been given in recent years to the issue of Public Safety interoperability. The Amateur Radio Service provides a good deal of interoperability communications for First Responders in disaster relief incidents. This critical role for our Service exists because, though there are interoperability channels right now in most Public Safety frequency allocations, those channels, and all others, become useless where the communications infrastructure of public safety facilities becomes inoperative. Interoperability, in short, presumes operability of Public Safety facilities. While some "hardening" of public safety facilities is called for, there is in our view an increasing role for decentralized, portable Amateur Radio stations which are not infrastructure-dependent in providing interoperability communications on-site.

Mr. Chairman, Amateur Radio is largely invisible to both the FCC and to Congress on a daily basis, because it is virtually self-regulating and self-administered. It is only during emergencies that the Amateur Radio Service is in the spotlight. At other times, emergency communications and technical self-training and advancement of telecommunications technology occupy licensees' time. For the first time ever, in recognition of the work of Amateur Radio Operators in this Hurricane Relief effort, the Corporation for National And Community Service (CNCS), which provides strategic critical support to volunteer organizations which in turn provide services to communities, has made a $100,000 grant supplement to ARRL to support the Katrina emergency communications efforts in the Gulf Coast. This enables ARRL to reimburse to a small degree, on a per diem basis, some of the expenses that radio amateurs incur personally in traveling to the Gulf Coast to volunteer their time and effort. The CNCS grant is an extension of ARRL's three-year, Homeland Security training grant, which has to date provided certification in emergency communication training protocols to approximately 5,500 Amateur Radio volunteers over the past three years.

ARRL wishes to commend the FCC's Enforcement Bureau (specifically the Special Counsel for Amateur Radio Enforcement), for the efficient and successful effort during the Hurricane Katrina relief in monitoring the Amateur Radio High Frequency bands to prevent or quickly remedy incidents of interference.

In closing, Mr. Chairman, the Committee should be aware that this vast volunteer resource in support of Public Safety is always at the disposal of the Federal government and to State and local government. The United States absolutely can rely on the Amateur Radio Service.Amateur Radio provides immediate, high-quality communications that work every time, when all else fails.

I thank you again, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, for the opportunity to testify today on the views of the ARRL and its membership. I would welcome any questions.

Respectfully submitted,

Harold Kramer, Chief Operating Officer

ARRL--the National Association for Amateur Radio

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In Katrina's Wake, Ham Radio Triumphs
By David Maliniak, AD2A

David Maliniak
ED Online ID #11136
September 19, 2005

Copyright © 2004 Penton Media, Inc., All rights reserved.

A few months ago, NBC's Tonight Show staged a race between a pair of
ham-radio operators with Morse-code keys and a couple of kids with
text-messaging cellphones to see who could communicate faster. The hams won
hands down, proving, in the minds of some, that old technology could hold
its own against new. In recent days, ham radio was put to the test again by
Hurricane Katrina. This time, however, lives were at stake.

In the world of design engineers and electronics in general, change is
essential. Designers work diligently to make the fruits of their labors
obsolete almost before they see daylight. The turnover in technology is
sometimes like a flood, with old being washed away by new over and over.
Often, the new beats the heck out of the old. But there are times when old
isn't necessarily bad; in fact, sometimes old works when new doesn't. And
then we're glad that old is still around, or at least we should be.

Wireless technology, while relatively new to many consumers, is of course
not new at all. A few (very) old-timers remember the original "wireless" of
radio. The revolution wrought by the pioneers of wireless changed the world
then, and the technology behind that revolution has been re-invented and
re-applied time and again. Its pre-eminent incarnation today is our
near-ubiquitous wireless communications infrastructure, which has freed us
from the shackles of landlines and made our mobile lifestyles possible.
Technology truly is great stuff.

