[Ares-races] Public Service Question

[JOE]

Hello,

First, and foremost, I clearly state the Amateur Radio is meant to be a 
BACKUP system to regular emergency service communications, NEVER to be the 
primary method of Emergency Service communications.  I do not mislead them 
to believe that we are instantly available to respond to a fire or disaster 
in minutes of it happening.  We are not structured to respond to 
emergencies like an Ambulance or Fire Department is.  We are better suited 
for long term situations, such as hurricanes or floods.  DO NOT promise 
something that you cannot do every single time you are called for 
assistance.  The worst thing that you can do is give the fire department 
false expectations.  If you promise to rapidly respond to a disaster, such 
as a house fire, and you fail to do it in a timely fashion you will never 
be called again.  The house will be burned to the ground and you will 
finally show up with a crew of hams.

We in Connecticut have a database of all ARES members that totals to over 
850 people that we can contact.  That way, if there is a disaster, the 
people in the effected area can take care of their personal business and 
homes and hams from the unaffected area can be contacted to come and 
help.  But, this call up of hams takes time, sometimes lots of time in the 
eyes of Emergency Service workers.

Second, the advantage to allowing hams to put repeaters on existing towers 
is the coverage that hams will have.  But, the question that you will have 
to answer is: Why would the ham repeater give better coverage than the 
Emergency Services radios on the site?  This may be because the ham 
frequencies give better range, such as ES being on 450Mhz and the hams 
using 146Mhz.  It may be because the EM have to share their frequency with 
other services, which causes interference, and the hams can delegate a 
clear channel during a disaster.

You may be able to play a roll in developing new sites for ES repeaters and 
remote receivers.  (You can then include a ham repeater at these sites).  I 
have been working with my surrounding towns to suggest that any new 
communications tower in the area be required to provide space for Emergency 
Services.  This is written into the zoning requirements.  Interestingly, 
hams fall into the category of Emergency Services in my area, this was no 
mistake on my part.  This established good will with Emergency Services in 
my area and gave the possibilities of some ham repeaters having some new 
homes on towers.

Coverage
I was thinking about this the other day.  If a ham were to put an APRS 
tracker station in their vehicle and drive around transmitting their 
latitude and longitude every 15 seconds, you could plot the ham repeater 
coverage in the area.  Crude, but it would work.  If you were to have a 
program that would capture the lat&long plus take a reading off the 
discriminator voltage of a repeater receiver, for example, you could also 
plot signal quality in that particular spot on the map.  (a TNC would be 
attached to the audio output of the repeater receiver).   Maybe someone 
will be inspired to write a program to take the data from the APRS station 
and massage the data it into something that could be plotted on a map, such 
as Street Atlas. Different color dots could mean different signal 
strengths, etc.

Good Luck and 73,

Joe, k1ike
East Haddam, CT





At 10:22 AM 1/26/02 -0800, you wrote:
>I am the ARES EC for the Yakima County, Yakima WA. I am also a
>captain on one of the local fire departments. I was contacted by my
>fire chief about doing a radio coverage test of our district. He also
>said that at the last county fire commissioners meeting he brought
>up the idea of ham radio usage. In my district, we have a few places
>that we can not get out on the fire radio or cell phone. Would like to
>see a letter that you wrote, that helped you befriend the fire service.