[South Florida DX Association] Wall Street Journal - Hams - & Katrina

[Bill Marx]

>From Bill NA2M

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outdated-looking radio.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."