Until, of course, a monster hurricane comes along to render it nearly
useless. Here we see a scenario in which a flood literally swept away the
new. As Hurricane Katrina's fury hammered the Gulf states on August 29, the
communications infrastructure took a devastating hit. Telephone service,
including wireless, became at first intermittent and then unusable in many
localities. Where there was phone service, 911 switchboards were often
unreachable due to the massive volume of calls. The response of local
authorities, now termed "confused" by deposed FEMA chief Michael Brown,
wasn't helping much. The Gulf Coast was about to descend into darkness,
chaos, and, worst of all for many, silence.

But proponents of the old were at the ready. The "old," in this case, is
ham radio. In the eyes of the "man on the street," ham radio has a pretty
stodgy reputation. Aren't hams still using Morse code? Don't some of them
use radios with tubes, for goodness sake? What the "man in the street"
probably doesn't know is that it was amateurs who advanced the radio arts
early in the 20th century. Down through the decades, amateurs have embraced
(and often driven) all of the innovations in wireless technology, up to and
including all digital modes and the Internet. But many have stayed in touch
with their roots, which is good old-fashioned analog HF operation. And
while amateurs have a long-standing tradition as innovators and
experimenters, they also have a mandate that comes with their licenses: to
be ready, willing, and able to provide emergency communications whenever
and wherever they're needed.

As Katrina bore down on the Gulf region, amateur radio operators, under the
aegis of the American Radio Relay League's (ARRL's) Amateur Radio Emergency
Service (ARES), prepared to swing into action with emergency networks that
would run health-and-welfare traffic into and out of the disaster zone. As
early as the Monday following the storm, hams throughout the hurricane zone
were putting emergency stations on the air. In one instance, hams were
instrumental in the rescue of 15 people clinging for life to a New Orleans
rooftop. Meanwhile, in Alabama, amateur SKYWARN weather nets kept the
National Weather Service apprised of conditions throughout the state. In
hard-hit sections of Mississippi, hams running off generators and with
makeshift antennas were the only means of communication, getting word to
out-of-state friends and relatives concerning their loved ones.

There were numerous other instances of hams helping those who were not
simply inconvenienced by the storm, but whose lives were in imminent
danger. Now that things have calmed down in the Gulf region, many of the
emergency nets have stood down. But hams continue to serve the public in
the many areas that are still without power or phone service.

As our nation collects itself in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster,
President Bush has promised federal reviews of what went right and what
went wrong. One of the findings of those inquiries should be that the
federally-instituted Amateur Radio Service, which functions under the
licensing authority of the FCC, stood tall when the country needed it.

Amateur radio currently faces various threats to its existence. Chief among
those is the advent of broadband-over-powerline (BPL) technology, which, if
broadly adopted, has the potential to cause widespread interference to HF
communications, not just for amateurs but for other services that use the
HF spectrum.

Amateurs and the ARRL have made a lot of noise about BPL, asserting that it
could seriously hamper their efforts and those of relief agencies such as
the Red Cross and Salvation Army, in the event of a disaster such as
Katrina. It's rumored, though, that the same FCC commissioners who have
given their blessing to BPL field trials will now take a much harder look
at the technical issues concerning BPL and its interference potential in
the HF spectrum. Let's face it: The federal government didn't handle the
emergency in the Gulf very well; it'd be prudent for it not to sanction a
technology that could impede one of the few things that actually worked.

Many readers of this newsletter are amateur radio enthusiasts. If you are,
and if you haven't already done so, consider writing your congressman to
express your concern about the future of the Amateur Radio Service,
especially in light of its outstanding efforts in recent days. Remind your
elected representatives that a vibrant and unimpeded Amateur service can
and will be a lifesaver when disaster strikes. Also, consider how you
yourself might help. What if a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake ravages
your area? Are you prepared to get on the air without relying on the mains
to handle emergency traffic? Get in touch with your local amateur-radio
club and find out how you can pitch in.

Your cell phones and wireless routers are indeed great stuff, but so is a
good old HF transceiver. We shouldn't always be in such a hurry to let the
flood of new technology wash away the old. The geek down the block with all
the antennas on his property could turn out to be your best friend someday.
Because sometimes, old trumps new.

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