[ADXA] WALL ST. JOURNAL

Tue Sep 6 20:20:21 EDT 2005

Lenny,

Great to see you still breathing, by the way...

I have felt that amateur radio has not gotten the over-abundance of support
that they have given during this crisis.  I am preaching to the masses, but
you know no matter how tech the systems get, when it comes down to it we are
there to support.   I have not seen anything in the news about this.  But,
that doesn't mean we won't keep working...

Best 73s...

Richard

[Lenny on a DX contact...  You are 5x9 5x8 5x7 5x6 5x4 5x3 4x4 4x3 3x3
GOOD CONTACT...]

-----Original Message-----
From: adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On
Behalf Of LennyK5OVC at wmconnect.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 5:12 PM
To: adxa at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [ADXA] WALL ST. JOURNAL

As Telecom Reels
>From Storm Damage,
Ham Radios Hum

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 6, 2005; Page A19

MONROE, La. -- In a shelter here, 300 miles north of New Orleans, Theo 
McDaniel took his plight to a young man fiddling with a clunky, 
outdated-looking radio.

Mr. McDaniel, a 25-year-old barber, had evacuated New Orleans with his 
wife and two small children more than a week ago and since then had had 
no contact with his brother or his aunt. The last he heard, his 
42-year-old aunt was clinging to her roof.

"We've got to get a message down there to help them," he said. The man 
at the radio sent the information to the emergency-operations center 
across town, which relayed it to rescue units in New Orleans. Later in 
the weekend, Mr. McDaniel learned that food and water were on the way to 
his trapped brother and his brother's young family. He had heard nothing 
about his aunt.

With Hurricane Katrina having knocked out nearly all the high-end 
emergency communications gear, 911 centers, cellphone towers and normal 
fixed phone lines in its path, ham-radio operators have begun to fill 
the information vacuum. "Right now, 99.9% of normal communications in 
the affected region is nonexistent," says David Gore, the man operating 
the ham radio in the Monroe shelter. "That's where we come in."

In an age of high-tech, real-time gadgetry, it's the decidedly unsexy 
ham radio -- whose technology has changed little since World War II -- 
that is in high demand in ravaged New Orleans and environs. The Red 
Cross issued a request for about 500 amateur radio operators -- known as 
"hams" -- for the 260 shelters it is erecting in the area. The American 
Radio Relay League, a national association of ham-radio operators, has 
been deluged with requests to find people in the region. The U.S. Coast 
Guard is looking for hams to help with its relief efforts.

Ham radios, battery operated, work well when others don't in part 
because they are simple. Each operator acts as his own base station, 
requiring only his radio and about 50 feet of fence wire to transmit 
messages thousands of miles. Ham radios can send messages on multiple 
channels and in myriad ways, including Morse code, microwave frequencies 
and even email.

Then there are the ham-radio operators themselves, a band of radio 
enthusiasts who spend hours jabbering with each other even during normal 
times. They are often the first to get messages in and out of disaster 
areas, in part because they are everywhere. (The ARRL estimates there 
are 250,000 licensed hams in the U.S.) Sometimes they are the only 
source of information in the first hours following a disaster. "No 
matter how good the homeland-security system is, it will be 
overwhelmed," says Thomas Leggett, a retired mill worker manning a ham 
radio in the operations center here. "You don't hear about us, but we 
are there."

Slidell, a town 30 miles northeast of New Orleans, was directly hit by 
the hurricane and remains virtually cut off from the outside world. One 
of the few, if not the only, communications links is Michael King, a 
retired Navy captain, operating a ham radio out of a Slidell hospital.

"How are you holding up, Mike?" asked Sharon Riviere into a ham-radio 
microphone at Monroe's operations center. She and her husband, Ron, who 
is the president of the Slidell ham-radio club, had evacuated before the 
storm to the home of some fellow ham-radio enthusiasts in Monroe. She 
said Mr. King had been working 20-hour days since the storm hit.

Crackling static and odd, garbled sounds followed her question to Mr. 
King. Then he replied: "It's total devastation here. I've got 18 feet of 
water at my house. Johnny's Café down there has water up to its roof."

Ms. Riviere asked about her own home, which is not far from Mr. King's. 
"It's full of mud," Mr. King replied. "Looks like someone's been 
slugging it out in there."

Ham radios are often most effective as one link in a chain of 
communication devices. Early last week, someone trapped with 15 people 
on a roof of a New Orleans home tried unsuccessfully to get through to a 
911 center on his cellphone. He was able to call a relative in Baton 
Rouge, who in turn called another relative, Sybil Hayes, in Broken 
Arrow, Okla. Ms. Hayes, whose 81-year-old aunt was among those stranded 
on the New Orleans roof, then called the Red Cross in Broken Arrow, 
which handed the message to its affiliated ham-radio operator, Ben Joplin.

Via stations in Oregon, Idaho and Louisiana, Mr. Joplin got the message 
to rescue workers who were able to save the 15 people on the roof, 
according to the ARRL, based in Newington, Conn. "We are like the Pony 
Express," says the 26-year-old Mr. Gore, wearing black cowboy boots. 
"One way or the other, even by hand, we will get you the message."

Mr. Gore, who is in charge of the northeastern district of Louisiana for 
the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, has spent a lot of time the past 
week at the Monroe shelter, helping evacuees try to track missing 
friends and relatives.

Last Monday, Danita Alexander of Violet, La., came to a ham operator in 
the Monroe shelter asking about her 96-year-old grandfather, Willie 
Bright, who had been in a nursing home in New Orleans. The next day, she 
got word back from a ham operator that he had been safely transferred to 
a shelter near New Orleans. "We can't do enough of these," says Mark 
Ketchell, who runs the ARES branch in Monroe.

Nevertheless, the ham-radio community feels under threat. Telecom 
companies want to deliver broadband Internet connections over power 
lines, which ham-radio operators say distorts communications in the 
surrounding area. Since hams are "amateurs," there is little lobbying 
money to fight such changes, they add.

The hams also get little respect from telecommunications-equipment 
companies, such as Motorola Inc. "Something is better than nothing, 
that's right," says Jim Screeden, who runs all of Motorola's repair 
teams in the field for its emergency-response business. "But ham radios 
are pretty close to nothing." Mr. Screeden says ham radios can take a 
long time to relay messages and work essentially as "party lines," with 
multiple parties talking at once. Says Mr. Leggett at the Monroe 
operations center: "We are the unwanted stepchild. But when the s- hits 
the fan, who are you going to call?"

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